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submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by awesome_lowlander@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/longreads@sh.itjust.works

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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[-] Wxnzxn@lemmy.ml 12 points 3 months ago

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.

this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2024
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