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.”

  • newtraditionalists@kbin.melroy.org
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    4 months ago

    Everyone read this. It’s an incredibly well written article. Journalism like this is so rare.

    Jesus fucking christ. This has hit me like a ton of bricks. And this is all so recent. What a stupid bubble I’ve grown up in. Glad to be edified, but mortified at humans, as well as totally inspired by them. Izidor and all of the other suffering people out there put me to shame. What a dumb thing to complain about work today.

    Wishing that peace finds all those who have suffered at the hands of monstrous humans.

    • corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca
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      4 months ago

      What a dumb thing to complain about work today.

      Trauma is trauma. This isn’t the Olympics, and we do not judge and compare trauma.

      YOU’RE ALLOWED TO FEEL SAD or pissed or frustrated or hungry or lonely or happy. The existence of people more happy or lonely or hungry or sad than you does not rob you of your right to feel.

      Don’t minimize your own experiences. They’re the only ones you get.

      I hope tomorrow goes better. No more free slurpees tomorrow, but it is Friday.

      • TargaryenTKE@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        They’re the only ones you get

        Ha, jokes on you, that’s what TV and books are for! (Mostly kidding, but not completely)

      • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        Yeah I’ve been having to remind myself of this as I (diagnosed with ptsd) have been hanging out a lot with someone whose life is an unyielding horror show. It’s important to be sensitive and acknowledge the differences with her, but it’s also important to understand that my life has been pretty fucking rough in its own right.

        And both of us manage to complain about a bad day at work. Sure her night terrors aren’t about her bad day at work, and none of her shifts have resulted in one of her traumatically originated mental illnesses, but I still get a text bitching about it from her when it happens.

    • HerderHilton@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      Highly recommend subscribing to The Atlantic. It’s about $50 for a year but has some of the best journalism across a variety of perspectives that will challenge you. Sometimes emotionally, like with this article, other times politically, but I always come away feeling more informed.