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PITESTI, Romania (AP) An art exhibition went on display Friday at a former Romanian prison where communists tortured and killed political prisoners in a gruesome re-education program.

The collection of 11 sculptures at the Pitesti Prison, southern Romania, aims to remind visitors about the horrors that took place there from 1949 to 1951.

The 3.5 meter-tall (11.5-feet) grey, polystyrene figures depict detainees who were tortured and humiliated to force them to become communists.

Several thousand prisoners who had fallen foul of the communist regime underwent what was known as The Pitesti Experiment. Prisoners were forced to stare at lightbulbs, eat feces, given electric shocks and head butt each other. They were also encouraged to inform on each other and torture fellow inmates. About 100 died from mistreatment.

Alexandru Bogdanovici, who was imprisoned because hed been a member of the fascist Iron Guard, was co-opted to re-educate fellow prisoners. But the prison commander later considered him disloyal and he was beaten, denied water and eventually died.

For the exhibit, artist Catalin Badarau sculpted contorted, anonymous figures which lie in hallways or in former prison cells. One figure stands awkwardly on his head, others have their hands tied behind their backs or are covering their faces.

Badarau says the oversized figures, of a mottled grey color which is similar to the prison walls and floors show the fragility of human beings.

They were strong people when they went into prison but they came out physical wrecks, he told The Associated Press. But conversely, they became spiritual giants.

Among the detainees that survived Pitesti are Romanian Orthodox priest Gheorghe Calciu-Dumitreasa who spent 21 years as a political prisoner and Corneliu Coposu, an anti-communist politician and well-known dissident who died in 1995.

An estimated 500,000 people, members of the pre-communist intellectual and political elite, were locked up in political prisons until a general amnesty was declared in 1964.

Similar art exhibitions will be held this year in other cities that housed political prisons or had anti-communist revolts, sponsored by the Nasui Collection & Gallery and a government institute tasked with investigating crimes of the communist era.

Badarau said his sculptures challenge people to ask themselves: What would I have done? Would I have become a victim or a torturer, or both?

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Romania: Art exhibit at ex-prison show horrors of communism - WIAT 42

.. is from Matt Ridleys 2017 Keith Joseph Memorial Lecture to the Centre for Policy Studies titled Free Markets are Revolutionary, Liberating, and Democratic:

Things like the English language, made by humankind, but not planned, ordered, constructed or ruled. There is no government, Supreme Court or police force of the English language yet we all obey its laws of vocabulary, grammar, and syntax. Likewise, the internet is something that evolves; it is not and was not designed, planned or managed. It is my contention that this concept of spontaneous order is the central idea of the enlightenment, brought to a pinnacle nine years later by Adam Smith with his invisible hand and applied to life itself by Charles Darwin some decades later. If the English language can get along without a government, why do we so quickly assume that English society cannot organize itself?

To labor the point, today in London roughly 10 million people ate lunch. Working out just how much of each type of food to have available in the right places at the right time to ensure that this happened was a problem of mind-boggling complexity, made all the harder by the fact people made up their mind what to eat mostly at the last minute.

Who was in charge of this astonishing feat? Who is Londons lunch commissioner and why does he get so little credit? Why is this system not subsidized? How can it be so lightly regulated?

The essence of free enterprise is that people become more prosperous by working for each other. The more they abandon self-sufficiency for interdependence, the better off they are. The more they specialize as producers, the more they can diversify as consumers. And what this means, of course, is that networks of exchange and specialization create cooperation, collaboration, and community on an epic scale.

By collaborating through commerce we can do things that are far beyond the capacity of the human mind to comprehend. Human intelligence is a collective phenomenon, a distributed brain, a cloud. As Leonard Reed famously pointed out, among the thousands of people who contribute to making a simple pencil, not one of them knows how to make a pencil.

True communism, true collectivism, is created by the market, not the state. That the deepest cooperation is what we achieve by buying and selling. Its time we told the young this. They will never have heard it.

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Matt Ridley on how true communism/collectivism is created by the ... - American Enterprise Institute

Posted: Jul. 21, 2017 7:00 am Updated: Jul. 21, 2017 10:37 am

PITESTI, Romania (AP) An art exhibition went on display Friday at a former Romanian prison where communists tortured and killed political prisoners in a gruesome re-education program.

The collection of 11 sculptures at the Pitesti Prison, southern Romania, aims to remind visitors about the horrors that took place there from 1949 to 1951.

The 3.5 meter-tall (11.5-feet) grey, polystyrene figures depict detainees who were tortured and humiliated to force them to become communists.

Several thousand prisoners who had fallen foul of the communist regime underwent what was known as "The Pitesti Experiment." Prisoners were forced to stare at lightbulbs, eat feces, given electric shocks and head butt each other. They were also encouraged to inform on each other and torture fellow inmates. About 100 died from mistreatment.

