Doubling Down & Ancestral Witnessing: Ooana Trien, A Rare Jewish Voice, Unequivocal About Communism
Ooana is my friend, who I listen to carefully, on the true history of the socialist anaconda. She is never mealy mouthed like I sometimes can be. Then again, they murdered her grandfather
This was Ooana’s comment to this post, which I interpret as Mark explaining why the word “communism” is still sonically problematic for countless Americans more or less of his generation. This was important for me to truly understand. At least Mark can translate what this impulse is and what it is rooted in. A good five years ago he called me when I was on a train to Texas, and told me he could not bear the left anymore, and could I please tell him about Christianity. That was one of those moments I will never forget.
I rarely remember emails but I remember phone calls.
Ooana called me last night, and within 20 seconds we were onto the forbidden subject of Pitesti prison. When Ooana speaks of what they were doing there, I cross myself. It’s the most deeply chilling history imaginable. Look it up. Better yet, Ooana will, over time, tell us about it, here.
First, here’s her comment (and please read the essay in the link:)
“I think there is a blind spot amongst many - one you don’t have and one that if we don’t shine a light on, it’s game over. https://www.atlassociety.org/post/can-there-be-an-after-socialism No cause, ever, in the history of all mankind, has produced more cold-blooded tyrants, more slaughtered innocents, and more orphans than socialism with power. It surpassed, exponentially, all other systems of production in turning out the dead. The bodies are all around us. And here is the problem: No one talks about them. No one honors them. No one does penance for them. No one has committed suicide for having been an apologist for those who did this to them. No one pays for them. No one is hunted down to account for them. It is exactly what Solzhenitsyn foresaw in The Gulag Archipelago: "No, no one would have to answer. No one would be looked into." Until that happens, there is no "after socialism." The West accepts an epochal, monstrous, unforgivable double standard. We rehearse the crimes of Nazism almost daily, we teach them to our children as ultimate historical and moral lessons, and we bear witness to every victim. We are, with so few exceptions, almost silent on the crimes of Communism. So the bodies lie among us, unnoticed, everywhere. We insisted upon "de-Nazification," and we excoriate those who tempered it in the name of new or emerging political realities. There never has been and never will be a similar "de-Communization," although the slaughter of innocents was exponentially greater, and although those who signed the orders and ran the camps remain. In the case of Nazism, we hunt down ninety-year-old men because "the bones cry out" for justice. In the case of Communism, we insisted on "no witch hunts"—let the dead bury the living. But the dead can bury no one.”
I ABSOLUTELY CONCUR. “Until that happens, there is no “after socialism.” Vladimir Bukovsky, for his part, devoted his life to trying to bring about Nuremberg type trials for the communist massacres.
Glasnost/Perestroika/Gorbachev and all that was a cruel and calculated PSY OP to make us complicit in these vast crimes going unpunished, once again seduced by the myth of the “thaw,” over which one was supposed to salivate with admiration. Please understand that nothing I am writing here has anything to do with the magnificent people known as the Russian people. Thank you. Let’s move on.
Diana (West) correct me if I say anything off base, would you?
After I told Ooana I wanted to make a post out of her comment, she texted me an Epoch Times article (by the excellent Charlotte Cuthbertsson,) about her family, and I read it, first astonished, then in actual tears. I tried to cut and paste it, but could only cut and paste the opening, and had to take screen shots of the rest. This should be a movie. I mean, if Hollywood ever stopped being deniers of communist atrocities. ie when hell freezes. By the way, I think McCarthyism was a PSY Op too. To make anti-communism dirty and distasteful in America.
NEW YORK—Ildiko Trien’s charmed and pampered life in Romania was flipped on its head when she was 5 1/2 years old.
Her father, who spoke many languages, was a businessman; her mother, a lawyer. Her Hungarian-born family was rich and they owned land. Trien’s father also reared Lipizzaner horses.
One night in 1946, four or five men with leather coats and caps barged into their house and grabbed the whole family. The family was planning to escape to Palestine the very next day.
“They put my brother’s shoes on me,” Trien remembered. He was four years older. “They were so big.”
Her father was snatched away to a gulag, and Trien, her mother, and her older brother, Csaba, were taken to live in a shack outside of Bucharest.
“We were considered bourgeois,” said Trien. Intellectuals, doctors, lawyers, and landowners were rounded up and placed in gulags. The gulags, or forced labor camps, dotted the route of a canal the prisoners were made to construct. It linked the Danube River to the Black Sea.
“We got put in a house with dirt floors, kerosene lamps, and a haystack,” Trien, now 75, recalled recently in Manhattan, where she lives. The shack was a dramatic change for a girl who, until then, was used to being dressed in outfits to match her pony.
Trien didn’t see her father for more than two years after that first night.
Earlier posts that led to this one, are here, here, here and here.
Thank you for sharing my mother’s story and for being, as always, a voice that rises above the throng.
The reason that Communism is never properly held accountable is very simple.
The Commies invented the fiction that somehow communism was on the left and was altogether different from fascism / Nazism which was on the right.
That was how it absolved itself from the crimes of the Nazis and held itself out to be some kind of polar opposite.
The truth is that the Nazis were socialists. They were the National Socialist party. Sure, maybe a different flavor than international socialists. And their economy was more fascist in nature, much like the system that we have today in the West. But they were most definitely cousins to the Commies.