Below the reader will find the translation of a text initially titled "Proposals of measures for the improvement of political-ideological activity, of Marxist-Leninist education of party members, of all working people", written by the General Secretary of the Romanian Communist Party (also known as PCR), Nicolae Ceaușescu, and presented on the 6th of July, 1971 before the Party's Executive Committee, after his return from a visit to some of the East Asian communist countries, the most notable of which being North Korea. As a sign of political change in a minor communist country, the Theses do bear some historical value; they may also be used by the reader as a template for correctly identifying similar rhetoric and patterns of expression in recent texts or speeches.
As a result of the profound transformations which have come to pass in the years after the liberation1, of the victory of the socialist system, of the vast political-educational activity2 realized by the party, in our country important results have been obtained3 in widening the cultural horizon, in lifting the political and ideological standard, in shaping the socialist conscience of those who work. This is expressed by the fact that our entire people, all the working people, without distinction of nationality, steadfastly forge the party's internal and external politics, that they deem to be their own politics, viewing it as the guarantee of their wellbeing and happiness. The supreme goal of the politics of our party was and is the growth of the material and spiritual wellbeing of masses, ensuring the conditions for the plenary affirmation of personality, building the new man, profoundly devoted to socialism and communism. The political-educational activity constitutes an inseparable component of the work to build the new social system, an outstanding pursuit of our party and state4.
With all the great successes5 obtained until now, in political-ideological and cultural-educational work there still continue to persist a series of lacks, deficiencies and shortcomings, whose elimination constitutes an imperious necessity for the progress6 of our society.
Taking into account the requirements of the current stage of the socialist construction, the great objectives that stand before the party and the people in forging the multilaterally-developed7 socialist society, it is necessary for measures to be taken to raise the level of revolutionary combativity and of the militant, partinic8 spirit of the entire activity political, ideological and of communist education of masses9, operated by the party organs and organizations, by mass and collective organizations, by state organisms, by propaganda, ideological and cultural-artistic institutions.
1. -- Decisive in the achievement of these objectives is the continuous heightening of the party's directive role in all the fields of political-educational activity, the increase of responsibility and exigency of party organs and organizations in guiding the entire work of mass education, performed through all the means of political influence and through the factors of culturalization that our society has at its disposal.
For this purpose party leadership and control will be strengthened to orient the political-educational activity towards the wide mass promotion of our party's ideology, its Marxist-Leninist politics, to heighten combativity against the influences of bourgeois ideology, of retrograde mentalities10, foreign to the principles of communist ethics and party spirit. Special emphasis will be put on presenting the great achievements obtained by the Romanian people -- maker of socialism, emphasizing the chief role of the working class, which fulfils with fairness its historical mission in erecting socialism, the cultivation of respect towards work, towards the producers of material goods in our society.
An essential task of the political-educational work performed by our party is the education of all those who work in the spirit of socialist patriotism, of love and boundless devotion towards the motherland, of the decision to not spare anything for the defense of our revolutionary achievements, of the country's independence and sovereignty, for the continuous strengthening and flourishing of socialist Romania. In the process of building the multilaterally-developed socialist society it is necessary to continue acting for the even more powerful consolidation11 of unity and brotherhood between Romanian, Magyar, German, Serbian and other working people, who, animated by the same interests and aspirations, achieve together all the country's material and spiritual values, take part with spiritedness in the struggle for the flourishing of the common homeland -- the Socialist Republic of Romania. It is the duty of party organizations to firmly fight against any tendency and form of expression of nationalism. Political work must act unflinchingly against any manifestation of indiscipline, of violation of the norms of social cohabitation, in the direction of the development of respect towards collective belongings, towards the country's laws, to strengthen socialist lawfulness and public order.
The direction and organization of the entire political-educational activity fall directly to counties'12 party bureaux and committees, to party organs at all levels, to activists who work in the field of propaganda, to all the communists.
In realizing all these tasks, an important role must be fulfilled by -- under the party's direction -- the syndicates, youth and women's organizations, all the mass and collective organizations in our homeland.
