Ceausescu Quotes

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el único que sufrió una muerte violenta fue Nicolai Ceausescu. No debería pasarse por alto que su muerte fue en gran medida precipitada por la juventud de Rumanía, gran parte de la cual, de no ser por la prohibición del aborto, nunca habría llegado a nacer.
Steven D. Levitt (Freakonomics)
Eu nu sunt ceea ce ascund, eu sunt ceea ce devin prin voință
Horia-Roman Patapievici (Flying Against the Arrow: An Intellectual in Ceausescu's Romania (Central European Library of Ideas))
there's a long history of resistance movements igniting in the soccer stadium. In the Red Star Revolution, Draza, Krle, and the other Belgrade soccer hooligans helped topple Slobodan Milosevic. Celebrations for Romania's 1990 WOrld Cup qualification carried over into the Bucharest squares, culminating in a firing squad that trained its rifles on the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife. The movement that toppled the Paraguayan dictator Alfredo Stroessner had the same sportive ground zero.
Franklin Foer (How Soccer Explains the World)
The foetus is the property of the entire society.Anyone having children is a deserter who abandons the laws of national continuity.
Nicolae Ceausescu
Ceausescu attempted to regain control. He couldn't. Random noise echoed from the sound system. He was rattled and confused. And the crowd- we felt it.
Ruta Sepetys (I Must Betray You)
В последнее время в кругах довольно богатых людей ходят разговоры о том, что он [Путин] закончит как Чаушеску.
Anna Politkovskaya
Time is the most precious gift you can give to someone.
Nicolae Ceausescu
Interactions with the world program our physiological and psychological development. Emotional contact is as important as physical contact. The two are quite analogous, as we recognize when we speak of the emotional experience of feeling touched. Our sensory organs and brains provide the interface through which relationships shape our evolution from infancy to adulthood. Social-emotional interactions decisively influence the development of the human brain. From the moment of birth, they regulate the tone, activity and development of the psychoneuroimmunoendocrine (PNI) super-system. Our characteristic modes of handling psychic and physical stress are set in our earliest years. Neuroscientists at Harvard University studied the cortisol levels of orphans who were raised in the dreadfully neglected child-care institutions established in Romania during the Ceausescu regime. In these facilities the caregiver/child ratio was one to twenty. Except for the rudiments of care, the children were seldom physically picked up or touched. They displayed the self-hugging motions and depressed demeanour typical of abandoned young, human or primate. On saliva tests, their cortisol levels were abnormal, indicating that their hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axes were already impaired. As we have seen, disruptions of the HPA axis have been noted in autoimmune disease, cancer and other conditions. It is intuitively easy to understand why abuse, trauma or extreme neglect in childhood would have negative consequences. But why do many people develop stress-related illness without having been abused or traumatized? These persons suffer not because something negative was inflicted on them but because something positive was withheld.
Gabor Maté (When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress)
The communists didn’t release their grip until the late 1980s. Effective organisation kept them in power for eight long decades, and they eventually fell due to defective organisation. On 21 December 1989 Nicolae Ceaus¸escu, the communist dictator of Romania, organised a mass demonstration of support in the centre of Bucharest. Over the previous months the Soviet Union had withdrawn its support from the eastern European communist regimes, the Berlin Wall had fallen, and revolutions had swept Poland, East Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia. Ceaus¸escu, who had ruled Romania since 1965, believed he could withstand the tsunami, even though riots against his rule had erupted in the Romanian city of Timis¸oara on 17 December. As one of his counter-measures, Ceaus¸escu arranged a massive rally in Bucharest to prove to Romanians and the rest of the world that the majority of the populace still loved him – or at least feared him. The creaking party apparatus mobilised 80,000 people to fill the city’s central square, and citizens throughout Romania were instructed to stop all their activities and tune in on their radios and televisions. To the cheering of the seemingly enthusiastic crowd, Ceauşescu mounted the balcony overlooking the square, as he had done scores of times in previous decades. Flanked by his wife, Elena, leading party officials and a bevy of bodyguards, Ceaus¸escu began delivering one of his trademark dreary speeches. For eight minutes he praised the glories of Romanian socialism, looking very pleased with himself as the crowd clapped mechanically. And then something went wrong. You can see it for yourself on YouTube. Just search for ‘Ceauşescu’s last speech’, and watch history in action.20 The YouTube clip shows Ceaus¸escu starting another long sentence, saying, ‘I want to thank the initiators and organisers of this great event in Bucharest, considering it as a—’, and then he falls silent, his eyes open wide, and he freezes in disbelief. He never finished the sentence. You can see in that split second how an entire world collapses. Somebody in the audience booed. People
