Abimael Guzmán, Leader Of Shining Path Insurgency In Peru, Dies At 86

LIMA, Peru — Abimael Guzmán, the leader of the brutal Shining Path insurgency in Peru who was captured in 1992, died on Saturday in a military hospital after an illness, the Peruvian government said.

Read the full article on NPR

 

Why Make the Dogs Bark: a Tale from Communist Bulgaria

Recently, I came across an article in the New York Times about an assassination attempt on a Bulgarian arms manufacturer in Sofia, Emilian Gebrev. They smeared poison on his car door handles

Read the full article on Counter Punch

 

May '68: The Pivot of Leftist Politics in France

 

     1968 was turbulent all around the world. For France, it was no different. The conservative president Charles de Gaulle was still in power. The controversial Algerian War had unsettled the populace. France was abandoning its position as colonialist overload of Vietnam as America escalated its own war against communism in that nation. The police had been militarized in anticipation of social upheavals. The young generation of postwar students were getting anxious and the labor unions were looking for new reasons to agitate the national workforce. The fires of political protest were sweeping throughout America, England, Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Japan and it was time for France to get caught up in all of that too.

     It all started small. A group of students at the Paris University of Nanterre wanted to spend more time with their girlfriends. The female dorms had strict time limitations and curfews for male visitors. The Sexual Revolution was building momentum and there were a lot of boy and girl students who wanted greater access to each other. They held a couple small demonstrations in the Spring of 1968 and, unpredictably, they began to attract a larger and larger number of students.

     Earlier that year, France’s Communist and Socialist Parties had agreed to form a coalition to replace Charles de Gaulle as prime minister of France. Activists at Nanterre saw the small demonstrations as a potential flashpoint to start an uprising and began getting more and more disgruntled students involved. So on March 22, 150 student agitators occupied a university administration building and drew up a list of demands. The police surrounded Nanterre and allowed the occupiers to publicly state their grievances. Then they were allowed to leave without being attacked, although the ring leaders were later brought in for disciplinary actions. They were later celebrated as heroes and that day was commemorated by christening it the Movement of 22 March.

     Demonstrations at Nanterre continued throughout April, disrupting ordinary affairs until May 2 when the university officials closed the university and threatened to expel the students who were responsible. Across town, at the Sorbonne campus of the University of Paris, students went on strike to protest the closure of Naterre. The police were called in to maintain order; they surrounded the Sorbonne campus and sealed it off to prevent anyone from coming or going. On May 3, students from Nanterre and other universities in Paris marched on the Sorbonne. They were joined by high school students and educators who were organized by the teacher’s union. 20,000 people arrived and began to attack the police. Barriers were built with any materials or debris they could find in the immediate area and the mob began throwing rocks and bricks. The police decided to retreat but soon returned wearing riot gear. The crowds were blasted with tear gas, being trampled and beaten with batons as the cops chased them away.

     Later in the week, students began returning to their campuses but when they arrived they found a police occupation. On Friday May 10, crowds began to gather at the Rive Gauche. The police attacked them so they set up barricades and the riots started again. Cars were burned and molotov cocktails were thrown. The disturbances lasted through the night and ended at dawn. The next day, images of the fighting were broadcast on television and the general public were horrified by the police brutality.

     The next day, over a million protesters marched through Paris. The Prime Minister Georges Pompidou went into hiding and called for the police to leave Sorbonne and released all the rioters who had been arrested. The students returned to the university but they became more violent, throwing rocks and bricks at the authorities. More barricades were set up and students occupied the campus, declaring it to be an autonomous people’s zone.

     All throughout the city, graffiti was written by anonymous protesters. Slogans like “It is forbidden to forbid” and “Be realistic, demand the impossible” could be read on walls and sidewalks. Some of these ideas became conventional wisdom for the upcoming generation of new radicals. Pamphlets, booklets, and chapbooks were also circulated, free of charge, throughout the crowds. They outlined revolutionary schemes and ideologies written by communists, socialists, anarchists, and artists. One pamphlet going around was published without copyright by the Situationist International, an offspring of the Surrealist art movement that morphed into an anarchist urban guerilla outfit. The manifesto, written by a young filmmaker named Guy Debord, was titled Society Of the Spectacle. It would go on to obtain cult status in postmodernist and activists intellectual circles.

