Any time I see US Americans going ‘I’m voting Green!’, ‘I’m not voting at all!’, I want to fucking HOWL.
Let me tell you a story of Romania in the Year of Our Lord 2000. This presidential cycle is seared into my memory, for one particular reason.
We were fucked harder than that dolt who thought he could climb Mount Everest with zero high-altitude and acclimatization training.
Our choices for future president had been whittled down to Corneliu Vadim Tudor, an ultra-nationalist, far-right poet and senator, a personage much in the vein of Trump as far as sheer bigotry is concerned…. and Ion Iliescu, former Communist Party official, former president and a man whom many of us still consider guilty of crimes against humanity for the fact that he called down thousands of miners upon anti-Communist, pro-Western protesters shortly after the 1989 Revolution:
He, along with other figures in the leading FSN, was allegedly responsible for calling the Jiu Valley miners to Bucharest on 28 January and 14 June 1990 to end the protests of the citizens gathered in University Square, Bucharest, protests aimed against the ex-communist leaders of Romania (like himself). (source)
The Romanian miners of Jiu Valley were called by the newly elected power to Bucharest to end the riots that broke up on 13 June 1990. As President Ion Iliescu put it, the miners were called to save the “besieged democratic regime” and restore order and democracy in Bucharest. The government trucked in thousands of miners from the Jiu Valley to Bucharest to confront the demonstrators. The rest of Romania and the world watched the government television broadcasts of miners brutally grappling with students and other protesters.
The official figures say that during the third Mineriad, seven people were killed and more than a thousand were wounded. The opposition newspaper România Liberă claimed that on 29 June 1990 over 40 bodies were buried in a common grave in Străulești, near Bucharest. Conspiracy theories and rumors circulated as to the origins and development of the mineriad, with some believing that both the Romanian Presidency and Secret Service had a hand in it. Later parliamentary inquiries into the potential role of the Secret Service contributed to the widespread public mistrust of the post-Ceaușescu intelligence service.
Government inquiries would show that the miners had indeed been “joined by vigilantes who were later credibly identified as former officers of the Securitate”, and that for two days, the miners had been aided and abetted by the former Securitate members in their violent confrontation with the protesters and other targets. (source)
As for Corneliu Vadim Tudor….
In 1991, [Corneliu Vadim Tudor] founded the Greater Romania Party, the platform of which Time magazine described as “a crude mixture of anti-Semitism, racism and nostalgia for the good old days of communism”. Some statements and articles by Tudor and his colleagues can be described as ultra-nationalist, anti-Hungarian, anti-Roma, and homophobic. (source)
Tudor’s and his party’s change from national communism to ultranationalism took place after 1996. In 1999, Dan Corneliu Hudici, a former reporter at România Mare, claimed there was a “secret blacklist” of dozens of politicians (including then-president Emil Constantinescu), journalists, and businessmen to be arrested if Tudor’s party came to power.
On 18 October 2012, while speaking on the talk show Romania la Raport, Tudor said that “in Romania there was never a Holocaust … I will deny it till I die because I love my people.“ (source)
These two fine gentlemen were our two options for president in 2000. I was too young too vote then, so all I could do was watch on with a sense of muffled, resigned horror. And my people, foolish though we can be, limited through we can be, ridiculously racist through we can be, painfully homophobic through we can be, decided that out of the two, the former autocrat and presumed mass-murderer was still a better option than the goddamn fascist – so Iliescu got the vote with an overwhelming majority.
Even people who loathed him with every fiber of their being grit their teeth and voted for the old bastard, because at this point most of us would have voted for a steaming turd, rather than Vadim! We couldn’t unleash someone like Vadim upon our partners, we still had access to the European Union to fight for – so we were pragmatic about the whole thing and went with Iliescu instead, even those among us who believed he should end up in jail for the rest of his life.
And then I see US Americans going on and on about how they’ll vote for no one other than Bernie, they’ll never vote for Hillary, not in a million years… People, if your complete lack of political pragmatism and your ‘ideological purity at all costs’ bullshit unleashes Trump upon your country and the rest of the world, you will have no one to blame but yourselves.
Nota Bene: since this is Tumblr, I feel I need to specify this. In Eastern Europe, ‘anti-Communist’ as a political position is so widespread that it tells you almost nothing about the rest of the person’s politics. They could well be social-democrats like me. They could be centrists. They could be right-wing. So i don’t want to hear any ‘oh they were probably just a bunch of fascists, they deserved it’ in regards to the protesters injured and killed during the Mineriads. I’ve already had people on here laugh at / dismiss my father’s torture at the hands of NKVD and my great-grandfather’s murder in the Aiud gulag, so I put nothing past some. Understand that we came with deep scars out of what were totalitarian regimes, we’re never going to look at them as Americans do.