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow)
decades. Why are revolutions so rare? Why do the masses sometimes clap and cheer for centuries on end, doing everything the man on the balcony commands them, even though they could in theory charge forward at any moment and tear him to pieces? Ceaus¸escu and his cronies dominated 20 million Romanians for four decades because they ensured three vital conditions. First, they placed loyal communist apparatchiks in control of all networks of cooperation, such as the army, trade unions and even sports associations. Second, they prevented the creation of any rival organisations – whether political, economic or social – which might serve as a basis for anti-communist cooperation. Third, they relied on the support of sister communist parties in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe. Despite occasional tensions, these parties helped each other in times of need, or at least guaranteed that no outsider poked his nose into the socialist paradise. Under such conditions, despite all the hardship and suffering inflicted on them by the ruling elite, the 20 million Romanians were unable to organise any effective opposition.
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: ‘An intoxicating brew of science, philosophy and futurism’ Mail on Sunday)
- Auzi domnule, cum domn'e?, as putea eu sa accept vreodata sau sa fiu obligat de acest Burtica sau chiar conditionat, auzi! conditionat! - La ce va referiti, Dom' Preda? - Cum ba, tu esti pe lumea cealalta de nu intelegi? Imi vorbea de parca eu as fi fost acolo sa stiu ce a vorbit el cu Burtica. Pana la urma s-a hotarat sa ma lamureasca si pe mine. - Uite ce mi-a zis, nea Tecu, cica, tov. Preda, dumneavoastra cunoasteti parerile noastre cu privire la puterea si capacitatea de gandire a tov Nicolae Ceausescu. Stiti cu totii ca dansul e un geniu, ca are gandire creatoare in politica tarii noastre, ca el e ctitorul neegalat de nimeni in privinta indicatiilor novatoare, de construire a socialismului, cum de altfel si a culturii, precum si a cunoasterii istoriei patriei noastre. De aceea m-am gandit ca impreuna sa ajungem la un acord si sa aratam ca in cartea pe care ati scris-o pana acum din romanul Delirul, dumneavoastra ati avut ca model persoana dansului. Descrierea actiunilor din timpul celui de-al doilea razboi mondial il infatiseaza ca un personaj principal, curajos, capabil, credincios comunismului si luptator pentru infrangerea fascismului si a Germaniei hitleriste. - Si dumneavoastra ce ati raspuns? - I-am zis ca nu pricep la ce se refera. Cum, tov Preda, n-ai inteles la cine ma refer eu? Te rog sa il prezinti ca personaj principal al romanului Delirul in volumul al doilea. Dupa cum mi-a povestit el in continuare, am inteles ca Preda ramasese inmarmurit pe scaun si nu-i venea sa creada ca tot ce auzise din gura lui Burtica era aievea. Si ca Burtica s-a ridicat in picioare si s-a proptit cu ambele maini in marginea biroului si i-a repetat: "Cred ca ne-am inteles sau, mai bine zis, ai inteles, domnu' Preda in privinta recomandarii mele prin aceea de a indeplini vointa sefului statului nostru de a il prezenta cu toate meritele in locul lui Niculae, personajul dumneavoastra din volumul I, inlocuindu-l discret cu Niculae Ceausescu, atribuindu-i lui toate meritele. Dupa ce s-a mai linistit a inceput sa-mi spuna mie cu vocea unui copil batut pe nedrept de parinti: - Vezi, ma, Dumitrescule, cum te obliga cizmarul asta nenorocit, care nu stie nici sa scrie, nici sa citeasca, si nici macar sa vorbeasca, te obliga sa il incluzi pe el in toate operele literaturii romane? El habar n-are de nimic, dar de, EL detine puterea si ce vrea el si cum vrea el noi trebuie sa executam. Inclusiv eu sa-l introduc in volumul doi al Delirului. Cum sa-l introduc in cartea mea cand nu stiu nimic despre el? Ba stiu ceva. Ca a facut politica asa de buna ca a dus tara de rapa. I-am zis lui Burtica sa ma scuze, dar nu pot scrie despre un om despre a carui viata si cultura nu stiu nimic. - Si tov. Burtica n-a zis nimic? - Cum sa nu zica? A zis. Si inca ce-a zis. Bine, tov. Preda, dar te avertizez, numai sa incepi sa scrii ceva din volumul al doilea al romanului Delirul si vorbim altfel. Trebuia sa il introduci si in volumul I, dar hai, treaca-mearga. Acum trebuie sa il bagi in vol. II. - Dom Burtica, dar v-am spus ca nu pot, nu pot. Ei, daca nu poti, cat voi trai eu si dumneata, acest volum II din Delirul sa stii de la mine ca nu va aparea.