2. -- The Propaganda Section of the Central Committee13 will14 present proposals for the improvement of the organisation of party education, of the forms of political and ideological preparation of party specialists15 and members, in order to develop the[ir] partinic, revolutionary spirit, to rise the level of party work. Measures will be taken for the improvement of education plans and curricula at the Ștefan Gheorghiu16 party Academy and the inter-county party Schools, in order to ensure the preparation of cadres with the fundamental problems of party work, of the science of political leadership. Will be ensured17 the inclusion18 in perfectioning courses of a larger number of activists from different fields of activity. The recruitment of lower and higher students19 for party schools will be made among party, state and mass organization activists, especially those that come from the working class and have a long experience in production.
3. -- Will be extended and activated the forms of mass political work: the activity of agitators, of satirical gazettes20, of artistic21 agitation brigades, of different forms of visual agitation at workplaces, for the popularization and generalization of positive experience, of achievements and advanced attitudes, as well as for the active fight against the states of negative things22. Party organisations will be oriented to strengthen the direct political-educational work, from person to person, with every party member, with every citizen.
A special attention must the party organs give to the education of party and state members in the spirit of the profoundly humanist politics of our party, a politics pervaded with human care, in the spirit of serving with abnegation the general interests of society, of the people23 -- a fundamental duty and principal criterion for the appreciation of cadres, of every communist.
Party organs must develop in24 our cadres the preoccupation with ensuring the conditions for the ever wider participation of masses in elaborating and achieving party and state politics, in the entire economic, social, ideological and cultural life -- an eloquent expression of the profound democratism of our socialist arrangement.
4. -- Will have to rise the role of party gatherings in debating the main life problems of working collectives, in increasing combativeness and political vigilance of party members, in lifting the critical and auto-critical spirit, in promoting the firm position against negative phenomena, against unsuitable attitudes towards work and the collective had, of disinterest towards the requirements of working people, against manifestations of indolence and superficiality. It is the duty of party organizations to form the mass opinion in the fight against abuses and dishonesty, dilapidations and all antisocial manifestations.
One of the main objectives of political work, especially among the young, is the firm fight against tendencies of parasitism, of easy, workless life, the cultivation of responsibility and of the duty to work for the homeland, the people, for the socialist society. The fulfillment of a useful work for society is an honor and an obligation for all citizens25.
5. -- Is necessary the creation of a large mass current for the participation of all citizens and especially the young in actions of patriotic work -- on construction sites, in the industry, in agriculture, in the management of localities. The party organs and organizations, mass and public organizations, the local organs of state power are directly responsible of organizing those actions26.
6. -- Will need to be intensified the activity of education and political preparation in schools and faculties27. For this purpose, the Ministry of Education will take measures for the improvement of educational plans and curricula, giving special attention to the improvement in the teaching of social sciences. Will need to be lifted the spirit of responsibility and the role of teachers in the political-ideological shaping of lower and higher students. Will be taken measures for the strengthening of the educational directions in the Ministry of Education28, ensuring their integration with party activists, their direct guidance from the Propaganda Section of the C.C. of P.C.R. The C.C. Secretariat of P.C.R., the county and town bureaux of party committees answer for the guidance of the entire political activity within schools and faculties, of the content pertaining to the teaching of social sciences. The educational plans and the curricula of social sciences will be approved by the Secretariat of C.C. of P.C.R. A third of the curricula of summer courses for teacher preparation will be dedicated to political information29 and to debates on ideological and educational problems.
7. -- Will be taken measures for the intensification of the activity of political education performed by the U.T.C. organizations30 and students' associations. The principal role in the entire activity of U.T.C. must be had by the working youth. Must be actioned to promote among the entire youth the conception about the world and life of the working class, for the cultivation of the working class' and the communist party's revolutionary traditions31, for the education socialist, patriotic, through work of the young generation. The research center for youth's problems is to orient its activity towards these requirements of youth education.
A special attention will need to be given to cultural-educational and entertainment32 activities among the youth and especially among lower and higher students, combating the manifestations of cosmopolitanism, different artistic fashions borrowed from the capitalist world. Will be forbidden the serving of alcoholic beverages in all the entertainment premises for the youth.
Will be enlarged and intensified the atheist propaganda33, the organization of mass actions for the disproof of mysticism, of retrograde concepts, for the education of the entire youth in the spirit of our materialist-dialectic philosophy.
8. -- Will be grown the role of the Academy of social and political sciences in debating the current ideological problems of our social-political life, of the cultural activity and artistic creation, in elevating the ideological combativity against foreign influences, in the powerful affirmation of the materialist-dialectic philosophy and of our party's politics.