     Meanwhile, throughout all the neighborhoods of Paris, people began organizing popular action committees. They held meetings to discuss their grievances against the government and laid out plans to petition for change. Over 400 committees were formed. The mainstream of society had joined in with the revolt.

     The tides began to turn on Saturday night when the leaders of the student demonstrations were interviewed on television. People watching at home were disappointed by their lack of direction, destructive ambitions, and utopian ideologies. The student leaders wanted to tear down the capitalist system and end the consumerist society but they had no real plans for what to do after that happened. Popular support for the movement began to gradually wane. But the protest movement was far from over.

     Not only young people in other parts of France begin to protest; blue collar workers all over the country, but mostly in Paris, declared a general strike. Influenced by student Communist Party activists, the Proletariat laborers, most especially the factory and farm workers, demanded ownership of their workplaces and the resignation of President de Gaulle. To calm the tensions, the labor unions made a deal with the business owners to increase wages by a heft 35%, shorten working hours, and provide more vacation time. The striking workers refused to accept this bargain. Their demands were more radical and more political. Some student demonstrators took note of the general strike and began showing up at the factories to sit with the idle laborers and support their picket lines. Some activists entered the factories and spent time talking to the workers, getting to know them and forming alliances.

     Towards the end of the month, while still on strike, the working classes, students, and Communist Party officials held a rally in a football stadium. As the day wore on, speaker after speaker came to the microphone and made speeches about overthrowing the government and radically altering the foundations of French society. But the proletariat and the student would-be revolutionaries had different agendas and by the end of the rally it was obvious they could lend each other little more than verbal support.

     On May 24 and 26, the only two deaths of May ‘68 were reported. In Lyon, rioters set a driverless truck into motion. It crashed into a line of police and killed one of them. Two days later in Paris, a 26 year old activist got into a fight with another demonstrator who stabbed him to death. In later years when police were confronted with their brutal and militaristic tactics of crowd control during those times, they responded by saying that they were proud of their actions because they themselves never killed anyone.

     While the rally was happening, the Socialist Party’s leader, Francois Mitterand, held meetings with government officials to discuss forming a new government. Surprisingly, the politicians wanted to include the Communist Party in their committees. The demonstrators were largely supporters of communist ideology and their numbers were large enough that it was thought they should be allowed to discuss their demands. The Socialist Party had more support from the general populace but they agreed to allow the Communists to attend planning sessions.

     The conferences were scheduled for May 29 but got canceled because on the morning of that same day, Charles de Gaulle, fearing the start of a revolution, fled the country. He handed power over to Prime Minster Georges Pompidou who, for a short time, ran the government by himself. The government collapsed when members of the National Assembly began to flee. Documents were destroyed, money was stolen, and a lot of politicians tried to cross the borders to escape to other countries. Somebody gave Georges Pompidou a gun and told him to keep it close in case he needed it. No one knew where de Gaulle had gone.

     Later that night, Pompidou learned that de Gaulle was over the border in Germany, plotting his return with a member of the military, General Jacques Massu. At that point, de Gaulle had grave doubts about his ability to continue leading France. He felt that he had lost the support of his people. Part of their plot for his return included plans for getting his family out of France if he were assassinated or unable to restore order in his country.

     On May 30, the Communist Party called for a march. A crowd of 500,000 gathered at the President’s palace on Champs Elysee. Pompidou was expecting a violent revolution to begin so he called out the riot squads and snipers, ordering them to shoot to kill if anything got out of hand. He also ordered tanks onto the streets of the countryside, surrounding Paris in case the demonstrators tried to escape. He mistakenly believed the they would start fighting then leave the city, regroup on the outskirts, and return to make tactical strikes using guerilla warfare techniques. But the Communists were not into violence. Their objective was to call for conferences and negotiations. They wanted their entry into politics to be done legally and peacefully. Some scholars have argued that if the military and police had clamped down with violence, then public opinion would have turned to greater support for the revolutionaries. All sides played their hands wisely that day.

     On May 30, Charles de Gaulle, back in France, appeared on television and announced that he would not resign. He also explained that the military had surrounded Paris in case a revolution began. But on the brighter side, he called for elections to be held at the end of June and Communist Party members would be on the ballot. After the broadcast, one million supporters of the government marched on the Champs Elysees, waving French flags. The call for revolution was over. The workers returned to work. The college year ended and the students returned home for the summer.