Savu Dumitrescu (Marin Preda Între Viață și Moarte)
In 1967, Romanian President Nicolae Ceausescu, as a means to increase the population, banned all contraception and abortion.
Gabrielle Palmer (The Politics of Breastfeeding: When Breasts are Bad for Business)
Satisfying consumers was not a priority. To get an apartment in the 1980s, applicants in Bulgaria had to wait up to 20 years, and those in Poland, up to 30 years; a quarter of the people filling the Soviet waiting lists were already pensioners. Car buyers in East Germany had to place their orders 15 years in advance. In Romania, the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu put all citizens on a low-calorie diet in the early 1980s to save money for repaying the country’s foreign debt. He limited lighting to one 40-watt bulb per room, heating in public buildings to 57 degrees Fahrenheit, and television programming to two tedious hours a day.
Anonymous
To be conscious of unfreedom one must have a concept of what freedom and respect for life are. A person who has never experienced this as a child, who has only known hypocrisy, without ever having come across a single helping witness, does not demonstrate for freedom. Such a person demands order and uses violence to achieve it, just as he or she learned as a child: order and cleanliness at any price is the motto, even if it is at the price of life. The victims of such an upbringing ache to do to others what was once done to them. If they don't have children, or their children refuse to make themselves available for their revenge, they line up to support new forms of fascism. Ultimately, fascism always has the same goal: the annihilation of truth and freedom. People who have been mistreated as children, but totally deny their suffering, use the mottoes and labels of the day. They thereby meet the approval of others like them because they are also helping to conceal their truth. They are consumed by the perverse pleasure in the destruction of life that they observed in their parents when young. They long to at last be on the other side of the fence, to hold power themselves, passing it off, as Stalin, Hitler, or Ceausescu have done, as "redemption" for others. This old childhood longing determines their political "opinions" and speeches, which are therefore impervious to counter-arguments. As long as they continue to ignore or distort the roots of the problem, which lie in the very real threats experienced in their childhood, reason must remain impotent against this kind of persecution complex. The unconscious compulsion to revenge repressed injuries is more powerful than all reason. That is the lesson that all tyrants teach us. One should not expect judiciousness from a mad person motivated by compulsive panic. One should, however, protect oneself from such a person.
Alice Miller (Breaking Down the Wall of Silence: The Liberating Experience of Facing Painful Truth)
The demolition of the wall of silence, against which the theme of child abuse constantly runs up, marks only the beginning of a long overdue development. It creates the conditions that make it possible to free the truth from the prison of misleading opinions and well-established lies. But for the full unfolding of the truth and its deployment in the service of life, more is required than a merely statistical grasp of the facts. Some people may, for instance, say, "Yes, I was often spanked as a child," while remaining, emotionally, miles from the truth—because they cannot feel. They lack the consciousness, the emotional knowledge, of what it means, as small, defenseless children, to be beaten and shoved around by incensed adults. They say the word "spanked" but thereby identify with the mindless, destructive behavior of the adult who violates, abuses, and destroys the child without the slightest knowledge of or concern for what he is doing and what it may result in. Even Adolf Hitler never denied that he had been beaten. What he denied was that these beatings were painful. And by totally falsifying his feelings, he would become a mass murderer. That would never have occurred had he been capable of feeling, and weeping about, his situation and had he not repressed his justifiable hatred of those responsible for his distress but consciously experienced and comprehended it. Instead he perverted this hatred into ideology. The same holds for Stalin, Ceausescu, and all the other beaten and humiliated children who later turn into tyrants and criminals.