9. -- It is necessary to grow the role of the press in the widespread propagation of the ideological positions of our party, of our ethical social cohabitation principles, in the firm fight against the influences of bourgeois ideology and of retrograde mentalities of any kind. The press will have to cultivate more the advanced figure of the worker, of the producer of material goods devoted body and soul to the cause of socialism, the flourishing of the homeland. Will be ensured the firm political orientation, especially of the cultural-artistic publications, in the direction of promoting militant socialist art and literature and of combating the tendencies to tear apart creation from our social realities, from the general public of the working people34.
Through forms and varied styles of expression, the art must serve the people, the homeland, the socialist society.
10. -- Will have to be increased the educational role of all the radio and television shows. Shows will be addressed in greater measure to the large masses of audience35, especially to workers and peasants, ensuring therewith of their more frequent presence in broadcasts36. Will be made a more rigorous selection of artistic productions broadcasted by the radiotelevision, promoting mostly movies, plays, musical shows from the national repertoire and especially from the new, socialist repertoire. Will be ensured a rational balance in the repertoire politics, so that there will be judiciously represented valuable creations from socialist countries, as well as representative works from the heritage of universal culture which possess a profound social character and a progressive, advanced philosophical position. Will be eliminated from broadcasts the productions which cultivate ideas and principles foreign to our philosophy and morals, the spirit of violence, the bourgeois life style, harmful mentalities for the youth's education.
Satire and humour shows will need to be directed against the negative phenomena in the society37, from the positions of our party's politics, removing the productions that are in bad taste and harmful or confusing from an ideological point of view.
The radio and television will stimulate the creation of revolutionary, patriotic and worker's songs, as well as their distribution to the masses, organizing for this purpose creation and interpretation contests, special shows, etc.
11. -- Will be taken measures for a better orientation of editorial activity, so that book production responds in greater measure to the requirements of communist education. Will be exercised a more rigorous control, to avoid the publishing of literary works that do not answer to the requirements of the political-educational activity of our party, of books that promote ideas and conceptions harmful to the interests of the socialist construction.
12. -- In the orientation of the repertoires of public performance institutions38, will be emphasized the promotion of original creation with militant, revolutionary character. Will be given also extension to valuable works from the current artistic creation of socialist countries; will be ensured a more rigorous selection of the works from the classical and contemporary international repertoire.
Will be acted39 more perseveringly for the development of Romanian creations of opera, operetta and ballet with themes springing from the battle of our people for socialism. County and municipal party committees answer for the just orientation of the repertoires of professional artistic institutions of performance, as well as those of cultural houses and community homes.
13. -- Will be taken measures for the better balancing of the movies programmed in our cinemas, limiting the projection of police and adventure movies, forbidding movies which cultivate violence and vulgarity40, which propagate the bourgeois life style.
14. -- An especially important role in the political-ideological orientation of cultural-educational activity, in ensuring a content pervaded by the spirit of the politics of our party of the entire literary-artistic creation is played by party organisations, by all the communists who perform their activity in this area.
Party members who are part of party and state leadership organs, as well as all those who activate in ideological institutions, of political education, of teaching, culture and art, in the entire sphere of our cultural life, must manifest a grand spirit of partinic exigency, of combativeness and Marxist-Leninist principledness. They must be an example in this respect, through their day to day activity as well as their own literary-artistic creations.
15. -- The Ministry of Interior Commerce, the Ministry of Tourism, as well as local party and state organs will watch that in places of public alimentation will be broadcast especially the musical creation of our country, making therewith a careful selection of foreign repertoire, in order to remove the music that expresses decadent currents.
16. -- It is necessary for measures to be taken to improve the activity of the Propaganda Section of the Central Committee of P.C.R., with an eye to the firm realization, at a higher level, of the duties that it bears. The Board of ideology and the Board of culture and press of the Central Committee will have to perform a more intense activity, to debate exactingly the problems of ideological, political and cultural activity, seeing to the just orientation of the entire activity performed in the respective fields.
17. -- In order to debate the problems of political-educational work, a conference will be convened at the party's Central Committee with the secretaries of county party committees who answer for propaganda problems, with cadres responsible in the field of ideological activity, with leaders of creation unions and of some cultural institutions.