     The election in June resulted in a loss for Charles de Gaulle. The Communist Party gained a small number of seats in the National Assembly and the Socialist Party lost most of theirs. Some small, spontaneous demonstrations happened after that but the uprising of May was over.

     Blue collar workers and left wing activists were unable to hold their fragile alliance together and went their separate ways. An experimental commune was set up outside Paris, though. A handful of anarchist squatters, leftist journalists from a newspaper published by Jean-Paul Sartre, and farmers with radical views attempted to form a co-op but the project lasted a very short time. The more educated activists looked on in dismay as the farmers took to fighting and bickering with each other; in the end, they refused to cooperate and the commune dissolved.

     In the long run, May ‘68 was increasingly seen as a turning point for the French left wing. It inaugurated the New Left movement in France. But this movement was less involved in demonstrations, strikes, and riots. Instead, a class of French intelligentsia formed and turned to philosophy and intellectualism instead. For better or worse, the arcane, and often confusing, disciplines of postmodernism, poststructuralism, deconstruction, and critical theory became a mainstay in Western university humanities departments. Many believe these theoretical styles have done more harm than good when furthering the cause of left wing politics.

     So what was May ‘68 really all about? There is no general consens. Both left wing and right wing public intellectuals have tried to dominate this narrative to support their own agendas. Many people supported the uprising for many different reasons, bringing their own complaints and ideas into the mix. It came and went like a spontaneous explosion of existential frustrations. In the end, there were no effective leaders with clearly stated goals to seize power and direct the demonstrations towards a higher cause. It all fizzled out quickly, leaving not much but an election and a lot of nostalgia. Strikes and demonstrations are now common in France and the capitalist establishment continues on with relative stability, able to withstand the shocks and upheavals that arise every so often.

Judt, Tony. Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. Penguin Books, New York: 2006.

Ross, Kristin. May ‘68 and Its Afterlives. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London: 2008.

photo credits:

The Irish Times

The Paris Review

Red Flag

Book Review

Book Review

Brainwashing

by Edward Hunter

          In mid-century America, a publishing house called Pyramid Books mass produced lowbrow novels for mainstream public consumption. The subject matters of their pulp paperbacks usually revolved around action and adventure stories, westerns, thrillers, war stories, and detective fiction. One of their more unusual titles was a supposedly a journalistic account of communist P.O.W. camps during the Korean War called Brainwashing. Its author, Edward Hunter, claimed that communists had developed a powerful technique of mind control which they used to turn ordinary citizens into robots who were unquestioningly subservient to the state apparatus. But Brainwashing is not a work of scholarship nor is it a product of scientific inquiry. Its publication by a cheap book company churning out fluff literature for people of average intelligence and mediocre tastes should be a good indication of what it really is.

     An interesting man in his own right, Edward Hunter was no psychiatrist not was he a sociologist or even a political scientist. He was an OSS and CIA agent who worked for the for propaganda bureaus of those governmental branches. He oversaw an impressive archive of communist propaganda from the USSR and China. He was also in charge of creating and disseminating propaganda pushing America as the greatest and most truthful of all nations, a messianic titan ordained by God to save the world from anything un-American, a harbinger of truth that all nations must bow down and submit to or else be condemned to the hell of being on the wrong side of history. Hunter coined the term “brainwashing” and used it to explain why people, who otherwise would be good, would choose to take sides with those the American government hates. Some of these people were citizens of communist countries and some of them were American soldiers who gave up sensitive military secrets to communist officials and sometimes even renounced their American citizenship.

     Hunter starts off this book by presenting it as a scientific history of mind control. The great discovery of the neurological scientist Ivan Pavlov is described; you know the one where he rings a bell and gives the dog food and watches as it starts to drool; later ring the bell but in the absence of the food and the dog still drools. Transfer this practice to the human population and you have a powerful formula for controlling the masses of humanity, right? Hunter claims that Pavlov went on to secretly refine this technique and gave the results to Nikolai Lenin, a claim that has since been debunked by legitimate historians.

     The bulk of Brainwashing consists of anecdotal evidence or should we say “case studies”? Probably not because Edward Hunter was not enough of a scientist to be able to properly use the concept of case studies in the writing of a research paper. Each sleep-inducing account is written in a dull, dry prose of short declarative sentences that drone on and on. The soldiers all tell stories about life in Pak’s Palace, the military’s name for the P.O.W. camps located in North Korea. A perceptive reader might quickly notice that their descriptions of brainwashing techniques are not only minimal but also vague, muddled, and unclear. Most of what they say involves things they do to amuse themselves, often at their captors’ expense, descriptions of the miseries of their prison, self-criticism sessions, and torture.

