Comrade Ignatencu does not believe that property should be sacred if it prevents the Party from achieving a particular end.
The new leader of the Communist Party has three priorities in life: the Party, work, and his wife – In in that order. He himself says that, the Party forbid, if his wife should desire a different position in the pecking order, then she “would lose out, from the very start.”
Ignatencu even accepts the Party’s dark past. In his opinion, the Party cannot be held responsible for the crimes of its members. Not that there were any great crimes in the communist period, and certainly no crimes against humanity in his opinion. The communists were trying to build a new society and such a society couldn’t come about by asking people nicely, smoothly and without suffering.
But to give you an idea of what communism means, the following is from a discussion I had with Petre, on the subjects of children’s education and human rights:
“When you educate a child, do you ask him whether he likes it? Do you ask the child what he wants to do and what he wants to learn? That would be degradation. The child learns what you teach him, because you prepare his future for him. In his old age the man will be the way you educated him as a child. You educate the child. The child has to know that he is obligated to do what he has to do, not necessarily because he wants to do it. But in this country the wheel has turned, because up until 1990 children knew that they had to study at school, that they had to go to school, and that they had to work after that. What do children learn nowadays? They learn to get their own way don’t they? They are taught to phone the child protection services if their parents or teachers clip their ears. That’s what children are taught. They aren’t taught to be civilized.
Nobody lays a finger on children who are educated at school and are civilized. It’s the hooligans who don’t want to learn who get punished. What are you supposed to do with a child who doesn’t want to learn? Just leave him like that? He’s the one who will end up hitting you on the head. You’re obligated to use less orthodox means. When a mother beats her child she doesn’t do it because she doesn’t love him. She beats him because he’s cheeky, because he doesn’t do as he’s told. A child also needs to learn the meaning of fear . . .”
He’s right: we all knew the meaning of fear, thanks to the repressive apparatus of the Communist Party, fear of informers and fear of those in charge. That fear left us without any backbone; it paralyzed us for at least four generations. It taught us to live with our heads bowed, and that’s why many of us even today don’t know that there is a sky above, the sun and the stars.
“Socialism was defeated in the region, at least in Russia, because it lost the media war. The communists were presented as evil. They go on about human rights, but I’ve never heard them say what human rights. What rights? The right to a fair trial? The right to health? Once I had an argument with a citizen who said he got arrested for just talking. How about that! You talked? Did anybody stop you talking? Of course not. They arrested you because you said what you weren’t supposed to. We have to draw the distinction. Because otherwise nobody would have punished you for it. Those were the rules. Ceausescu was a stickler for the law. He didn’t do anything unless he was legally covered for it. But now they say he was a dictator. The real dictator is the one who does whatever he likes.”
He’s right there, too: the communists didn’t kill you for just talking, but for what you said. Nothing could be truer. The communists let you talk, as long as you said what they wanted to hear. Freedom of speech was the freedom to express the will of the Party, but such nuances are too subtle for Comrade Ignatencu.
With reference to the famous Leninist dictum: “If you are unable, we will help you, if you do not know, we will teach you, if you do not want to, we will force you,” Comrade Ignatencu asks, rhetorically: “How was the Party to blame if eighty per cent of the Romanian population put the communists in the position of having to force them? But they forced them to do good, to learn, to be disciplined. And the ones who opposed, the ones who shirked, were sent to the Canal, to Gherla Prison.”
My grandfather opposed and he ended up in a communist prison. Whatever Comrade Ignatencu might say, I don’t believe that my grandfather forced the Communist Party to take away his freedom.
Petre Tutea, a famous Romanian philosopher, once said: “With your left hand, you can’t even make the sign of the cross, let alone run a country.”
I say that there is no greater crime than to forbid a man from achieving his maximum potential just because society decides for him how much he needs and above all how much he is allowed to want.