In the autumn of this year, a plenum of the C.C. of P.C.R. will analyze the problems pertaining to ideological, political-educational and cultural-artistic activity. In order to prepare the plenum, there will be organized debates throughout the party organs and organizations, in the institutions and organizations with educational character, as well as in the press.
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Acting in the direction of the proposed measures, it is necessary that the party organs and organizations ensure the orientation of the entire political-ideological and cultural-educational activity in the spirit of Marxist-Leninist traditions, of proletarian internationalism, of solidarity of the working people of our country with all the peoples who forge the new socialist arrangement, with the international communist and working movement, with the working class, with the peoples who fight for national emancipation, for the defense of their independence and national sovereignty41, with all the contemporary forces that rise against imperialism, for social progress and peace.
Our party considers that fulfilling the tasks both national as well as international, constitutes an inseparable dialectical unit, their harmonious blending being a fundamental duty of every communist.
The entire ideological, political-educational, cultural-artistic activity that takes place in our country must have as a basis the general Marxist-Leninist line of the Romanian Communist Party, the programme elaborated by the 10th party Congress, must ensure their assimilation and bringing into life by our entire people. The improvement of political-educational activity must lead to the intensification of communists' participation, of all the working people, of the entire party and nation at forging the multilaterally-developed socialist society, a work that requires both improving the grade of material civilization of Romania42, as well as forming a new man, with a heightened socialist conscience.
I bring for approval by the Executive Committee these proposals of measures, seeing to their publication and the organization of their bringing to life.
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The proposals of measures have been unanimously approved by the Executive Committee of the C.C. of P.C.R. during the meeting on July 6, 1971.43
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This particular doublespeak supposedly refers to the communists' takeover of state affairs. As things often happen, this event also occurred in a specific historical context. Immediately post-World War II, Romanian monarchy was greatly weakened, more so that Romania was officially declared a loser in the war and its remaining competent leaders got executed in Romanians' own Nuremberg Trials. This came as a great opportunity for the times' pro-Soviet politicians, e.g. Ana Pauker and Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu (Romanian communists' very own Trotsky, if we were to be snarky), who did not hesitate for a moment to grab power.
And so they did, and they evicted King Michael (the First and the Only) from his bloody throne, and the rest is bloody history. ↩
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The "activity" described here and throughout the entire text being completely non-descript in the sense that it doesn't really matter what they did, they just did stuff, m'kay? So no one may lift a finger to point out that they didn't do anything. ↩
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This sounds like crap because it is an impersonal expressed syntactically as a reflexive, which, in contrast to the previous footnote, gives the impression that no one did anything, but results were obtained -- by themselves. In Romanian we call this "limbă de lemn", i.e. "wooden tongue", because of its deliberately misleading vagueness. ↩
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As the reader may have noticed, most of this paragraph is devoid of actual meaning. Some of the remarkable key words are "party", "social[ist/ism]", "wellbeing", "political", "educational", "ideological", and they don't actually say anything other than "we're awesome and we aim to be awesome in the foreseeable future".
Quite a nasty gamble, and an ironical one, given how the Romanian socialist communist future looked in hindsight. ↩
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GREAT SUCCESS! ↩
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Progress literally means "to move forward", which is also what "mers înainte" means. ↩
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The idiom "multilaterally-developed" is a well-known target of derision for educated Romanians who lived through the communist regime. The term's usage in public discourse correlated negatively with the amount of food available on shelves, which makes the news coming in 2016 from countries such as Venezuela a painful reminder of times (for) now gone for Romanians.
Romanians also use this mockery as a reminder to people who naïvely believe that "things were better in the times of old". Hell no, they weren't, and we'd better not forget that, lest history repeats itself. ↩
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This word does, to my knowledge, not exist in English, or if it does, it means something else than represented here. Here "partinic" denotes acting to serve the best interest of the party, in its spirit and so on and so forth. ↩
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Note that "political", "ideological" and "of communist education of masses" are all attributes of "activity". I am aware that in English attributes generally* appear before the subject, but this particular sentence is so contrived that it was difficult to put it any other way while carefully preserving the initial text's style. Thus I ask the reader to forgive me this flaw.
