With the failure of
Ceausescu's economic policy of far-reaching autarky and the collapse of centralized industrial plants in the 1970s and 1980s terror grew, though it is difficult to qualify precisely the subtle and the violent forms of oppression exercised by the omnipresent Securitate.
All poems are sublimely translated into English; some are from the years of the tyrannical regime of Nicolae
Ceausescu, others are during the cultural proliferation that followed.
On Christmas Day in 1989, President
Ceausescu of Romania and his wife Elena were shot by firing squad after a secret military tribunal found them guilty of crimes against the state.
"Under Nicolae
Ceausescu we feared that the cathedral would be torn down or covered up, which was the policy towards churches at that time.
In addition, Bevan includes short but effective descriptions of other demolition campaigns: attacks on the houses of the Protestant gentry in Ireland;
Ceausescu's plans for Bucharest; and Mao in Beijing and Tibet, to name but a few.
Yesterday, Rowling was also guest of honour at a celebrity gala held at the palace of executed Romanian dictator Nicolae
Ceausescu, which raised more than pounds 100,000 for the foundation.
Ceausescu, who consolidated his power in 1967, courts popularity by eliminating Gypsies.
Associate Editor Matt Welch explains the weird liberal love affair with eminent domain (page 18); in "The Second Romanian Revolution Will Be Televised" (page 38), he reveals how the old TV show Dallas helped bring down the
Ceausescu regime and how gangsta rap has helped usher in a new age of reform.
The volume begins with a chapter on national Stalinism, the political culture that dominated the RCP and eventually produced
Ceausescu. Tismaneanu carefully distinguishes Romania's national Stalinism from national communism as found elsewhere in Europe.
As McNamara crowed delightedly about his "faith in the financial morality of socialist countries,"
Ceausescu razed whole villages, turned hundreds of square miles of prime farmland into open-pit mines, polluted the air with coal and lignite, and turned Romania into one vast prison, applauded by the bank in a 1979 economic study as being a fine advertisement for the "Importance of Centralized Economic Control." This same report hailed as "an essential feature of the overall manpower policy"
Ceausescu's stimulus of "an increase in birth rates." The reality?
As prominent liberal attorney Alan Dershowitz wrote in Canada's National Post last year, "Arafat excitedly bragged about his involvement in [the murders of the diplomats] to Romanian dictator Nicolae
Ceausescu at a dinner attended by Lt.