Historical Amnesia. How America Lost Its Way

What I wish that my family's 42 (and my 15) years of living in an authoritarian regime can teach America today

“ Ignorance can make us foot soldiers for unworthy causes. “ - Tara Westover, “Educated”

I was in college in Romania, studying to get my English major, when this American professor from Texas came to speak with us. One of the students asked him what is the biggest difference between Romania and America, and he said: “Well, you guys are many years behind America in many ways but you are not focusing your efforts into being more advanced than you are. Instead, you think your strength is in speaking about how glorious your past was. You always speak about your history and your past. But in America, let me tell you, the average American who walks down the street and enjoys their juicy burger at McDonald's and shoots their rockets into space doesn’t give a crap about history or how glorious or not that was.” I am sure I was not the only one in the audience who cringed a little and found his statement so cheapening coming from a representative of a nation most of us revered. Now, 20 some years later, I cringe still.

Nowadays, I cringe because I see the sad, the painful, the sometimes irreversible effects of so many years, decades of average Americans not giving a crap about their country’s and the world’s history. Americans find more interest in a cheap reality show displaying daily from the White House, from an accidental bug landing on a VP’s head on national television than spending the same amount of time and energy learning about history and worrying about where their present history is taking them. But that is another topic for another blog.

If you’re born in a small country like Romania, a country that has been the victim of many historical accidents and horrors, you are not only following history. It’s ingrained in your DNA. You breathe it, you eat it for breakfast and for every meal. It’s your duty since birth to preserve it, carry it on and ensure you won’t repeat it. It’s a requirement and an unwritten order to sheer survival.

For the first 15 years of my life, I was brought up in the worst years of Communist Romania, the dying years. For those who think Communism and Socialism are the same thing, they are not. I know, you don’t follow history, but I’ll say just this for your education: the difference between Communism and Socialism is that between China and France. It’s that between Cuba and Canada or Sweden. Not. The. Same. Thing. It was not only a Communist regime, but one of the worst authoritarian regimes in the history of the world. Communism is rarely if ever non-authoritarian. I learned to grow up guarded, with no trust in anyone who was not myself, not even in my parents and grandparents. I grew up in fear, and in lacking. We lacked food, running water (although the plumbing was there), soap , toilet paper, decency, dignity, and above all freedom. Not only freedom to read what we wanted and speak what we wanted, but freedom to think.

During that time I was coming of age and I started asking questions. I never understood how one person with just a handful of people just as evil as himself could control the millions of Romanians in the country. How a country that calls themselves “democratic” (which means “demos+kratos” = the power of the people) can become so swiftly “autocratic” (the power of one). How one person can impose such a rule of fear when the rule was crushing the very humanity and human dignity that I felt we should all have and respect in one another. I never understood, until the days of the Revolution of December 1989, why people cannot just kick this person and his handful of acolytes out and start fresh with a new era, when pretty much everyone in the street knew his regime was wrong and crushing. I had the same questions then about why Hitler, who was allegedly elected in free elections, could not be stopped by his own people before he ruined half of the world and a whole nation in particular. I could not understand how authoritarianism can be instated when most people should see it coming like a freight train.

Today’s America, the past several years, mostly, has shown me just how this can happen. Little by little, every day, every piece of news that comes across the wires shows me (and should show all of us, as a nation) how this happens. To me, it’s written on the wall in plain, simple English. Second-grade level plain English.  

This is what this blog is about. I will tell you things that have become the new normal for this country and are things that I lived only during my Communist years in Romania. I command you, American folks, to really shut the world off for a minute, shut off Facebook, and Twitter, and Instagram and really, really think about these things. Decide whether you want your country to head into the direction that so many other authoritarian regimes lead many other countries in this world. Imagine you are multiplied into millions of people that want the same thing. Would you want yourself to be a victim of such a ruling? Just think. Then act. 

Like 1945 when a weakened Romania after the world war needed to fill a void with some ideal and just like the 1930’s when Germany needed a new ideal to believe in (I know, this is not as juicy as a McDonald's burger, it’s history, but bear with me), we are at crossroads in America today. We are in turmoil and we need to fill a void. But with what we’re filling it, what direction we choose from here on out will not only change what we have today, but will pen the destiny of this country, and of the world, not for years, but for generations to come. Unfortunately, in moments like these, the guy with the loudest rhetoric is not the good guy.  Maybe it’s not too late for America to choose the right way. But what I see seems far too gone. “Maybe” sounds optimistic.

I do need to add this one disclaimer: this is not, by any means, democratic (or "liberal") propaganda. I believe that some democrats have their blame in this, too. What follows is my truth, the one I have lived myself, proven by history. I am no one’s tool or messenger. I am sharing what I have seen and experienced myself and what my parents and grandparents experienced before me. And I will add that I am incredibly grateful that despite it all today, I am not afraid for my life when I write and post these thoughts on an open blog. At least not yet. 