Alexandru Bogdanovici, who was imprisoned because he'd been a member of the fascist Iron Guard, was co-opted to re-educate fellow prisoners. But the prison commander later considered him disloyal and he was beaten, denied water and eventually died.

For the exhibit, artist Catalin Badarau sculpted contorted, anonymous figures which lie in hallways or in former prison cells. One figure stands awkwardly on his head, others have their hands tied behind their backs or are covering their faces.

Badarau says the oversized figures, of a mottled grey color which is similar to the prison walls and floors "show the fragility of human beings."

"They were strong people when they went into prison but they came out physical wrecks," he told The Associated Press. "But conversely, they became spiritual giants."

Among the detainees that survived Pitesti are Romanian Orthodox priest Gheorghe Calciu-Dumitreasa who spent 21 years as a political prisoner and Corneliu Coposu, an anti-communist politician and well-known dissident who died in 1995.

An estimated 500,000 people, members of the pre-communist intellectual and political elite, were locked up in political prisons until a general amnesty was declared in 1964.

Similar art exhibitions will be held this year in other cities that housed political prisons or had anti-communist revolts, sponsored by the Nasui Collection & Gallery and a government institute tasked with investigating crimes of the communist era.

Badarau said his sculptures challenge people to ask themselves: "What would I have done? Would I have become a victim or a torturer, or both?"

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Romania: Art exhibit at ex-prison show horrors of communism ... - Herald-Whig

WARSAW The Polish Parliaments move on Saturday to subvert judicial independence has opened a searing debate about whether a nation once held up as a paragon of post-communist democracy has slid back into a darker era.

The Senates 55-23 vote on the measure, which is widely expected to be signed into law by President Andrzej Duda, capped a 20-month procession by the right-wing ruling Law and Justice party to bring Polands independent institutions under its control.The swift offensive has left leaders who toppled communist rule in 1989 to question whether they succeeded in embedding democratic norms in a state that was under Soviet domination for decades.

Lech Walesa, a former Polish president and leader of Solidarity, the labor union that helped precipitate communisms fall across Europe, called Saturday for a mass effort to reengage citizens about the importance of the separation of powers.

Our generation managed, in the most improbable situation, to lead Poland to freedom, he told a crowd gathered in Gdansks Solidarity Square.You cannot let anyone interrupt this victory, especially you young people.

The erosion of the rule of law also raises difficult questions for the European Union, which once saw Polish democracy and prosperity as its biggest success after the 2004 expansion that encompassed much of Eastern Europe. Now, E.U. leaders are threatening to suspend Polands voting rights in decisions of the bloc, though they may be thwarted by the veto of Hungary's leader, Viktor Orban, another post-communist prime minister who has centralized power in defiance of democratic norms.

Polands disregard for the E.U.s warnings and the opposition of tens of thousands of protesters who have taken to the streets in recent days comes amid a global wave of nationalism that crested last year with Britain's decision to leave the E.U. and the election of Donald Trump. Saturdays vote, which unfolded soon after Trump visited Warsaw and praised its populist leaders, may be another measure of the transatlantic echoes of the American election.

The U.S. State Department sounded an alarm about the measure, which would cast out all current justices of the Supreme Court, except those handpicked by the governing partys justice minister. But Trumps visit was tacit support for Law and Justice leaders, said Michal Kobosko,director of the Atlantic Councils Warsaw Global Forum, andencouraged them to move forward with their offensive against the courts. Another measure would dissolve the independent body that selects judges. And the Constitutional Tribunal, the authority capable of invalidating the legislation, has been filled with government loyalists.

Behind the monument to the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, the backdrop for Trumps speech, sits the Supreme Court. Its top judge,Malgorzata Gersdorf, said she will probably lose her job as a result of the changes. She is scheduled to meet Monday with Duda, the president and a former Law and Justice member of Parliament. He is a close ally ofJaroslaw Kaczynski, the architect of the effort to bring the courts to heel.

Gersdorf said the judiciary is the last independent institution protecting citizens from an authoritarian state whose aim, she said, is removing legal obstacles to interference in elections. The government has already clamped down on public media and restricted democratic assembly

The last barrier is the Supreme Court, she said in an interview.This change would undo our democratic system based on the independence of the courts. Each citizen has to know that a judge wont fall in front of political power.

According to Law and Justice, however, the courts are riddled with corruption, a product of lingering communist influence. The charge, said Jan Gross, a Polish-born professor of Eastern European history at Princeton University, is total nonsense. He called the proposed changesan indigenous assault on democracy and decency.

Law and Justice calls them democracy in action. A professional and honest system of justice is a dream of many Poles, said the ruling partys justice minister, Zbigniew Ziobro.Poles chose our program. This is democracy.

