A Wonderful Socialist Life - Part I - Introduction

A series of articles dedicated to all leftists who believe the grass is greener and cows are fatter inside the socialist pastures.

First, let me introduce myself: my name is Andy Ionescu, I am a naturalized American citizen, and I was born and raised in Eastern Europe behind the Iron Curtain, in a country called The Socialist Republic Of Romania.

You may have heard of my former country due to three people: an often misunderstood and fictionalized historical character called Vlad Dracula AKA “The Impaler”; then the world’s most awarded female gymnast named Nadia Comaneci who the first athlete who scored a perfect 10 in her sport; and finally, a communist dictator who held on to his power until he was ousted by an angry, cold and starving population, caught, put together with his wife against a wall and shot on Christmas Day 1989.

The following year after I was born (1963), the communist dictator I’m talking about and you probably already heard of, came to power. His name was Nicolae Ceausescu, but in secret and only among trusted friends we used to make fun of him by calling him names like “Tea Cup”, “The Cobbler” or “The Stutterer”.

I lived…scratch that…I survived in one of the Eastern European countries which had one of the most brutal, repressive, Kafkian, deprived of humanity and absurdly demented political regimes of all Soviet Union’s satellite states.

Perhaps you met other people, immigrants to America who grew up in other socialist Eastern European countries like Eastern Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland or Hungary, and they told you bits and pieces of their lives full of deprivations and lack of freedom they lived in their countries. But I am here to tell you one thing about my former country: when compared to other East European countries, what we Romanians had to endure under our communist regime and its dictator Ceausescu, was far, far worse than our Czech, Polish, Hungarian and East German comrades had to go through.

And how would I know that, you may ask?

I was born and raised in Constanta, which at the time was Romania’s second largest city and largest commercial and military harbor, on the shores of the Black Sea. Just to the North of my hometown, there was the tourist resort of Mamaia. My mother’s flat was just a 15 minute walking distance from Mamaia and when I grew up as a teenager then as a young bachelor, the tourist resort was were I was spending almost every day of my summer vacations, whether on the beach in the morning, or the resort promenade chasing after tourist girls and (mostly unsuccessfully) trying to sneak inside disco clubs catering exclusively to Westerners.

Due to this proximity to foreign tourists I had the opportunity to meet tourists from other East European countries and I realized a couple of things about them and implicitly about their countries. First, they were better dressed and looked somewhat more relaxed and happier than us Romanians. For us, a pair of blue jeans and a pair of sneakers was contraband worth their weight in gold. Not so for a Pole or a East German. For us, a simple electric coffee grinder, or a bag of coffee, or a wrist watch, or a kitchen blender, or a counterfeit Adidas t-shirt, or chewing gum, or a box of markers, or perfumed laundry detergent, or a pressure cooker, or a vacuum cleaner, or a good quality transistor radio capable of receiving the faint signals broadcast by The Voice Of America and Radio Free Europe, were luxury articles - we couldn’t find any for sale in our stores. But we could buy them from our Polish, East German, Czech, or even Russian comrades who were buying them freely in their countries, smuggling them into Romania, and making an nice profit by selling them to us - it was probably enough to pay for their vacation expenses in Mamaia.

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So yeah, that’s how I know their socialism was somewhat better than ours - first because they could afford to travel and vacation for two weeks to a foreign sister socialist country (something that 99.9% of us working class Romanians couldn’t even contemplate to do), and because they were selling us contraband stuff we couldn’t get in Romania other than on the black market, but the East Germans, Poles, Czechs or Hungarians could buy freely in the stores of their countries.

So let’s start by making something clear, since I can already hear some of my leftist readers who got lost on the Internet and stumbled upon this article, already whining "But...but...you are talking about life in a communist country, we don't want communism, socialism is different!"

Yes it is, you cluelles snowflakes. Communism is the final goal in the Marxist philosophy. In communism all people are equal, one works to the best of his ability and it is provided with subsistence goods in accordance to what the State says the person needs. There is no need for money, there are no salaries, no banks, no financial system, no home ownership. Not even the furniture in your home or the clothes you are wearing and the food you eat don’t belong to you, they are allocated to you by the State bureaucrats. That is communism.

No socialist country in the world has ever achieved the predicted final stage of Marxian socio-economic evolution, that of communism. Not USSR, not Cuba, not Romania, Poland, Bulgaria, China or North Korea. All these countries were (and some still are) SOCIALIST.

People in those socialist countries still use money; they are all State employees but they get salaries; private property still exists to an extent or another (for example in Socialist Romania you started as a State apartment renter but in certain cases you could buy your the apartment you rented; or you could buy a home in a village where you could have your own backyard in which you could grow food for your family.

IN CONCLUSION: there were never real communist countries anywhere in the world at any moment in history. All the countries people in the West mistakenly refer to as “communist”, they were all socialist. They all had socialist economies and they were ruled by communist Parties. The reason the ruling Parties called themselves communist not socialist, was simple: Marxist theory says socialism is just the intermediate phase between capitalism and communism. Because communism is the final goal, it was natural the political Parties blazing the society way toward communism called themselves communist, not socialist.

Now, about the other claim, that socialism isn't the same with democratic socialism, the kind of kinder, gentler strain of Bernie socialism, the young Democrats are so enamored of: the only difference between the two is how much political power each one has at a given moment.

All socialist despots and their communist dictatorships start as moderate Western socialists or how they call themselves today, Democratic-Socialists. I’ll give you just two examples out of many: Cuba and Venezuela.

When Fidel Castro fought his guerrilla war against Batista’s regime, and when Hugo Chavez was running his first successful presidential campaign, they both carefully avoided labeling themselves as communists who wanted to embrace Soviet / East European socialism. These leaders called themselves Socialist-Democrats who wanted economic and social freedom and equality for all their people. That (according to their propaganda) was to be achieved by embracing socialism, without which true participatory democracy was impossible, because they said, under a rigged capitalist system based on competing social classes of privileged and poor, true democracy was impossible. The problem is (and always was) when Democratic-Socialists achieve enough political and military power they invariably become full blown communists and they are immediate dropping the “democratic” part from the democratic-socialist bait and switch scam they are pulling.

Democrat-Socialists under Hugo Chavez first won free democratic elections held in free capitalist Venezuela. At first they pledged to respect political plurality, free press and protect private property, just like our friend Bernie Sanders and his Democratic-Socialist comrades are promising. Everything was tolerable in Venezuela for a couple of years.

Then little by little Chavez started nationalizing industry after industry, started persecutions against free speech, started to censor, then finally shut down opposition TV and newspapers rigged elections, confiscated guns from the hands of civilians, used military and police force against the opposition and the disarmed people, declared himself President for life and generally speaking ruined one of the most prosperous Latin American countries transforming it in a shit hole under the thunderous applause of brain dead American leftist celebrities like Sean Penn and Danny Glover, as well as other scores of college profs and an entire generation of young imbeciles brainwashed in colleges across the US. Maduro, the present socialist dictator of Venezuela is just continuing the destruction of his country and he'll probably pay for it with his life, like Ceausescu did in 1989.

In conclusion: Socialist-Democrats like Bernie and his Democratic Party colleagues are just plain old ordinary communists who didn't confiscated all our guns and didn't managed to grab all the political power yet. But that day is drawing very, very close in America, after they managed to “win” the November 2020 election.

Next week in the series: Part II - Daily Life In The Socialist Workers’ Paradise.

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