{"id":71707,"date":"2022-05-30T01:00:57","date_gmt":"2022-05-30T05:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=71707"},"modified":"2022-05-29T09:41:02","modified_gmt":"2022-05-29T13:41:02","slug":"qotd-the-end-of-nicolae-ceausescu","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2022\/05\/30\/qotd-the-end-of-nicolae-ceausescu\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The end of Nicolae Ceau\u0219escu"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>On the morning of the 21st of December, 1989, Romanian General Secretary Nicolae Ceau\u0219escu was in a foul mood. The Berlin Wall had fallen, and Mikhail Gorbachev and George H.W. Bush had recently announced the end of the Cold War, making the end of Ceau\u0219escu’s rule inevitable, though he couldn’t see this yet. Worse, his security leaders had just failed to violently put down protests in the city of Timisoara, a fact that enraged his wife Elena.<\/p>\n

“You should have fired on them, and had they fallen, you should have taken them and shoved them into a cellar,” she said. “Weren’t you told that?”<\/p>\n

Long one of the world’s most vicious dictators, Ceau\u0219escu’s most recent plan for winning over the heartland was forcing half the country’s villagers to destroy their own homes \u2014 with pick-axes and hammers, if they couldn’t afford a bulldozer \u2014 and packing them into project apartments in new “agro-industrial towns”, for a “better future”. Despite this, and his long history of murder, terror, and spying, Ceau\u0219escu to the end did not grasp that his unpopularity had an organic character. He was convinced ethnically Hungarian “terrorists” were behind the latest trouble.<\/p>\n

After reaching the balcony of Bucharest’s Central Committee building to give a speech that December day, he’s genuinely surprised when the crowd turns on him. When he tells them to be quiet, he’s befuddled by their refusal, saying, “What, you can’t hear?” Elena jumps in and yells, “Silence!”, to which Ceau\u0219escu, hilariously, replies, “Shut up!” The crowd listens to neither of them.<\/p>\n

Paul Kenyon’s Children of the Night<\/em> describes the morbid black comedy that ensued. The Ceau\u0219escus and a motley gang of undead apparatchiks that included the “morbidly obese Prime Minister, Emil Bobu” later tried to load into a single helicopter \u2014 Bobu “waddled, walrus-like, to the rear” Kenyon writes \u2014 but there were too many of them, and the copter barely got off the ground. “Where to?” asked the pilot, and nobody knew, because there was no plan, since none of them had ever considered the possibility of this happening.<\/p>\n

The sky was full of stuff, including other helicopters, which were dropping leaflets on the crowd giving what Kenyon described as a Marie Antoinette-like order to ignore “imperialist conspiracies” and return home “to a Christmas feast”. Four days later, a firing squad put the Ceau\u0219escus against a wall and gave them their final, solid lead Christmas presents.<\/p>\n

Ceau\u0219escu’s balcony will forever be a symbol of elite cluelessness. Even in the face of the gravest danger, a certain kind of ruler will never be able to see the last salvo coming, if doing so requires any self-examination. The neoliberal political establishment in most of the Western world, the subject of repeat populist revolts of rising intensity in recent years, seems to suffer from the same disability.<\/p>\n

Matt Taibbi, “Justin Trudeau’s Ceausescu Moment”, TK News by Matt Taibi<\/em><\/a>, 2022-02-10.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On the morning of the 21st of December, 1989, Romanian General Secretary Nicolae Ceau\u0219escu was in a foul mood. The Berlin Wall had fallen, and Mikhail Gorbachev and George H.W. Bush had recently announced the end of the Cold War, making the end of Ceau\u0219escu’s rule inevitable, though he couldn’t see this yet. Worse, his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[62,7,41],"tags":[930,720,506,879],"class_list":["post-71707","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe","category-history","category-quotations","tag-1980s","tag-protest","tag-revolution","tag-romania"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-iEz","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71707","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71707"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71707\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":73953,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71707\/revisions\/73953"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71707"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71707"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71707"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}