So, here is my list of things that you and I live with today that I only lived once before, during my life in Authoritarian Communist Romania, arguably the darkest time of my life:

• Votes are a total waste and a cheap fake show of fake democracy. They can be sold, thrown into the garbage and completely disregarded. Even when intelligence shows they were stolen, those instated in power are allowed to proceed with the fake results because the one person says so. What is the point? – you might ask. The voting process is always allowed to proceed even in an authoritarian regime to keep the appearance of a democracy. But the inner workings of it all are gutted of fairness.
• There is no person higher than the one in charge in the president’s mansion, whatever you call that. No person nor law above their head.
• All foreign powers are evil and want us harm. Those who destabilize the country are foreign powers and not his own forces and personnel. Divisive propaganda to ensure absolute power is installed: “Trust us, not them” becomes the battle cry.
• Every country in the world is our enemy except those that have an authoritarian regime in power.
• The country leader puts his own family members and close friends in power positions even when everyone in the country understands that they are all grossly under- or non-qualified. Such concepts like “conflict of interest” are derided and perceived as destabilizing.
• The country leader lavishes in gold while the country lives paycheck to paycheck. Food stamps, homelessness are foreign concepts to the man in charge and he wishes to destroy any mere mention of them as a personal shame to his own regime, instead of acknowledging them as a fact and asking how he can help. He displays complete and utter lack of empathy which is poisonous for a “service” job as that of a democratic president.
• He favorizes the wealthy and the few to the detriment of the many and the poor.
• The regime dehumanizes people, whether they are innocent or proven guilty. People are  put in camps, or cages – units of sheer terror. In these camps, they break families up and sort people by sex (men separated from women) instead of trying them and following human-right principles of the law as agreed upon by all countries of the democratic world.
• The country leader demands people and the military to participate in lavish and expensive parades to celebrate himself, complete with tanks and the military to display his power, not the country’s achievements (very different concepts!).
• Intellectuals (yeah, those people we should listen to because they read history) flee the country as a last resort, seeing the helplessness of turning any of it around.
• Mediocrity and corruption is advanced: people who can be bought and not people who can apply the existing law of the land are promoted.
• The existing law of the land must change to fit his needs, and instead of letting the people (those in Congress elected by the people) change it, he changes it with the power of his one signature.
• Political discourse is dead. The only thing that exists, the only reality is the power of him and a very small group of close allies in key positions. The deviousness that only blind greed for power can muster ensures that every institution, little by little, responds to his beck-and-call.
• You’re afraid to speak your mind if that means speaking anti-him/ them. You can make all the fun you want and feel “free” to denigrate his opposers, to denigrate anyone who is “out of the norm” for what they believe the norm is, like people who worship differently, or people with disabilities, or people who are different for one reason or another, or make choices not popular to the regime’s choices. You still feel like you have freedom of speech, when in fact, you don’t. You have freedom of abusing those who dare stand against them or be different. Freedom of abuse is not freedom of speech.
• Police controls your thoughts and not your actions.
• He politicizes (hides behind his party) the Department of Homeland Security, the Supreme Court along with issues that chip away at freedom and the country’s autonomy, like the Russian interference in elections, Covid etc. Those are blows against the country and not a political statement of any party. They should, in a healthy democracy, be dealt with accordingly and not along party lines.
• He militarizes local defense: replaces local police with military forces.
• He promotes war, dissension over healthy discussion and diplomacy, even or especially in his own country. “Divide and conquer” is the motto of his every action. The more we feel fearful and scared and not act, the easier and faster his reach advances.
• He forbids the press from attending meetings, press conferences, and makes threats that he will close TV stations and newspapers who don’t agree with his ideas. Trust me, in the beginning these are empty threats. I lived to know they will be eventually carried out.
• Freedom of press is the first rule of a true democracy. It’s in the Constitution. He does everything to undermine or discredit that. And I know this is an effort of thinking for some: but by press I do not mean Facebook, Twitter, or even Apple News. I mean find the writing of those reporters who risk their lives to tell the truth.
• Doors are closed to the press, to the people, during big decision-making meetings.
• He forbids people from testifying when subpoenaed in matters of the country, or matters that regard his truthfulness and record.
• He pardons convicted criminals for the simple reason that they are his friends.
• He swiftly and diligently turns people against each other. He establishes a culture of every-man-for-themselves-trust-no-one-everyone-wants-to-steal-lie-and-turn-you-in-get-your-guns-and-prepare-to-fight. I am here to tell you from experience that this is not democracy, folks! This is not freedom!  You’ll be left not only without freedom but without humanity. And dignity. Without respect.
• He builds literal walls to separate people. The Germans walled in the Jews in Warsaw and then walled out the free Berlin from the communist one.
• Truth tellers are silenced and ordered to be quiet, on account of not betraying secrets of state, but in truth, these are secrets of personal issues that would only incriminate the president and his clique. Another big, huge lie they love to tell is “this is for the good of the country”. Who can rebut that?! In fact, it’s only for the good of their abusing the power.
• He promotes an active agenda to shut out all other countries to allegedly focus on our own. This gives a false sense of patriotism. People are not islands. And again, history (I know! The big H word!) has proven that we’re always stronger together and no nation can exist in a void. You isolate because you’re hiding something awful. Anyone with a toddler will tell you that silence from a bedroom always means trouble.
• One of the last steps is the idea to introduce ‘patriotic education’ in schools to allegedly teach the history and truth of the country. This is the first step into making his own propaganda a mandatory subject in schools, planting it in the young minds that will later lead his way. Trust me, I learned that propaganda in all my formative years in school and my mother was forced under the penalty of death to teach it. It never taught me the “history of the country”. It only taught me he is the one and only and the almighty.
• They sow the belief that science is bad. Truth is: science makes you think. Thinking is bad in an authoritarian regime. Thinking undermines power.
• The purpose of speeches and news conferences that he leads are not to share news, but to spread propaganda. Everything they do, every move, every visit, every gesture is diabolically, minutely calculated to ensure that people know who the boss is and who has the supreme power. The only viable (for them) politics they perform is that of intimidation and ensuring people see them as the supreme force. Narcissism and not empathy is their main trait of character for such a leader. 
• Nowhere since communism have I felt that my life has no value, no meaning at all. Authoritarianism makes you feel that the simple whim of one person, a simple tantrum can make or break the fate of the entire population of the country. That no decision I make, or anyone else for that matter, will change in any way what happens to my life, to my livelihood and my well-being.
• Demonizing everyone who is not him: the media, the political opponents, the activists who want to create awareness – everyone but himself and the family is perceived as evil and a threat.
• America has a more complicated web of litigiousness that the old-school dictators did not have to worry about. In America, he must cover all traces of all wrong doings by demanding everyone in touch with his person and family to sign non-disclosure agreements. For now. Sudden imprisonment for alleged crimes against himself will follow. The threats of that have been already planted.
• Some people that do talk and show proof of their accounts are never backed up, their testimonies not confirmed and then you start doubting the media who reports the facts, when, really the manipulation from the source is the problem. 
• They create chaos so people cannot tell fiction from fact.
• And I could go on … but I stop here and thanks for making it this far.