     Using canned responses, the soldiers all answer questions about how they resisted brainwashing and survived the ordeal. Without variation, their explanations come down to two stock answers: religious faith and patriotism. Ring a bell and the dog starts to drool. Invoke the sacred ideals of God and country and any human will feel the strength and courage to survive any trial. Are the emotional responses to faith and patriotism conditioned reflexes? Pavlovian psychiatrists would say yes. Does America brainwash American citizens the way communists brainwash Soviet and Chinese citizens? The communists would say yes. But Hunter claims that communists always lie, are never capable of telling the truth; only Americans tell the truth so when communists condition their citizens it is mind control and when Americans do the same it is not. Black is black and white is white; there are no other colors and there are no shades of grey. Hunter claims the shades of grey are for weaklings and liberals who are no different from communists or anything else that does not fall into lockstep with the American way. You don’t want to be a weakling or a liberal, do you? Jump on the bandwagon, take your place in line, and conform to what the American authorities say you should be, schmuck.

     If you think the testimony from those G.I.’s is not enough, some clinical analysis is provided by the great Dr. Leo Freedom. Yeah right. And you might be surprised to learn that Dr. Freedom has a brother named Captain America. I mean, if you are just going to make stuff up at least try to make it believable. In the end, the doctor’s analysis is little more than a reiteration of everything the soldier’s supposedly said in their descriptions of the P.O.W. camps, albeit in slightly altered language. He does not cite any peer-reviewed research, he uses no technical jargon, refers to no statistics, and his dialogue is no more sophisticated than that of a junior high school biology teacher. Dr. Freedom was probably never even a real person. Of course, he ends his explication by explaining the importance of religion and patriotism when it comes to resisting brainwashing. One of the indoctrination techniques mentioned by Hunter is the repetition of ideas to the point where they become an unquestionable part of a man’s mind. It’s kind of like a catechism, praying before a meal, or recitations of the Lord’s Prayer which they teach to children. But religion is true and communism isn’t so when the church conditions the minds of its sheep (the Lord is my shepherd so believe what we tell you to believe, you little piece of mutton) it is for the common good but when the communists do the same it is brainwashing.

     One point that Hunter makes about communist rhetoric is that they never offer proof for any of their claims. Their method of argumentation involves stating a premise, making some brief comments on it, then restating the premise. But this is also how Dr. Freedom states his case in the chapter allotted to him. In fact, Hunter does the same when he makes his own commentaries on brainwashing techniques. For example, he says that religious faith is necessary for resisting mind control with the explanation that having a belief in a higher purpose makes torture bearable and that is why we should all be religious. He does say that prayer helps to focus the mind on something other than the pain but that is the most explanation he gives. In the end we should all be religious because that is the right thing to do. He uses the same circular logic that he accuses the communists of using. If you read carefully, you might notice that Hunter often uses the same conditioning and rhetorical strategies that he claims are brainwashing techniques. You can accuse him of being a hypocrite but he probably was something worse; he knew how to manipulate emotions and knew most readers will just swallow everything he says without skepticism. He would piss in your face and tell you it’s raining because he’d assume you are too gullible and submissive to challenge him on the matter.

     In fact, Brainwashing is not actually a book about emptying the contents of a person’s mind and replacing them with what the communists want them to think. The scenarios described by the soldiers are all scenes of torture. The prisoners are given insufficient food rations, denied medical treatments, subjected to violence and verbal abuse, put into solitary confinement, questioned endlessly, force to make false confessions, rewarded for good behavior and punished for disobedience. This book is really about interrogation methods used by intelligence agents to learn military secrets from their captives. Individuals subjected to cruelty will often say anything their interrogator wants to hear in order to make their suffering stop. Mind control has little or nothing to do with what Edward Hunter is writing about. The interrogation techniques he describes are the same ones used by American intelligence agents and law enforcement officials anyhow. But certainly if the people on our side do it, it is not a problem.

