30 Years Ago, Romania Deprived Thousands of Babies of Human Contact. Here’s what’s become of them.
30 Years Ago, Romania Deprived Thousands of Babies of Human Contact. Here’s what’s become of them.
God, this article was full of lines that just made me want to cry.
This past Christmas Day was the 30th anniversary of the public execution by firing squad of Romania’s last Communist dictator, Nicolae Ceaușescu, who’d ruled for 24 years. In 1990, the outside world discovered his network of “child gulags,” in which an estimated 170,000 abandoned infants, children, and teens were being raised. Believing that a larger population would beef up Romania’s economy, Ceaușescu had curtailed contraception and abortion, imposed tax penalties on people who were childless, and celebrated as “heroine mothers” women who gave birth to 10 or more. Parents who couldn’t possibly handle another baby might call their new arrival “Ceauşescu’s child,” as in “Let him raise it.”
To house a generation of unwanted or unaffordable children, Ceauşescu ordered the construction or conversion of hundreds of structures around the country. Signs displayed the slogan: the state can take better care of your child than you can.
At age 3, abandoned children were sorted. Future workers would get clothes, shoes, food, and some schooling in Case de copii—“children’s homes”—while “deficient” children wouldn’t get much of anything in their Cămine Spitale. The Soviet “science of defectology” viewed disabilities in infants as intrinsic and uncurable. Even children with treatable issues—perhaps they were cross-eyed or anemic, or had a cleft lip—were classified as “unsalvageable.”
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I hope all the communist cosplayers on Lemmy read this. Capitalism is far, far from perfect and caused its share of misery, but that's what you're stanning for.
What happened to these children was horrific, but framing it as a communism vs democracy/capitalism is pointless jingoism. The USA and other Western nations have their fair share of atrocities committed against children.
The thousands of children who were stolen from their families and abused/killed in Residential Schools were mistreated and abused in a society that viewed the practice as "democratic", "enlightened" even.
The idea of deformities making children "unfit" is just a form of eugenics, which was fully endorsed by the US prior to WWII.
To say nothing of Japanese internment camps, indiscriminate bombing of schools and homes in the Middle East, thousands of teens tried and imprisoned as adults in the failed war on drugs, children being stolen from their families and imprisoned on the Southern border, and countless other atrocities committed against children by our great nation. And right now the Western world is financing a military campaign in Gaza which has killed an unfathomable number of children.
Communism may be no better, but it's hard to argue it's worse.
The numbers are quite literally orders of magnitude apart
That's a bold claim, do you have a source?
According to the linked article in the OP, 170k children went through this Romanian system.
According to numbers just from Canada's residential School system, over 150k children were stolen from their families and beaten, abused, and often killed in pseudo-prisons. (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/canada-residential-schools-unmarked-graves-indigenous-children-60-minutes-2022-02-06/)
Numbers for the US are hard to come by, but the US dept of the interior estimates that "tens of thousands" of indian children died in their residential School system. (https://www.bia.gov/sites/default/files/dup/inline-files/bsi_investigative_report_may_2022_508.pdf)
This isn't a competition to see who is worse. Virtually every country on earth has committed unspeakable atrocities, many of them are still doing so today. Acting like this was a product of communism doesn't add anything useful to the discussion and just carries water for the parties who continue to commit similar atrocities under Western Capitalism.
That's authoritarianism calling itself communism. Just because they call it that doesn't make it so, and you're buying into their propaganda if you call it communist.
If you actually apply a Marxist analysis here, the system in the Soviet Bloc after the revolution failed in the 20s was a clearly capitalist one, the thing Engels described as the state becoming the "national capitalist" in "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific". The very fact this was done to bolster "the economy" and sorted people into their ability to provide value to be exploited by the state economy is making that quite clear.
Capitalism does not mean western democracy, neither does having red aesthetics and abstract ideals and convictions make you communist - only the actual material base and relations of production and value are what should be looked at.
Communism was the best thing that ever happened to Russia, and Russia was the worst thing to ever happen to communism.
We advocate against human rights violations, not for them. What, you think capitalism cradles and comforts children? Russia has only ever known corruption by the wealthy and powerful. Stop guzzling what you're fed and realize that progress takes time and failure and effort. Just because Russia couldn't pull it off, you think it's impossible for the West to make it work?
I'm not aware of any modern communist who would uphold Ceaușescu. That's like being pro-Pol Pot.
A lot of the communist cosplayers on here don't care about communism, its just a facade to cover their support for the CCP and Kremlin.
They could at least stan Vietnam and Cuba instead
I rarely hear about either on here, but I see comments from "communists" all the time.
Such odd organizations to willingly support, assuming those are actually people and not troll farms.
Yeah, a good portion are shills running LLMs.
Some are rightfully frustrated with things like corporate overreach and environmental apathy. They're looking for an alternative and when they noticd a bunch of accounts who seem to be their peers supporting an alternative... they see what they want to.