Polling suggests that a majority of the country wants Duda to veto the legislation. At the same time, there is strong support for Law and Justice, which leads its closest competitor, the center-right Civic Platform, by double digits.

Zygmunt Poziomka, a former coal miner who stood wrapped in a Polish flag outside the Senate building Friday, said Law and Justice was returning control of the courts to people ill-served by negotiations in 1989 over Polands post-communist future.

The communists are still there just the sons instead of their fathers, saidPoziomka, 58.Its been 72 years since World War II, and they still wont let Poland have a chance. Finally Trump let the world see that Warsaw had an uprising, that we fought and had a vision.

Kaczynski, the leader of Law and Justice, is the son of a veteran of the uprising, and his political vision is defined by national victimhood, not just in World War II but in the decades since, Gross said. The most powerful politician in Poland, Kaczynski continues to insist that a 2010 plane crash that killed his brother, Lech Kaczynski, then the nations president, was orchestrated by the Russians, with the help of Civic Platform and its leader at the time, Donald Tusk, who is now president of the European Council.

This is the underlying dispute that defines Polish politics right now, said the Atlantic Councils Kobosko.

Conspiracy theories, as well as the governments broadside against the courts, have found support among peopleleft out by the transition from communism, said Rafal Trzaskowski, a Civic Platform member of Parliament.These are people who dont travel or use the infrastructure that came with integration, and we failed to communicate with them.

Law and Justice, he said, uses that resentment to deny the legitimacy of negotiations in 1989 that brought a peaceful end to communism talks in which Jaroslaw Kaczynski and his brother played a minor role and later dismissed as the collusion of elites.

This is the beginning of the end of a democracy, Trzaskowski said, lamenting that opposition lawmakers could do little beyond joining the demonstrations.

One protester, Radomir Szumelda, a leader of the Committee for the Defense of Democracy, a civic group promoting liberal values, said the aim is to sustain public outcry until the government takes notice. In particular, he said, they are seeking to pressure the president to veto the legislation, which remains unlikely even though Duda expressed some concerns Saturday through a spokesman.

We will show that we refuse to live without freedom, said Szumelda, 45. Young people who didnt live under communism may not know what that was like, but they are also joining us, and together we are saying that we cant go back.

Protester Sasza Reznikow, a 31-year-old actor, immigrated to Poland from neighboring Belarus in 2006 to escape the dictatorship. Now, he said, he sees Poland lurching to the East.

Klaudia Kocimska and Magdalena Foremska in Warsaw and Michael Birnbaum in Brussels contributed to this report.

Read more

It only took two years for a robust European democracy to fall apart

Trumps visit to Poland seen as a snub to the E.U. and Germany

Europe is starkly divided over whether democracy is working

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Poland's long march toward democracy is threatened by quick steps away from it - Washington Post

An art exhibition went on display Friday at a former Romanian prison where communists tortured and killed political prisoners in a gruesome re-education program.

The collection of 11 sculptures at the Pitesti Prison, southern Romania, aims to remind visitors about the horrors that took place there from 1949 to 1951.

The 3.5 meter-tall (11.5-feet) grey, polystyrene figures depict detainees who were tortured and humiliated to force them to become communists.

Several thousand prisoners who had fallen foul of the communist regime underwent what was known as "The Pitesti Experiment." Prisoners were forced to stare at lightbulbs, eat feces, given electric shocks and head butt each other. They were also encouraged to inform on each other and torture fellow inmates. About 100 died from mistreatment.

Alexandru Bogdanovici, who was imprisoned because he'd been a member of the fascist Iron Guard, was co-opted to re-educate fellow prisoners. But the prison commander later considered him disloyal and he was beaten, denied water and eventually died.

For the exhibit, artist Catalin Badarau sculpted contorted, anonymous figures which lie in hallways or in former prison cells. One figure stands awkwardly on his head, others have their hands tied behind their backs or are covering their faces.

Badarau says the oversized figures, of a mottled grey color which is similar to the prison walls and floors "show the fragility of human beings."

"They were strong people when they went into prison but they came out physical wrecks," he told The Associated Press. "But conversely, they became spiritual giants."

Among the detainees that survived Pitesti are Romanian Orthodox priest Gheorghe Calciu-Dumitreasa who spent 21 years as a political prisoner and Corneliu Coposu, an anti-communist politician and well-known dissident who died in 1995.

An estimated 500,000 people, members of the pre-communist intellectual and political elite, were locked up in political prisons until a general amnesty was declared in 1964.

Similar art exhibitions will be held this year in other cities that housed political prisons or had anti-communist revolts, sponsored by the Nasui Collection & Gallery and a government institute tasked with investigating crimes of the communist era.

Badarau said his sculptures challenge people to ask themselves: "What would I have done? Would I have become a victim or a torturer, or both?"

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Romania: Art exhibit at ex-prison show horrors of communism - ABC News