Re-education and manipulation, techniques of totalitarian regimes, were felt in Romania even 35 years after the Revolution. Millions of Romanians let themselves be subjugated by an evil discourse promoted by someone who came on a white horse to bring peace to the world and God on Earth.
Historian Marius Oprea PHOTO Mediafax
Historian Marius Oprea explained in an interview for “Weekend Adevărul” that, unlike communism, when you couldn’t express your opinions freely, nowadays, if you don’t have discernment and a culture of facts, you let the influencers choose for you
“Weekend Truth“: Totalitarian regimes felt the need to re-educate those who had fought against those in power. Was it a form of annihilation of them?
Marius Oprea: First, for fear that their own regime could be overthrown by the former political and intellectual elites. Then, as the regime consolidates, “re-education” becomes synonymous with control and submission. In Romania, re-education has acquired a different meaning because of the Pitesti Phenomenon. The terror becomes a velvet one, but, in essence, the regime does not lose its oppressive character. I remember a speech that Ion Iliescu gave at the beginning of the 70s, as a minister, in front of the senior officers of the Securitate. He told them that there was no need to arrest the young rebels, but to hand them over to him, to send them to the youth construction sites, for re-education through work. But, generally, totalitarian regimes resort to re-education to such an extent that it becomes a social component. Atheist propaganda, for example, as a component of re-education, was a daily permanence in communist Romania.
When the fault of the parent falls on the child
By far, the most monstrous form of re-education was that of the Pitesti Phenomenon, but every regime, in one form or another, inserted this monstrous lesson. For example, under communism, political prisoners received punishment after punishment, namely compulsory residence, considering that they were not sufficiently re-educated in prisons, and were also sent to the villages of Bărăgan. Is this also a form of re-education – more subtle, more dangerous?
When the criminal components of a punishment applied by the regime ran out, the regime invented others on the spot. And everything worked by category, as it still works today, for example, when the Romanian state does not take into account that the descendant of a legionnaire political prisoner suffered as much, if not more, than his son or daughter to a former liberal or peasant sentenced to prison by the Security and does not grant him, through a profoundly unconstitutional article of law, the established pension, even extending the guilt of the parents, as much as it may have been, on to the children. But let’s go back to “administrative punishments”, as the communists euphemistically called the sending to camps and/or compulsory residences or deportation of inmates considered unrehabilitated at the end of the sentence.
From the prison, on the basis of an arbitrary decision, belonging exclusively to the Security, prisoners who had been sentenced either to long terms of punishment, or belonging to political categories such as the one mentioned above, were not set free, but sent with such decisions to the camp, or in another form of isolation and control. The tragedy did not end until the Security established, through informants placed around the camp detainee or the deportee, that he had become docile, that he no longer had “hostile comments”.
Hostility towards the regime was the main reason for the re-education action, and it did not disappear from your life until you understood that your only chance was to adopt a duplicitous life. Just as the requirements of communist propaganda required you to cheer and shout in chorus with the others the imposed slogans in the market. In the kitchen, at home, with your head under the pillow, you could still allow yourself, if you had the courage, to swear. What you think, keep to yourself. This was the ultimate goal of re-education. Publicly expressed thought belongs only to the regime.
“Romanian communism was never sovereign”
Let’s stop Stalinism and re-education measures in prisons. What did this oppressive system mean to the Russians? How was the regime implemented in Romania?
We only copied and pasted the rigors of the Eastern regime, because the regime was, from one end to the other, a Soviet-communist occupation regime, even if it had nationalist nuances in places and towards the end, especially from a xenophobic aspect. Romanian communism was never sovereign. The question of leaving the Warsaw Pact or CAER was never raised. How is it now, when you can’t be in NATO and the EU only when it suits you. Like any occupation regime, the Soviet-Communist one was one that made torture a state policy, applicable to all those who could, through their ancestry, oppose this territorial, ideological, political, ethical, moral occupation . An occupation that grinded, day by day, the destiny of millions and millions of Romanians, who would not have believed that such a freedom, like the one we enjoy today, could still be possible. Re-education was reserved for the class enemy, and potential enemies were all those who might not think as they were asked to do, or who did not shout the required slogans as loudly as the others.
Did the communist regime brought from the East acquire other values for us, did it fade or suppress freedoms even more?
The communist regime in Romania became even more oppressive than the one in the former USSR in certain points, because with us it was always like in North Korea, if we take into account about five or seven years of relaxation in its history, when, for various reasons, whether it was requested from Moscow itself, the terror was no longer so intense. But Securitate and its purpose, the edge of the sword in the class struggle, have always remained the same.
The legionnaires received the harshest lesson of re-education, through torture, in prison, but during their regime they too had their own re-education and re-education camps. What can you tell us about this period?
That the extremes manifest themselves in identical forms. Patriotism cannot be imposed. You either have it or you don’t. You are attached to family and lineage, or you are not. It’s like faith and free will. It is the lack of discernment that generally dictates such an attitude, and this can hardly be educated or re-educated, because it depends on minimal training and culture. You are able to judge yourself or social media judges or a white horse for you, because that’s all it is.
Re-education through propaganda continued under communism. From hawks of the motherland to workers in factories and plants, from intellectuals to peasants, they were all educated to be people who would build socialism, communism. Currently, re-education is done through social media. A candidate for the highest office in the state has promoted a new re-education tool through social media, and for a certain type of population this speech is catching on.
Lately, I have witnessed the reactivation of many reflexes that I thought had died with communism – from the herd effect of blind obedience to a man on whom you hang your hopes, to the finding of historical service criminals, like the legionnaires . However, things are much more nuanced, and at the level of society as a whole, I think it’s more of a general political failure, which also includes the bankruptcy of education.
Generally, there is also an element of juggling with people’s hopes and feelings. They are not the object of re-education, but of manipulation – a complement to it. Manipulation is secondary to re-education, it complements and supplements it, where it cannot be applied. It has the same end goal—and often, the same result: submission, the annihilation of the will. Stop thinking your head—in the good, happy case you ever had one.