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* One notable exception being Gilbert and Sullivan's Modern Major-General's Song. ↩ -
Note that while "combating retrograde mentalities" puts it in the negative, and "progressive thinking" in the positive, both catchphrases convey the exact same message. ↩
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The literal translation is "cementation". ↩
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I.e. "județ", pl. "județe", an administrative division in Romania. ↩
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Referred to henceforth as "the C.C." or "the C.C. of P.C.R.". ↩
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This is where the actual imperative begins. ↩
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I'm not sure this is accurate. "Cadru de partid" is somewhat related to party cadres, i.e. politruks, but I think Romanian communists used it to refer in general to party bureaucrats. ↩
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This guy was quite literally a nobody at his time in the early 1900s. So because Romanian communists didn't have a better guy after whom to name their "Academy"... ↩
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Sorry, I couldn't help myself with this "se va face" thing, as the whole deed will magically turn itself into being. However, while it sounds amusing, unfortunately this logic has been a genocide of minds. ↩
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See, and you thought "inclusiveness" was a brand new thing invented by the new activists right around the corner! ↩
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An "elev" is a student in the pre-university cycle, while a "student" is the same, only in higher education. ↩
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The exact equivalent of today's "tabloids". ↩
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I don't think "artistic" means what they think it does. ↩
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The Romanian Communist Party was so progressive that it invented "self-help", "personal development" and "staying positive" almost half a century before it was cool. Take that, ye feckin' hipsters! ↩
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So here's the thing that leaves me thinking. It's clear that this particular paragraph is a shitty piece of propaganda, in that it's not even well thought out; look at it: it shifts the "humanism" towards "the society", which, as opposed to what the untrained eye might believe, puts the two elements in clear contrast to each other.
Now, the fact that Ceaușescu (or whoever wrote his text) aimed to bullshit the Executive Committee is more or less reminiscent of nowaday's VC pitches, which would dispel the myth of the tyrannical dictator. I mean what the fuck, he could make whatever decisions he pleased, humanism be damned. So why the whole pretense? Yes, I get it, in front of "the people", but what party executives gave a fuck about "hoomanism"? ↩
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I'm pretty sure the "la cadrele noastre" formulation is ungrammatical. ↩
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Except for those who are more equal, of course. ↩
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Goddang fucking finally, a clear, unambiguous assignment of responsibility! ↩
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Why "faculties" and not "universities", I don't know. Regardless, PCR had a tight political grip on Romanian academic institutions, some of them still being managed in that fashion nowadays throughout the country.
One notable example is University Politehnica of Bucharest, which coincidentally I graduated. The ex-"rector" turned president of University Senate, Ecaterina Andronescu, is also a hardcore member of the Social Democratic Party, known for its strong ties with the former communist regime.
The more things change... ↩
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It's unclear whether the measures will be taken from within the Ministry of Education, in which case this should have been phrased as "will be taken measures in the Ministry of [...]", or the directions are something inherent to said institution, which is a nonsensical proposition. ↩
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Political correct language lesson #123: in this particular passage "information" denotes an action, not an item. That is, the thesis here expresses that teachers should and will "be informed" on "political matters", whatever those might be.
What the thesis means to say is that the brainwashing must go on in an adequate proportion, i.e. "a third of". Let's sit for a moment and analyze this linguistic construction, for it makes up a great deal of the socialist mind-twisting mechanism. The first observation is that in a normal (i.e. non-propagandistic) context, the action of conveying information is always attached to the informer, never to the informee. The second observation is that normally it is completely up to the informee whether it accepts or not a given piece of information, whereas the text denotes a completely different type of interaction.
This, my dear reader, is exactly the mechanism of propaganda at work, since a time before the invention of the printing press. When you read "tech environments need to be more inclusive" or whatever other subject is deemed fashionable by a Ministry of Panem et Circenses near you, your conscious is fooled into believing you are "being informed", while your subconscious is force-fed with whatever the clique in power wants you to believe. But enough of this technique, Christos Ballas has it amply documented. ↩
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"U.T.C" stands for "Uniunea Tineretului Comunist", i.e. "The Union of Communist Youth".