Alice Miller (Breaking Down the Wall of Silence: The Liberating Experience of Facing Painful Truth)
Zo breek je verzet, kreeg ik te horen, door het mooiste wat mensen bindt te gijzelen, hun liefde en toewijding, zorg en trouw te vermorzelen alsof het iets verderfelijks was. Door familiebanden en vriendschappen te laten veranderen in mijnenvelden. Dit alles opdat iedereen die naar vrijheid verlangt en daar iets me wil zichzelf niet anders kan zien dan een tikkende tijdbom, een permanente dreiging voor zijn naasten. Hoe menselijker je was, hoe dichter je bij schoonheid, waarheid en al hun nuances wilde komen, bij rechtvaardigheid en menselijke waardigheid, hoe groter het ontploffingsgevaar. Als je weet dat je met één woord het leven van je kind kunt ruïneren, bedenk je je wel honderd keer voordat je in een koppige verzetsbui iets zegt. Dan houdt je je mond.
Nausicaa Marbe (Wachten op het Westen)
For a baby to thrive she or he has to be more than fed and kept clean. She or he needs to be held and to be engaged with as a living baby. This last thought might sound a bit mad. Of course a baby is alive. But if a baby receives only perfunctory care, if her or his needs for food and water and changing are met in a production-line manner, as happened for the many abandoned babies in the Romanian orphanes after Ceausescu was toppled, she or he may not thrive; she may die.
Susie Orbach (Bodies)
Demonstrating for peace to promote war was nothing new. Totalitarianism always requires a tangible enemy. To the ancient Greeks, a holocaust was simply a burnt sacrifice. Khrushchev wanted to go down in history as the Soviet leader who exported communism to the American continent. In 1959 he was able to install the Castro brothers in Havana and soon my foreign intelligence service became involved in helping Cuba's new communist rulers to export revolution throughout South America. At that point it did not work. In the 1950s and 1960s most Latin Americans were poor, religious peasants who had accepted the status quo. A black version of liberation theology began growing in a few radical-leftist black churches in the US where Marxist thought is predicated on a system pf oppressor class ( white ) versus victim class ( black ) and it sees just one solution: the destruction of the enemy. In the 1950s UNESCO was perceived by many as a platform for communists to attack the West and the KGB used it to place agents around the world. Che Guevara's diaries, with an introduction by Fidel Castro, were produced by the Kremlin's dezinformatsiya machine. Changing minds is what Soviet communism was all about. Khrushchev's political necrophagy ( = blaming and condemning one's predecessor in office. It is a dangerous game. It hurts the country's national pride and it usually turns against its own user ) evolved from the Soviet tradition of sanctifying the supreme ruler. Although the communists publicly proclaimed the decisive role of the people in history, the Kremlin and its KGB believed that only the leader counted. Change the public image of the leader and you change history, I heard over and over from Khrushchev's lips. Khrushchev was certainly the most controversial Soviet to reign in the Kremlin. He unmasked Stalin's crimes, but he made political assassination a main instrument of his own foreign policy; he authored a policy of peaceful coexistence with the West but he pushed the world to the brink of nuclear war; he repaired Moscow's relationships with Yugoslavia's Tito, but he destroyed the unity of the communist world. His close association with Stalin's killings made him aware of what political crime could accomplish and gave him a taste for the simple criminal solution. His total ignorance about the civilized world, together with his irrational hatred of the "bourgeoisie" and his propensity to offend people, made him believe that disinformation and threats were the most efficient and dignified way for a Soviet leader to deal with "bourgeois" governments. As that very clever master of deception Yuri Andropov once told me, if a good piece of disinformation is repeated over and over, after a while it will take on a life of its own and will, all by itself, generate a horde or unwitting but passionate advocates. When I was working for Ceausescu, I always tried to find a way to help him reach a decision on his own, rather than telling him directly what I thought he should do about something. That way both of us were happy. From our KGB advisors, I had learned that the best way to ut over a deception was to let the target see something for himself, with his own eyes. By 1999, President Yeltsin's ill-conceived privatization had enabled a small clique of predatory insiders to plunder Russia's most valuable assets. The corruption generated by this widespread looting penetrated every corner of the country and it eventually created a Mafia-style economic system that threatened the stability of Russia itself. During the old Cold War, the KGB was a state within a state. In Putin's time, the KGB now rechristened FSB, is the state. The Soviet Union had one KGB officer for every 428 citizens. In 2004, Putin's Russia had one FSB officer for every 297 citizens.