     To make matters worse, at the time this book was published the CIA had already initiated their MK-ULTRA program. Although Hunter’s concept of brainwashing was little more than a propaganda ruse, the intelligence agency was fascinated with the idea of mind manipulation. Therefore they began a two decades long program exploring the possibilities of brainwashing, not because they wanted to combat it but because they wanted to develop a powerful coercion system of their own. They experimented with control techniques involving hallucinogenic drugs, truth serums, electro-shock therapy, hypnosis, and violence. It is as if Hunter’s book was written to say, “Hey look at what those commies are doing over there. We are the good guys. We would never do anything like that, would we?” Edward Hunter was the type of old-time grifter would direct your attention to a crime being committed in the distance while he slides your wallet out of your pocket, empties it of its contents, and slides it back in without you ever noticing it. He was the kind of conman who would forcibly anally rape you and then convince you to see a therapist because he just proved you are gay.

Time has not been kind to theorists of brainwashing. Neuroscientists and psychiatrists have dismissed it. Hypnotism is possibly a pseudoscience. Mass hypnosis has been relegated to the realm of conspiracy theory kooks. Mind control is the content of science fiction and for anyone smarter than one of Pavlov’s drooling dogs it is not hard to see that it is an oversimplification, a term used to describe the practices and beliefs of people who differ radically from your own point of view. It is too complicated for some to grasp the idea that Asian or Russian people are different from Americans because we live in geographically distinct regions of the world. We grow up in different cultures, speak different languages, and are the products of different histories. When Chinese or Korean communists give evasive answers to questions, speak indirectly, drop hints, or use face-saving behavior, it is not because they are sneaky or dishonest; it is because those are ordinary communication styles for Asian people and other cultures that are defined as “high-context” by sociologists. This reality is too complex for many people to understand so it is easier to say they have been brainwashed and leave it at that. Then again, there are times when most humans do seem to be little more than trained animals.

     Edward Hunter’s Brainwashing is a work of propaganda. The Chinese communists are always ugly, vicious, and tricky but never smart enough to see that the morally upright Americans are always outwitting them. Stereotyping, demonizing, and vilifying the enemy is a common propaganda technique, one that is abundant in the pages of this book. At one point the author address the moral conflict some soldiers might feel about lying to their interrogators to protect American military information. He says it is morally acceptable because deceit is a necessary part of war. He deliberately neglects to mention that the authorities’ deceit of the people on their own side is a part of that equation. Do not make the mistake of thinking that the leaders of your own country are more righteous than the leaders of any other country because the are not. The style may be different but the result is the same. You can choose to be a dupe for communists or you can choose to be a dupe for capitalists but either way you are nothing more than a dupe in the end.

     Brainwashing is, however, an interesting sample of Cold War propaganda. It is also an interesting window into the mindset of the American government. You can use it to familiarize yourself with propaganda techniques and be all the wiser in the end. Poke holes in Hunter’s flimsy theories and watch this house of cards collapse.

Hunter, Edward. Brainwashing. Pyramid Books, New York: 1956.

THE CHEKA: REAL LIFE TORTURE AND HORROR, STATE SANCTIONED

In our current times, certain presidents yearn for complete power. Some have achieved this already. Chiseling away at established checks-and-balances systems and boundaries of decency, some pine for the day when they see glory in derided systems of the world’s history. One established weapon throughout the history of dictators is a secret or state police. Empowered by the dictator, they are driven to extract information and eradicate any resistance to their leader’s power. The Gestapo may be the most popular – or most used in our current vernacular – but not necessarily the most ruthless.

Read the full article on Cvlt Nation here

Nicolae Ceausescu and the Imprisonment of Communist Romania

   In all the countries of the communist satellite states of the Warsaw Pact, Romania was believed to be the most friendly nation to Western powers. Ironically, Nicolae Ceausescu ran Romania lile a maximum security prison. His nation was also the most repressive one behind the Iron Curtain. All this happened while he presented his nation as a model society calling it Communism With a Human Face. Did America and its Western Allies turn a blind eye to Romania’s human rights abuses or were they simply unaware of them? Did the Soviet Union pretend to tolerate Ceausescu’s eccentricities or did they encourage them? While these questions may never be answered, it is obvious that the life and career of Nicolae Ceausescu resulted in one of the great human tragedies of the modern era.

    At the time of World War II, the former Ottoman voivodate of Romania was faced with some difficult decisions. The Germanophile king and prime minister of the Balkan state had been given Transylvania, with its largely ethnic Hungarian population,  as a gift from the Nazis in exchange for support for the Axis cause. Later in the war, it became obvious that the Axis could not win and the fascist Romanians switched sides and lent military support to the USSR. The Western Allied powers thought of Romania as small fry and cared little which side they belonged to. Caught in a double bind between domination from the two totalitarian powers of fascism and communism, the modern state of Romania was born in blood, fire, and ambiguity.