I read in the news the other day that one of the "could-have-been" presidents of US and A wanted to create a "National Service Reserve" for millennials. Un(?)fortunately things didn't work out too well for her, but either way, now you know where to go if you want to relive the communist dream... while it lasts. ↩
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Whatwhat?! Either the text's author was some kind of a poet or he was fucking kidding the audience. How can an inherently stationary concept such as tradition ever revolve? I am dumbfounded by this linguistic cum-gargle. ↩
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"Distracție" is normally translated as entertainment, but in reality this is what entertainment is: a (sometimes benign) form of distraction.
Theoretical scenarios involving a toxic surge of entertainment have been proposed in works such as Huxley's Brave New World, but can also be easily observed in today's very real Western World. ↩
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I'm getting a bit ahead of myself, but the reality was very different. The majority of people living on what is now Romanian soil have been Orthodox Christians centuries before such a thing as a "Romania" even existed. Even today's rationalist-atheist propaganda makes only a small dent in Romanians' belief, which makes the Romanian Orthodox Church one of the country's most powerful institutions, religious, political or otherwise.
Getting back to more communist times, as I said, the reality was very different. The Orthodox Church still existed, although it had a very precarious relationship with the state. Factually, the state controlled the church mostly through the secret services, with which many priests were forced to collaborate "for their own good". Even so, the vast majority of Romanians still went to the church to at least take part in the three major events in their spiritual lives: getting christened, married and buried. ↩
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This last bit sound familiar? Let's dissect it.
"To tear apart creation from our social realities" is the equivalent of nowadays' various "social justice" "warriors" brouhaha-ing over "misrepresentation" or "underrepresentation" of races, genders et al. in "popular media". So the propaganda machines known as "Hollywood", "the music industry" et al. deliver, with the average result of zero pieces of actual art, meaning e.g. posing actual problems instead of pretending to solve pseudo-problems, or e.g. having the property to be memorable for at least a decade. Face it kids, real music ended in 1972.
"From the general public of the working people" is an attempt to identify the target audience. There's on one hand "the working people", and on the other hand nobody else. This is why it's nigh impossible to find a good laptop nowadays: because "nobody buys laptops anymore"; this is why they don't teach your kids gems such as Latin, logic and argumentation in high school nowadays: because "they don't use them for nuthin' anyway"*. Yes, this is a way to wipe out inconvenient people and artifacts off the face of the Earth, and yes, this is systematic, in case you were wondering.
And this is how we ended up with a mentally retarded civilization. Or, how do they call it, "retrograde".
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* This latter item is discussed in a post of its own on The Tar Pit. I won't bother linking it, go dig through the archives. ↩ -
Also known as "followers", "uniques", "clicks", etc. ↩
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Also known as "reality shows". ↩
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And that they were. For years actors such as Amza Pellea and Toma Caragiu posted on their Youtubes pieces in good taste that were aimed at communists' harmful or otherwise incompetent governance. And so Romanians could live on haz de necaz for a while. ↩
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The original reads along the lines of "institutions of [public] performance, theatre, opera, balet, rostrum", from which we can deduce that the author was culturally retarded, because all the aforementioned places are "for public performance". As in many other sentences above and below this particular line, the author merely pretends to be cultured, because look, he distinguished between all those places he (or she) never actually bothered to visit. ↩
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By now the reader will have been driven out of their mind by this formulation of the impersonal. This particular piece is also somewhat special because it has no grammatical subject.
Word to the reader: Romanian is a great language; it is also pretty difficult, at least as hard as French and Spanish*. Now, the construction above happens to be perfectly legitimate, but it also happens to be used in our context by retarded people, in a retarded manner.
To Romanian-speaking readers: never** use subjectless constructions such as "se va acționa" in a real-life (spoken or written) sentence. It really, sadly and unfortunately for you and for anyone who's communicating with you (which includes any of your potential readers), really means that you're retarded beyond hope.
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* Only, unlike French and Spanish, it has significant Slavic influences, which will make your life noticeably harder if you're coming from the West. Not unlike, for example, how French is a perfect Latin, if only it weren't for all those Celtic and Germanic influences. But we digress from the digression.
