God, this article was full of lines that just made me want to cry.
This past Christmas Day was the 30th anniversary of the public execution by firing squad of Romania’s last Communist dictator, Nicolae Ceaușescu, who’d ruled for 24 years. In 1990, the outside world discovered his network of “child gulags,” in which an estimated 170,000 abandoned infants, children, and teens were being raised. Believing that a larger population would beef up Romania’s economy, Ceaușescu had curtailed contraception and abortion, imposed tax penalties on people who were childless, and celebrated as “heroine mothers” women who gave birth to 10 or more. Parents who couldn’t possibly handle another baby might call their new arrival “Ceauşescu’s child,” as in “Let him raise it.”
To house a generation of unwanted or unaffordable children, Ceauşescu ordered the construction or conversion of hundreds of structures around the country. Signs displayed the slogan: the state can take better care of your child than you can.
At age 3, abandoned children were sorted. Future workers would get clothes, shoes, food, and some schooling in Case de copii—“children’s homes”—while “deficient” children wouldn’t get much of anything in their Cămine Spitale. The Soviet “science of defectology” viewed disabilities in infants as intrinsic and uncurable. Even children with treatable issues—perhaps they were cross-eyed or anemic, or had a cleft lip—were classified as “unsalvageable.”
Everyone read this. It’s an incredibly well written article. Journalism like this is so rare.
Jesus fucking christ. This has hit me like a ton of bricks. And this is all so recent. What a stupid bubble I’ve grown up in. Glad to be edified, but mortified at humans, as well as totally inspired by them. Izidor and all of the other suffering people out there put me to shame. What a dumb thing to complain about work today.
Wishing that peace finds all those who have suffered at the hands of monstrous humans.
What a dumb thing to complain about work today.
Trauma is trauma. This isn’t the Olympics, and we do not judge and compare trauma.
YOU’RE ALLOWED TO FEEL SAD or pissed or frustrated or hungry or lonely or happy. The existence of people more happy or lonely or hungry or sad than you does not rob you of your right to feel.
Don’t minimize your own experiences. They’re the only ones you get.
I hope tomorrow goes better. No more free slurpees tomorrow, but it is Friday.
They’re the only ones you get
Ha, jokes on you, that’s what TV and books are for! (Mostly kidding, but not completely)
Yeah I’ve been having to remind myself of this as I (diagnosed with ptsd) have been hanging out a lot with someone whose life is an unyielding horror show. It’s important to be sensitive and acknowledge the differences with her, but it’s also important to understand that my life has been pretty fucking rough in its own right.
And both of us manage to complain about a bad day at work. Sure her night terrors aren’t about her bad day at work, and none of her shifts have resulted in one of her traumatically originated mental illnesses, but I still get a text removed about it from her when it happens.
Highly recommend subscribing to The Atlantic. It’s about $50 for a year but has some of the best journalism across a variety of perspectives that will challenge you. Sometimes emotionally, like with this article, other times politically, but I always come away feeling more informed.
Well, you make a good case.
Have you read this from them?
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1996/05/the-nitrous-oxide-philosopher/376581/
(I can’t, I’m not a subscriber. But I think it used to be free or smth. I’m pretty sure I’ve read it in the past.)
Ceaușescu had curtailed contraception and abortion, imposed tax penalties on people who were childless
He was an incompetant monster and damn that’s an exemplary case.
We may soon see this in Russia, where they’re talking about banning the idea of not having children as “extremism”
We might even see something like it in the USA, thanks to the evangelicals and Republicans.
Broke teen parents having no choice but to join the military? That’s a republican wet dream.
On the plus side, they were smart enough to go air force.
With them, I imagine the US will become more like Israel. They’re religious extremists.
They’re not following the teachings of Jesus though. What they are is some nationalistic spin-off that doesn’t have much in common with actual Christianity.
Russia’s system isn’t/wasn’t any better, unfortunately. This was incredibly brutal and so hard to read.
All of this is basically my worst nightmare. Fuck anyone imposing the way this guy did.
-antinatalist
Truly the most horrific of crimes against children. Nothing makes me more sick.
An important story.
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What happened to these children was horrific, but framing it as a communism vs democracy/capitalism is pointless jingoism. The USA and other Western nations have their fair share of atrocities committed against children.
The thousands of children who were stolen from their families and abused/killed in Residential Schools were mistreated and abused in a society that viewed the practice as “democratic”, “enlightened” even.
The idea of deformities making children “unfit” is just a form of eugenics, which was fully endorsed by the US prior to WWII.
To say nothing of Japanese internment camps, indiscriminate bombing of schools and homes in the Middle East, thousands of teens tried and imprisoned as adults in the failed war on drugs, children being stolen from their families and imprisoned on the Southern border, and countless other atrocities committed against children by our great nation. And right now the Western world is financing a military campaign in Gaza which has killed an unfathomable number of children.
Communism may be no better, but it’s hard to argue it’s worse.
The numbers are quite literally orders of magnitude apart
That’s a bold claim, do you have a source?
According to the linked article in the OP, 170k children went through this Romanian system.
According to numbers just from Canada’s residential School system, over 150k children were stolen from their families and beaten, abused, and often killed in pseudo-prisons. (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/canada-residential-schools-unmarked-graves-indigenous-children-60-minutes-2022-02-06/)
Numbers for the US are hard to come by, but the US dept of the interior estimates that “tens of thousands” of indian children died in their residential School system. (https://www.bia.gov/sites/default/files/dup/inline-files/bsi_investigative_report_may_2022_508.pdf)
This isn’t a competition to see who is worse. Virtually every country on earth has committed unspeakable atrocities, many of them are still doing so today. Acting like this was a product of communism doesn’t add anything useful to the discussion and just carries water for the parties who continue to commit similar atrocities under Western Capitalism.
That’s authoritarianism calling itself communism. Just because they call it that doesn’t make it so, and you’re buying into their propaganda if you call it communist.
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If you actually apply a Marxist analysis here, the system in the Soviet Bloc after the revolution failed in the 20s was a clearly capitalist one, the thing Engels described as the state becoming the “national capitalist” in “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific”. The very fact this was done to bolster “the economy” and sorted people into their ability to provide value to be exploited by the state economy is making that quite clear.
Capitalism does not mean western democracy, neither does having red aesthetics and abstract ideals and convictions make you communist - only the actual material base and relations of production and value are what should be looked at.
Communism was the best thing that ever happened to Russia, and Russia was the worst thing to ever happen to communism.
We advocate against human rights violations, not for them. What, you think capitalism cradles and comforts children? Russia has only ever known corruption by the wealthy and powerful. Stop guzzling what you’re fed and realize that progress takes time and failure and effort. Just because Russia couldn’t pull it off, you think it’s impossible for the West to make it work?
