I also checked out the Romanian dictator he mentioned. This is... uh... freaking horrible.
What the fuck kind of "Communist Party" governed Romania???
gonna be honest alot of the soviet/eastern bloc governments seem kind of shitty.
not to downplay the good socialism did.Unsurprisingly, Parenti has lots of good leftist criticisms of the USSR in Blackshirts and Reds.
I think it does help to have some of these criticisms ready when the topic comes up with non-leftists, because you don't want to come off as (or be) a cheerleader for whatever AES states do. It's critical support, after all.
i mean, yeah. we'd be betraying our ideology if we didn't make fair criticisms of its implementation. we are scientific socialists, not cheerleaders.
Ceausescu is complicated because beyond the Soviet split he needs to be understood in the context of the IMF and its predatory loans. The suffering of the 1980s was trying to pay off that debt which is engineered to strangle poor countries like Romania. He was a shit and his wife was a joke, but I don't know what the happy path for Romania would have been.
That truly sucks. 1980s were hard on all countries. It's a double tragedy that it led to the downfall of Eastern European Communism and the rise of Western Neoliberalism.
Seems he also just sucked socially. Banning abortion in the 60s. Every day I realize more and more why Hoxha was as fierce and immovable as he was. He'd piss off every other communist nation on earth if it meant protecting the rights of women in Albania; a true believer
btw we dont have a Hoxha or soviet Albania emote from what I can find
How did those not show up for me? Thx, though we should have one of him as a partisan https://espressostalinist.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/partisanhoxhacolor.jpg?w=584 or this cute one of two comrades hanging out https://topwar.ru/uploads/posts/2015-06/1435413981_hodzha-i-stalin.jpg
That was the first country I backpacked through and I met a fair number of people who were like 18-40 during the 80s. The austerity was brutal enough that it made a lot of older people traumatic hoarders. They've got drawers full of little utilitarian items because "paying off all foreign debt" meant selling off all excess production. The country's largest luxury shopping mall, Plaza Romania, was built on the corpse of one of Ceausescu's 1980s public works projects. Collectively they're referred to as "hunger circuses" because he was building monumental domed public markets during a borderline famine. I don't see any leader, much less a mediocre one like Ceausescu, being able to navigate a period like that with the external conditions placed on them. Their past was so shitty that they wouldn't have been able to turn eastward for Soviet help even if the Soviets weren't in the process of Perestroika liberalisation themselves. Maybe the maths work out for partially selling off production and lessening the consumer impact of the decade, but they were facing the austerity that turned the people against their revolution either way.
is there any evidence that democracies are better at avoiding these kind of stupidity? Author says authoritarian rulers create stupidest ubran constructions, but you got lots of stupid buildings and constructions in USA too
I had a feeling that's what happened. Romania sided with the Nazis, then the Communists took over. Obviously, when the Communists were removed the Nazis would come back...Hurts to see it's true.
Not eradicating the Nazi ideology is probably the biggest failure of Eastern European Communism. Decades of communist governance should've at least instilled the lesson of Nazi = bad if nothing else.
Sure, but Ceausescu was supposed to be a communist. He came into an established communist nation and fucked things up, any awful shit in Romania decades before his administration doesn't change that
Do any other comrades have any good resources on Romania and Ceaușescu?
I didn't find much information on marxists.org either. Maybe there are other sources.
Most communists understandably tend to have a very negative opinion of Ceaușescu and consider him to be among the worst socialist leaders of the Eastern bloc. Despite this, a 2014 poll showed that:
66 percent of Romanians would vote for communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu (1918-1989) if he ran in the upcoming presidential elections in November
The survey highlights that 69 percent of citizens believe that they lived better during communism
A 2018 study by polling institute Isogep showed that Nicolae Ceaușescu remains the most popular Romanian president. 64.3% had a good opinion of Ceaușescu, followed by current president Klaus Iohannis with 50.7%, the only other president with an approval rate over 50%.
Some history of Romania's socialist period from a socialist perspective.
The account is good. Criticism of red countries here and there, but from a honest point of view. A bit lib sometimes, but fine.
I saw this on r/breadtube and was pleasantly surprised to see it doing pretty well. That place is usually filled with reactionary leftist and neoliberal content, but they really enjoyed it.
