First of all, Romanians like to see themselves as an oppressed nation from a historical point of view.

Some of them do, but that's really not the problem. The problem is that for the most part they've been acting like a bunch of (occasionally backstabbing) whores trying to sell themselves, or even imagining themselves in the role of the proverbial maidens. We could say the were some sort of "gatekeepers" to Europe, but mostly in the sense that they were always ungovernable and most powers kept them as one or more buffer states for this exact reason. And the major powers that tried to actually govern this region ended up quite badly -- just look at the Romans and the Euro-Americans.

> What's more outrageous is that Wallachian and Moldavian rulers were nothing but docile puppets put to rule by the Ottomans themselves

Well, not necessarily, but I don't have the space to cover this aspect here.

> Inspired by an adventurer in the second half of the 16th century called Mihai Viteazu

This is utter bullshit, and one of the things that led me to believe this is the incessant peddling of this idea in the Romanian space by all the idiot pseudo-intellectuals. Let's expand on this, since this is an interesting story.

Mihai was put into rule by the Ottomans, most likely in conjunction with the Habsburgs -- the former hoping that he would exert some influence on the latter, and the latter hoping that they'd use him as a strategic advantage against the former. And that they did, which I suppose makes Mihai one of the most capable military leaders in Europe at the time. And even though the notion of nationalism did not exist at the time, he thought the ambition that the price for all his military achievements would be his own state, comprised for the most part of Romanians, and overlapping in a large part with today's Romania. And this, whatever all the idiot peddlers would say, is no small feat for such a small people.

In much fewer words: Mihai Viteazu was a sort of Ceaușescu of his time, if you will, tare-n gură până-n ultimul moment.

> Secondly, Romanians have this bad habit of taking various famous persons of Romanian origin and calling them Romanian

Meh, who the fuck cares that the French consider Ionesco to be one of their own? I read some of his Romanian essays and they were great. And sure as hell he was Romanian, and he made a point of poking a hole in all his conationals. And can you blame him?

> I am proud to be Romanian

Not really, not since at least 2020, if not earlier. I mean I'll go and mention in passing that I am Romanian to whomever I speak to, but I won't be proud of it, at least not more than I'm ashamed of them. It just is what it is -- say what you will, I still speak the language better than most of y'all, or at least the v2.0 that stemmed from its cultural peaks.

> sometimes it doesn't really seem much of a country

See, a completely misguided line of thought can accidentally lead to the right conclusion too. Unfortunately, Romanians are rarely capable of running a country, and sometimes also by accident.

As for the so-called "dumb nationalism", nowadays it even has a popular name: "sovereigntism". Only this sovereigntism isn't, as you would naïvely believe, dumb (only) because it judges Dacians tarabostes to have been the best people of the year 100 AD, no. It's dumb because it's not really a nationalism; it's a nationalism about as much as I have six balls between my legs, i.e. it's missing about two thirds of it. The rest is just as pantsuit as the rest of 'em.