By Jayme Metzgar
Monday, December 23, 2019
When communism collapsed across Eastern Europe in 1989,
the process was swift and surprisingly peaceful. Decades of terror and tyranny
came to a sudden end with hardly a shot fired: governments stepped down,
borders opened, walls fell.
One country, however, proved to be the exception. Thirty
years ago this week, citizens of Romania were being killed by the hundreds as
they took to the streets to demand liberty from their brutal communist regime.
Unrest that had begun December 16 in the southwestern city of Timişoara soon
spread throughout Romania, fueled by the news that protesters were being gunned
down by secret police.
The dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu, returning from an
overseas trip with his wife Elena, tried to quell the growing chaos in a speech
from his balcony in Bucharest on December 21. As he looked out over the usual
mass of compulsory adoration—the people in neat rows bearing Marxist slogans
and portraits of the Ceauşescus—the aging despot had hardly begun to speak
before he was interrupted by a growing chorus of boos, hisses, whistles, and
shrieks.
It was both unprecedented and unthinkable. Television
cameras momentarily broadcast Ceausescu’s astonished face live across the
nation, before quickly cutting away. For the first time, the people had seen
his vulnerability. It was the beginning of the end.
The Ceauşescus fled Bucharest the following day and were
caught by their own people on a rural Romanian roadside. On Christmas Day—a
holiday that had long been suppressed by Ceauşescu’s atheist regime—the
dictator and his wife were put on trial by a kangaroo military court. They were
quickly found guilty, marched out to the courtyard, and summarily shot.
My Introduction to
Romania
I first set foot in Romania five years later, a young
high school graduate on my first long trip away from home. When I arrived, Ion
Iliescu—the rebranded communist who had seized control in the chaos following
Ceauşescu’s fall—was still president. The fresh scars of communism were
obvious: cities filled with ugly, gray concrete structures; ragged children
begging on street corners; a dearth of commerce, beauty, and civic life.
As I spent more time in Romania—a year living there in
1997 and two subsequent decades as head of an orphan care nongovernmental
organization—I began to discern communism’s less-visible scars. They are
pervasive and devastating, especially for society’s most vulnerable. While many
perceive conservatism to be uncompassionate, I’ve become an even firmer
believer in American-style liberty and capitalism precisely because of my
nonprofit work among abandoned children in Romania.
What I’ve learned is this: there is a grim symmetry
between the promises of Marxism and its real-world results. Simply put, Marxist
ideology promises specific virtues, but it delivers their polar opposites. (No
communist comes to power promising bread lines and prison camps, I assure you.)
The result is human suffering that should grieve any person of compassion.
Allow me to tell you just three of the long-term societal harms I have
witnessed.
1. Marxism Promises
Belonging But Delivers Isolation
The desire to belong to something larger than oneself is
universally human. Marxism appeals to this desire by preaching
collectivization, with the rights of the individual subordinated to society as
a whole. It sounds good and righteous on paper, especially to those craving a
sense of larger meaning for their lives. Shouldn’t we set our own individual
interests aside for the greater good?
Yet what the communists in Romania delivered was a total
destruction of cohesive community. Not only did they bulldoze
villages—forcefully relocating peasants to miserable block apartments in the
cities—they also figuratively bulldozed Romanians’ sense of trust and reliance
upon one another.
Informal community associations are always a threat to
communist governments, which can allow no loyalty higher than the party, and
Romania was no different. Spies and informants infiltrated nearly every
relationship and every gathering. Those willing to denounce their close friends
and family earned special favors.
With no one to trust, Romanians became deeply isolated
from one another. This ingrained sense of mutual mistrust continues to be a
major obstacle in bringing Romanians together to solve societal problems.
2. Marxism Promises
Equality But Delivers Scarcity—for Everyone But the Elites
Besides being collectivist, Marxism is first and foremost
an ideology of envy. Wealth and prosperity are zero-sum, and we’re all in
competition for it. Anyone who has more than I do is clearly taking something
from me. Government should ensure that we’re all equal, not just in opportunity
but in outcome.