    When the war ended in victory for the Allies, including Soviet Russia, the Romanian Communist Party, led by First Secretary Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, took command of the country, becoming one of Stalin’s puppet Eastern Bloc nations. Gheorghiu-Dej ruled Romania with force the way Stalin ruled the Soviet Union; he soon died and his loyal messenger boy Nicolae Ceausescu was tapped by the RCP’s Central Committee to step up and take his place.

    Why Ceasusescu was chosen to be Conducator of Romania remains a mystery. Most scholars believe it was because he was young, naive, and easy to manipulate. By any standard of judgment, he was an odd choice. Born into a large family of farmers with a violent, abusive alcoholic of a father, little Nicolae was an unremarkable student. He spoke with a severe stutter, had no sense of humor, and most people avoided him because of his short temper and penchant for street brawling. When he got older, he moved to Bucharest and joind the Communist Party. He went in and out of jail for participating in communist activities; it was there that he met Gheorghiu-Dej and started memorizing Karl Marx’s doctrines by rote. People say he put blind faith in Marxism, never really thinking critically about what it meant, how it applied to the real world, or what its shortcomings might be.

    Nicolae Ceausescu spent most of World War II in prison. After his release, he met his soon to be wife, Elena, said by many to be the Lady Macbeth behind Ceausescu’s throne. Elena was also an unremarkable person. Said to be pretty in her youth but not beautiful, she dropped out of high school at the age of 14 due to failing most of her classes. By the time of her death she was known for being greedy, cruel, manipulative, petty, vindictive, and mean. After Ceausescu’s ascent to power, her greatest achievement was obtaining a Ph.D in chemistry by plagiarizing her research and cheating on her exams while exasperated professors allowed this to happen for fear of being sentenced to jail for tangling with the First Lady of communist Romania. And all this without ever having finished high school or earning any other higher education degrees.

    The Romanian people hailed Ceausescu after Gheorghiu-Dej’s death. Ceausescu renounced his mentor as a brutal imitator of Stalin and proceeded to demote, fire, imprison or publicly humiliate all of his cabinet members. Ceausescu himself filled his own cabinet with sycophants, yes-men, family members, and ass-kissers interested in nothing but a chance to get ahead. Anybody who disagreed with the Conducator or gave him negative information was soon sent packing. Ceausescu won accolades from Western leaders and media by publicly expressing his support for Dubcek’s Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia and denouncing the Soviet invasion of that country. Ceausescu’s warm welcome in the West soon led to an influx of finances from bankers and businessmen hoping to cash-in on the supposedly freest nation behind the Iron Curtain. Perhaps they thought communism would soon fall and they would gain mountains of gold for having been there before the collapse.

    Ceausescu did not spend this money wisely. He invested heavily in steel mills and heavy industry, over-producing goods that could not be sold due to excessive production. Iron and steel products from Romania were made by low-skilled workers on cheap machinery and soon became unwanted commodities because of their poor quality. Food also became scarce. Once considered the most fertile part of Eastern Europe with its abundance of high quality fruits and vegetables, Romania became a starving nation as most produce was exported to pay off the Balkan nation’s foreign debts. Food was minutely rationed and Romanian citizens waited hours in long lines just to get meager supplies that barely kept them alive. Meanwhile, the Ceausescu’s spent millions of dollars to satisfy their lust for luxury items. For them it was a daily smorgasbord of diamonds and champagne while their people suffered from malnutrition and this in an economic system that promised equality and abundance for all.