Ion Mihai Pacepa (Disinformation)
Today it is considered bad manners to point to any Soviet source of American anti-Americanism. But throughout their history, Americans had never before been anti-American. They voluntarily came to the US. They were always a proud and independent people who loved their country. Ares is the Greek god of war. He was usually accompanied in battle by his sister Eris ( goddess of discord ) and by his 2 sons, Deimos ( fear ) and Phobos ( terror ). Khrushchev and Ceausescu. Both men rose to lead their countries without ever having earned a single penny in any productive job. Neither man had the slightest idea about what made an economy work and each passionately believed that stealing from the rich was the magic wand that would cure all his country's economic ills. Both were leading formerly free countries, transformed into Marxist dictatorships through massive wealth redistribution, which eventually made the government the mother and father of everything. Disinformation has become the bubonic plague of our contemporary life. Marx used disinformation to depict money as an odious instrument of capitalist exploitation. Lenin's disinformation brought Marx's utopian communism to life. Hitler resorted to disinformation to portray the Jews as an inferior and loathsome race so as to rationalize his Holocaust. Disinformation was the tool used by Stalin to dispossess a third of the world and to transform it into a string of gulags. Khrushchev's disinformation widened the gap between Christianity and Judaism. Andropov's disinformation turned the Islamic world against the US and ignited the international terrorism that threatens us today. Disinformation has also generated worldwide disrespect and even contempt for the US and its leaders.
Ion Mihai Pacepa (Disinformation)
[…] j'assistais […] à ce que les médias ont appelé la « Révolution » roumaine. Une révolution dont on ne sait toujours pas trente ans après, si elle a été le fruit d'un véritable mouvement populaire, ou un coup d'État fomenté par l'URSS, les Occidentaux ou les deux. Mais elle permit au pays de retrouver sa liberté, d'embrasser la démocratie et le libéralisme économique. (p. 10)
Romain Dutter (Goodbye Ceaucescu)
La politique d'austérité que [Ceaușescu] a instaurée a conduit à une pénurie alimentaire que les Occidentaux ont utilisée pour le diaboliser. Se sentant lâché par ses anciens « amis » il est devenu de plus en plus parano, a renforcé son emprise sur la population. Et le ras-le-bol général a abouti à la Révolution de 1989. (p. 28)
Romain Dutter (Goodbye Ceaucescu)
Să o spunem fără înconjur: deriva dinastică rămâne pentru România o pată ruşinoasă. Nu poate fi invocat un simplu accident al istoriei, e o dereglare izvorâtă din factori binecunoscuţi: insuficienta maturizare politică, cultura acceptării mai curând decât a rezistenţei, reflexulpaternalist... Românii l-au avut pe Ceauşescu fiindcă l-au meritat (nu toţi, dar mulți). Orice societate are ceea ce merită.
Lucian Boia (De ce este România altfel?)
Et dans le taxi qui me conduisait à la gare, la radio autrichienne donna les premières nouvelles d’un soulèvement contre la dictature népotiste de Nicolae Ceausescu, en Roumanie. Un séisme politique ébranlait la topographie figée de l’Europe d’après la Seconde Guerre mondiale.
Tony Judt (Après-Guerre: Une histoire de l'Europe depuis 1945 (Grand Pluriel) (French Edition))