In reality, what Marxism delivers, in Romania and
elsewhere, is scarcity. Lacking the necessary motivation of self-advancement
that fuels most human achievement, the communist economies in Eastern Europe faltered.
While the entire Soviet bloc suffered economically, prompting Gorbachev to
promote the reforms that quickly snowballed into revolutions, Romania’s
suffering was especially severe.
Middle-class Romanian friends my own age can distinctly
remember the first time they caught a glimpse of a banana or an orange (one
friend didn’t know what to do with the banana, so he ate it along with the
peel). Other friends have shared their memories of standing for hours in line
every week to receive meager food rations. While I lived in Romania in those
early post-communist years, I learned to do without grocery stores, fruit in
the winter, or reliable hot water. If all citizens were equal under communism,
they were equally impoverished.
But the truth is that they weren’t equal. There was a
path to wealth and prosperity open only to a very few: the elites in the
Communist Party. While Romanians came close to the brink of starvation, and
while half a million children were robbed of their childhoods in orphanages, Ceauşescu
built himself the largest palace in the world, grotesque and staggeringly
opulent.
It was from the balcony of this palace that he delivered
his final speech, laced with tributes to socialism and “the working people.”
This is the hypocrisy that Marxism never fails to deliver.
3. Marxism Promises
Dignity and Compassion But Delivers Degradation and Cruelty
Everywhere communism has reared its head, it portrays
itself as the advocate for the worker, the defender of the common man against
the rapacious bourgeoisie. Young people who consider themselves compassionate
toward the downtrodden are typically drawn to leftist ideologies.
In the real world, however, I have seen communism foster
nothing but cruelty, selfishness, and a lack of empathy. These outcomes are the
natural and bitter fruit of an ideology that isolates people from each other,
casting them as rivals for the same scarce goods.
In Romania, even to this day, it is rare to find public
officials, either elected or appointed, who see their positions as anything
other than a platform for self-advancement and enrichment through corruption.
(While many will see the United States as increasingly fitting that
description—with good reason!—our public corruption is still far less than that of a nation
like Romania.) Marxism’s “one for all” dogma quickly morphs into “every man for
himself.”
The weak and the vulnerable are the first to suffer. One
common feature of communist nations has been a legacy of inhumane state-run
orphanages.
Romania is infamous for its hellish orphanages, but its
chaotic revolution simply allowed Western journalists to enter and discover
what was happening everywhere throughout the Soviet bloc. Even today, while
conditions for abandoned children have undeniably improved, the communist
mentality and lack of empathy among government officialdom continues to make
our work to advocate for children difficult.
Marxism vs. Communism
vs. Socialism
Finally, a word about terms: I have repeatedly used the
word “Marxism” to encompass both socialism and communism, both of which are
stages of Marxist theory. However, in speaking with Romanian friends about
their system of government under Ceauşescu, some have objected to my usage of
the term “communism.”
“No, no, we weren’t a communist nation, even though we
were run by the Communist Party,” one friend told me. “Romania was a socialist
country. They told us this over and over, in schools and everywhere. We were
working toward communism, but we hadn’t achieved it yet.” Indeed, in rewatching
Ceauşescu’s final speech, I counted a total of eight mentions of “socialism” or
“socialist Romania,” with nary a mention of communism.
Terminological niceties aside, it’s clear that younger
Americans are growing increasingly comfortable with ideologies on the Marxist
spectrum. Even the term “communism” doesn’t seem to carry with it the stigma
that “fascism” does, despite being an equally savage and murderous form of
tyranny.
To any American inclined to believe the false promises of
Marxism rather than the historical reality, to anyone who believes this
ideology is in any way humane or compassionate, I offer this warning. I have
witnessed the ugliness, the poverty, and the despair it leaves behind. I have
spoken to those who suffered in Marxist prisons and have seen the memorials to
those who died in the streets seeking freedom.
I have spent my adult life working to alleviate the
damage done to vulnerable children—the damage still being inflicted every
day—by the evil legacy of communism. We don’t want this here. Pray God it never
comes.
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