** Unless, of course, you're willing to break this rule on purpose, in which case, well. Constructions such as "din bătrâni se povestește [...]" make good exceptions to the rule, and for a good reason: they define an implicit logical subject, which in the sentence we're analyzing is entirely absent. ↩ -
Of course, they have no fucking idea what the word means: vulgarity, that which is vulgar, coming from the Latin vulgus, meaning the people. Yes, I know, words don't mean what they mean, we're progressives and therefore fuck you. ↩
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I wonder if the mention of sovereignty has anything to do with Ceaușescu's 1968 speech in which he famously slammed the communist bloc countries for invading Czechoslovakia. But we're now well over the length of your typical Tarpitian text, so we're going to leave this story for another time. ↩
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"Make Romania great again!" and all that. ↩
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... and this approval concludes Ceaușescu's text -- assuming it was written by him, a fact that I very much doubt. The most frequent word in the text is "party" (about 50 occurrences, 2% of the total word count!), followed by the mostly meaningless "activity" (about 30 occurrences). Other notable words are "political", "educational", "ideological", "people" and so on and so forth. I wouldn't exactly call the text a reference, but I'm sure it doesn't sound much different from any other socialist "manifesto" out there.
As history shows, the plan was approved. And as history goes, Ceaușescu and his clique went forward with trying to implement this as per the original spec, not accounting however for the small detail that Romanians are not North Koreans, and, as told by the great Costache Negruzzi in his romanticization of Alexandru Lăpușneanu, they're "proști, dar mulți", i.e., the people may have been stupid, but there was a whole bunch of them out there ready to separate the king's head from the rest of him.
From what I've been told, the first few years after the 6th of July weren't so bad. Things had gotten progressively worse however as Ceaușescu started his attempt to repay Romania's entire sovereign debt, an endeavour which he brought to GREAT SUCCESS! By '88 (the year when I decided I should fall out of a vagina) "the people" were both starved and fed up at the same time, of the "multilaterally-developed" claptrap among others, which was also quite the achievement.
The whole thing unsurprisingly, as in Lăpușneanu's case and many others before and after it, ended in blood. Ironically, it would seem that political leaders, of course! the elites well-versed in matters cultural, ideological, political, historical and of circle-jerking and cum gargling, don't seem to have figured this simple turn of events out. And so, the time draws ever nearer when the next set of heads will begin to fall. ↩
Can you tell us more about this? I'd like to find out
some additional information.
I've only let the above spamcomment go through in order to make a point: the man spends hours upon hours of labour to translate a (granted, minor) historical piece from the source, along with annotations, comments and whatnot, resulting in a 5600-word monster -- and the best that the bot can respond to this is "Can you tell us more about this?". Dry as fuck, what can I say.
Neways, my point is that this is about as far as "artificial intelligence" is able to take you. Anything else that might make the bot "feel" "intelligent" is pure sophistry. This is, simply put, your dying civilization's crowning achievement, now wash your head with it, as the Romanian saying goes.
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[...] goddamn pervy communists dun did it [...]
[...] Above: a selfie. Below: more or less sad memories from the latter years of Ceaușescu's communism. [...]
[...] by 1985 the USSR under the late Gorbachev was already well on that path. The USSR was, not unlike Romania and its partners in the communist bloc, already in its late stages of decay in 1980, not so unlike [...]
[...] will leave you shaking your head in disbelief when I mention democracy. Had you read the fucking lesson, then maybe you'd understand what I'm talking about; but as things currently stand, we're going to [...]
[...] who can set things in motion, a fact which from this point of view alone places her piece below Ceaușescu's mediocre gargle. The problem is, as clearly stated in my footnote #8 above, that since 1947 the [...]
[...] to mind is that it was truly a pleasure to translate this piece, in contrast for example with the July Theses. The reason is, I hope, obvious: while the latter is written in Romanian woodentongue and thus [...]
[...] most popular among them are the gondola that goes way up into the mountains -- thank you very much Great Shoemaker -- and the aforementioned valley of the Valea Cerbului2 river, heading up to the famous Gura Diham3 [...]
[...] in Bihor. But otherwise in the exact vein of Hondol, Boga is an ex-mining commune developed during the last century, nowadays slowly decaying while nature is regaining lost ground1. And also precisely like that [...]
[...] thing. Stalinist communism, which Moromeții 3 presents, is a wholly different beast from the nationalist communism implemented by Ceaușescu. I'll readily agree with the reader that either of the two communisms was [...]
[...] know what else this reminds me of? It really reminds me of S0E1, that is, that time when they shot the shoemaker. Turns out you don't even need a trial anymore these days, since Facebook -- y'know, that other [...]