·       Americans, from their ivory towers, cannot understand that this is not a Democrat vs Republican affair any longer. As mentioned before: there is no such thing left in America as political discourse. There is no more "let's respectfully disagree." The only thing left to argue about in today's America is this, as I see it: do we want to remain a democracy and continue to work on our problems of which we have many, many wounds and bleeding scars that must be tended to and healed, and finally strive to be the leader of democracy, peace and fairness in the world or do we allow one person, one family, one clique of opportunists to turn us all into their enablers, take us centuries behind in history, and to a place where we will eventually be starved, in extreme poverty and with no independence of thought, with no humanity and dignity to speak of, or worse? This is not political discourse. This is survival. Are Americans too ignorant, too wrapped-up in their everyday smallness of social media and love of reality TV to see the clear, legible writing on the walls and do something about it?! 

One fact I have witnessed over the almost 23 years of being in America is that they took so much out of schools that they turned America into stupid, science-deaf people with no critical thinking.

During communism I didn’t understand how this poisonous group of people led by an evil-minded criminal became powerful and the sole ruler of a country, crushing millions of individuals under their shoe. But the Revolution taught me that only the voice of people, standing together, united, with no arms other than their fists and voice boxes could overturn it.

America has not lived nor are they, as a collective, interested in learning about the tragedy of the Holocaust and of an authoritarian communist regime and might find it impossible to relate. But if that’s not bad enough, they also have a herd amnesia to their own history too. They can’t and won’t remember their own genocide of the Native Americans and the crimes of centuries against African Americans. By not learning, by not knowing, by not paying attention, America is bound for a tragedy. America is already living the early dawn of that tragedy.

I guess somewhere between chasing those rockets and eating those burgers America lost its way and its identity, if it ever truly had one, given that they didn’t resolve their own conflicts, but deepened them. I wished it then, listening to the man from Texas at my university, and I wish it now more than ever: America should finally, at least now, in what seems to be the final hour of a bleeding, wounded democracy, wake up and give a crap about history. The one they can learn from and the one they are building for their future generations.