    While the outside world celebrated the apparent freedoms of the RCP, Ceausescu was busy building up the Securitate, Romania’s secret police equivalent to the KGB. Many members of this organization were thugs recruited from the fascist Iron Guard political party. Most Romanian citizens were put in touch with a Securitate officer who they could report any suspicious activity or language to. Neighbors were encouraged to spy on neighbors and turning in another person was a good strategy for staying on the Securitate’s good side. Romanians learned to fear one another and the long term result was a nation of people who trusted no one and spoke very little. Citizens were also forced to participate in parades and festivals to satisfy Ceausescu’s love of  pageantry. Passions in these events ran high since people were scared that showing too little enthusiasm would result in a beating by Securitate forces. Harassment of scientists and intellectuals was also a routine part of the Securitate’s job. Scholars and writers who did not find a way to make their works celebrate the greatness of their leader could never get published. Any scientific papers written by researchers had to mention Elena Ceausescu as the head of the project. Failure to do so would lead to harassment, intimidation, and public humiliation. The Securitate spied on people excessively. The Romanian telephone system was the most heavily bugged in the world. There were so many wire taps in the country that Romanians often refused to answer the phone out of fear of being secretly listened to. Ironically, Ceausescu was paranoid about spies and was constantly having his premises, offices, and phones searched for evidence of espionage.

    Perhaps the most long lasting part of Ceausescu’s legacy is the architecture. Anyone who has been to Romania will know that this statement is not a compliment. In 1971, Ceausescu made state visits to China and North Korea. Overcome with a sense of awe at the orderliness of row after row of grey concrete apartment blocks, Ceausescu returned to Romania with a vision. He quickly made plans to bulldoze vast sections of Bucharest containing historic buildings and charming cottages to erect vast tracts of soulless, monolithic housing blocks that, without color or character, resembled prisons. He went on to do the same with all the farming villages throughout the country. Soon Romania was a strange contrast between majestic Carpathian mountains, peasants working the fields, and cinder-block monstrosities housing the hapless citizens. The other side of this architectural project was the construction of Ceausescu’s lavish private summer palaces all over the country, most of which he never even bothered to visit. To top it all off, he oversaw the construction of the world’s second largest building, the Casa Poporului or Peoples’ House, in central Bucharest. Its awkwardly extravagant interior is overpowered by its plain exterior, resembling a pile of oblong kleenex boxes. This multi-million dollar architectural project went on as the Romanian people struggled financially and psychologically to survive.

    By 1989 Nicolae Ceausescu had almost completely lost touch with reality. Paranoid, delusional, erratic, violent, and senile, his psychological state probably resulted from years of being pandered to by yes-men who never let any negative information reach his ears. He sincerely believed he had achieved the impossible dream of creating a communist utopia on Earth. In December 1989, anti-government riots started in Timisoara and rapidly spread across the country and into the capital Bucharest. Nicolae and Elena were whisked away in a helicopter by Securitate conspirators and imprisoned in an army barracks, forced to sleep on military cots, using a filthy public toilet, and eating the same beans and bread the military was being fed. On Christmas day of 1989, the Ceausescu’s were taken to a schoolhouse and convicted of crimes against the state in a rather simple and ridiculous kangaroo court. After losing their case, they were abruptly taken out to a wall and shot by a firing squad. The execution was filmed and broadcast on Romanian national television. The coup was carried out by a secretive group of Securitate officers; they had been planning since 1971 to overthrow Ceausescu because they thought he was straying too far from pure communism. 18 years later, Nicolae Ceausescu was done in by the men closest to him.

    After the revolution of 1989, RCP Central Committee members expressed regret for having placed Ceausescu in power. One has to image that in another time and place, Nicolae and Elena would have been nobodies, persona non grata, hacks, and non-entities shuffling through life with no other purpose than mere survival.

Behr, Edward. Kiss the Hand You Cannot Bite: The Rise and Fall Of the          Ceausescus. Villard Books, 1991.

The Self-Immolation of Jan Palach and the Prague Spring of 1968

   In the winter of 1969, a history student at Charles University, in the Czechoslovakian capital city of Prague, set himself on fire. His name was Jan Palach and his suicide was a political protest against the Soviet Union’s occupation of his country. In his suicide note he simply stated that he wanted more freedom of speech in his nation. His death marked the dwindling end of what has come to be known as the Prague Spring of 1968.

    By the late 1960’s, Czechoslovakia had become a stagnant nation. After World War II the country ushered in its era of communist rule. After the Stalinist terrors of the 1950’s, the economy had weakened, censorship had killed any desire for learning or intellectual curiosity, and culturally the nation seemed to be at a dead end. Antonin Novotny, the First Secretary of the Communist Party increasingly looked more and more like a dinosaur, unwilling to adapt to the changing needs of the time. Then Aleksander Dubcek entered the scene. Dubcek, a moderate socialist working for reform of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, devised a plan called the Action Programme that would reinvent the government apparatus and make living conditions more than just mere drudgery for the citizens of his nation. The Action Programme called for freedom of speech and an end to media censorship, limited free enterprise, the right to form political parties outside the Communist Party, an end to citizen surveillance by the police, and more political representation for the Slovakian people who felt that the government was unfairly favorable to the Czech half of the country. In short, it was to be an end to the Stalinist-era totalitarian rule that no longer seemed to be relevant. Dubcek became popular with not only the people of Czechoslovakia but also with a band of reform-minded politicians and the StB, the Czechoslovakian secret police. Dubcek and his followers politely asked Novotny to step aside and he did.

