And who but the most deranged of apologists would even attempt to compare the dim achievement of a porter's daughter composing in an aristocrats castle to all those little Natasha's empowering themselves by widely displaying their genitalia across my 19" LCD, bought and paid for through freedom, monitor? (note freedom willing I will have a 21" sized monitor to display the fruits of freedom soon)
I must ask why do you hate freedom Joanna? Why do you feel this need to salvage something from that great 19th century fraud against 18th century liberalism? Our great achievement is that no Padilla will ever be a threat to our order because the "poets down here don't write nothing at all and in the quick of night when they try to make an honest stand they wind up wounded not even dead..." You see we have rendered our artists so precious they have no purchase and if they did then you could go catalogue their sorry state at Guantanmo or perhaps up here in the northern Gulags.
Give up your family story and history! It is that of blood diamonds to which I am sure commissar Pug will agree.
Please no more apologia for Stalinism, Maoism, and Pol Potism it irrationalizes the beat of my freedom maker.
Travism
>
> "Communist" stretches all the way from 1945 to 1980. It includes real
> reforms that benefitted the vast majority of people -- free medical
> care, free education, pensions, vacations. It includes a
> mini-renaissance in the arts, after the death of Stalin. It also
> includes the Ceausescu era, our tin pot dictator with delusions of
> grandeur, who (with the help of the IMF) destroyed the economy, caused
> some of the most beautiful buildings in the capital to be razed, and
> discredited any meaningful idea of socialism in Romania.
>
> It is true that Romania's long tradition of colonial servitude,
> feudalism, curruption, nepotism, and general cravenness was not undone
> by the 20 years of the Russian-imposed "communist" post war regime. It
> would be very surprising if it had. Those habits, that modus vivendi,
> found ways to disguise themselves in the politically correct garb until
> they could be tossed aside.
>
> If I enthused, it was about the real gains that were made for a space of
> twenty years. These were gains that allowed my mother, the daughter of a
> porter to get as good an education as could be had in the Western world
> and to become a nationally recognized writer by her late twenties. As
> such, she was able to devote her entire life to writing; sejourning for
> months in the liberated castles of the aristocracy in order to finish a
> novel or to get a new one started. These were gains that allowed my
> dirt poor grandparents to get medical care when they fell ill and which
> allowed my grandfather to retire in his early sixties.
>
> "Communist" Romania is a mixed story; some parts worth cheering for and
> others not. Perhaps a few decades serving as the Mexico of Europe will
> convince Romanians that world capital does not have their best interests
> at heart and perhaps there will another, more successful revolution. I
> hope to see that day.
>
> Joanna
>
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