    That is when trouble began with the USSR. Leonid Brezhnev, the General Secretariat of the Soviet Union, did not trust Dubcek. While Dubcek sincerely wished to remain close partners with the USSR despite the changes promised in his reforms, Brezhnev feared a loosening of totalitarian rule in Czechoslovakia would set off a wave of defections by countries involved in the Warsaw Pact. While Dubcek scrambled to find a moderate position between the demand of the Soviets and the promises he had made to his people, the government of the USSR was making secret deals with members of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party to undermine the authority of Dubcek and have him overthrown.

    So far the  people of Czechoslovakia were peacefully embracing the Action Programme. In the streets there were some calm demonstrations. The media and the intelligentsia were embracing new avenues of thought. Three new political parties, the KAN, K-231, and the SDP were formed without interference from the dominant Communist Party. All the while, Brezhnev continued to pressure Dubcek to return the country to old-style Stalinist rule. Then in September of 1968, Soviet tanks crossed the borders into Czechoslovakia from neighboring East Germany, Poland, and Hungary. Then a band of Communist Party officials stormed into a meeting being led by Dubcek and declared they were taking over the government. The politicians in the meeting looked at them with confused faces then told them to leave. They did and then went into hiding. But the Soviet troops stayed and the Czechoslovakian people remained non-violent but showed their resistance by verbally assailing the soldiers in Russian and removing street signs to confuse them as they tried to navigate Prague. After the coup d’etat failed, the Soviets kidnapped Dubcek and brought him to Moscow.

    During Dubcek’s absence the Soviet government continued to sow discord in the Czechoslovakian ruling council by secretly encouraging some members to push for reform while encouraging other members to support normalization. The ensuing conflicts weakened the government and prevented any real changes from taking place. Meanwhile the Soviet soldiers were going on drunken rampages, raping, looting, assaulting, and killing the citizens of the country they were occupying. They also engaged in the vandalism of television and radio stations as well as the offices of newspapers and book publishers. The Czechoslovakian people continued to hold peaceful demonstrations, mostly in Prague. After a couple months of occupation, though, it seemed as if things would stagnate for ever.

    That is when Jan Palach committed suicide to protest the Soviet invasion of his country. At first, the people saw this as a rallying cry to push the Prague Spring forward. The Soviet troops saw it as a reason to crack down harder on rebellion. In the coming weeks, several other people committed suicide by publicly lighting themselves on fire but nobody knew about it because the media was being forced into silence and censorship.

    Finally, in January of 1969 two unrelated sports events set off further unrest. Czechoslovakia and the USSR had two hockey matches and the Czechoslovakian national team won both. In celebration, the people of Czechoslovakia flooded the streets in celebration. Initially this had nothing to do with politics. Then after the second match, the accompanying street celebration turned into a riot in which the Czechoslovakian mob destroyed a Soviet Aeroflot office. After the riot ended, the Soviet officials convinced the Czechoslovakian government that Dubcek had to go. Dubcek’s refusal to carry out the Soviet’s orders and his inability to move the Prague Spring into a more productive stage was making him appear to be a weak and ineffective leader to people on both sides.

    Gustav Husak, a Slovakian politician, took over as First Secretariat of the Communist Party. Although he was one of the original supporters of Dubcek’s Action Programme, he later took sides with Brezhnev and returned Czechoslovakia to its dreary totalitarian gloom and hopelessness. By that point, the people of his nation wanted a return to calm and order more than political reform. Media censorship was re-established. All political parties except for the Communist Party were banned. Free enterprise ended. In response, thousands of people left the Communist Party and went along with their rule albeit grudgingly and without enthusiasm. The country mostly stayed the same until the Velvet Revolution happened twenty years later.

Williams, Kieran. The Prague Spring and Its Aftermath: Czechoslovakian Politics 1968 – 1970.  Cambridge University Press, 1999.