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Romania recently saw the largest demonstrations on its streets since the fall of communism. On February 5, more than half a million people took part in protests across the country.

The marches came in response to an emergency decree passed by the recently elected PSD-ALDE government a coalition of the PSD (Social Democratic Party) and ALDE (the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats). Among other things, this aimed to weaken anti-corruption legislation and offered potential amnesty for those convicted of corruption.

The decree was issued at 10pm on the evening of Tuesday January 31 and did not have to face parliamentary scrutiny. Many saw it as a back-door attempt by the government to help its supporters, both within the party and in the media, who are currently either in jail or under investigation for corruption.

The amnesty for those with convictions was also seen as an attempt by PSD leader Liviu Dragnea to clear his own path to becoming prime minister a position from which he is currently excluded due to a conviction for electoral fraud. Dragnea is prime minister in all but name, such is his domination of the PSD. Sorin Grindeanu, the sitting prime minister, is entirely dependent on Dragneas patronage.

The Romanian government is simultaneously strong and weak. It commands a parliamentary majority, controls many institutions and has backers in the media. But it is continually vulnerable to anti-corruption efforts, which have seen many of its prominent members and supporters jailed. Both Dragnea and ALDE leader Clin Popescu-Triceanu are subject to investigations and court cases.

The emergency decree is part of a broader PSD campaign to unpick anti-corruption safeguards through legislative initiatives which will benefit its expansive patronage networks.

Protesters of all ages, social backgrounds and political leanings have come from across the country in response to this situation. Many are angry at the content of the proposed law as well as the surreptitious way in which it has been introduced. This is an unprecedented mobilisation of society but also reflects how Romania has changed over the past decade. Civil society is becoming increasingly vocal and active.

The government meanwhile has shown no interest in backing down. Its public statements and actions have been conscious efforts to muddy the waters and confuse the public. Although it promised on Saturday February 4 to repeal the decree, this was more an attempt to confuse people and take them off the streets rather than a real concession. Closer inspection revealed that the repeal was not really a repeal at all. It contained clauses that had previously been declared unconstitutional so could be declared invalid at any moment meaning the initial decree would stand.

Whats more, Grindeanu suggested sending the controversial measures through parliament, which would easily approve them thanks to the PSDs majority. When his justice minister spoke out against this plan, Grindeanu threatened to sack him. Grindeanu has shifted the blame for the crisis over the decrees onto the justice ministry.

The governments supporters and media allies have been quick to attack the protesters as anti-democratic, even claiming they were being paid by US financier George Soros, fascists, or were out on the street as part of a coup dtat led by President Klaus Iohannis, who has called for a referendum on the reforms proposed in the decree and took part in the protests.

The complex legal machinations and contradictory statements are part of a deliberate strategy to draw out the issue. The government seems to want to stall for as long as possible in the hope that the protesters will give up and go home.

The PSD has a lot resting on this matter. Dragneas career depends on him getting out of his own ongoing corruption case. A second conviction would see him sent to jail, perhaps ending his political career.

The PSD is also very heavily dependent on local barons and oligarchs for financial and organisational support. The price for that support is the government weakening anti-corruption legislation.

The PSD government of Victor Ponta fell in November 2015 in the face of the street protests that followed a fire in a Bucharest nightclub in which 64 people died. Although the government was of course not responsible for the fire, many Romanians felt it was responsible for the administrative culture that allowed permits to be granted in exchange for bribes with no regard for safety, and for a health service that could not cope with the aftermath of the accident.

Dragnea has positioned himself as a political hardman. He wants to face down the latest protests and show that his government and party not the people on the street are in charge. There is a fear that retreating now will embolden government opponents in the future.

Although, on the face of it, this is a simple issue of anti-corruption, it has wider implications for Romanian democracy. The government may continue its approach of legal obfuscation to try to slide its decree through or it may, for the time being, abandon this attempt to unpick anti-corruption measures. However, this will be only a short pause. For the demonstrators the question remains whether the protests can be sustained and be effective in getting the government to abandon its anti-anti-corruption strategy.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Dan Brett does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

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Romania protests: what caused the biggest uprising since the fall of communism? - Yahoo News

Zamudio: Folly and obsolescence of communism | SunStar Sun.Star COMMUNISM is a theoretical political and economic system whereby the means of production are commonly owned, and everyone in the classless society works according to their abilities and the resources thereby produced and distributed according to their ... and more »

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Zamudio: Folly and obsolescence of communism | SunStar - Sun.Star

Communist Russia was famous for furry hats, forced labour campsand the KGB so you might not think there were a lot of LOLs on offer.

But the CIA have proved us wrong with a selection of Soviet-era jokestingedwith vodka and despair, released as part of a document dump from their archives.

Honestly, some of these you realise that maybe the Trump/Brexit/World War 3 era isnt actually the worst time to be alive like this one about the fact that communist shops never had any food.

A man goes into a shop and asks, You dont have any meat? No, replies the sales lady, We dont have any fish. Its the store across the street that doesnt have any meat.

Its not clear why the jokes were compiled, or by whom but the documents, released in 2013, but available online now, offer a fascinating insight into a (thankfully) bygone era.

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CIA release a bunch of Soviet jokes and communism was clearly a ... - Metro

Continued below... While real refugees were kept out, Obama threw open the doors to Sunni Muslim migrants

Of the hundreds of thousands of displaced Syrian Christians, Obama took in 125 in his final year.

While real refugees were kept out, Obama threw open the doors to Sunni Muslim migrants: many of whom sympathize with their Sunni Islamic terrorist side from Al Qaeda to ISIS. Obama had armed and aided the Sunni Islamic freedom fighters in Syria who were oppressing and displacing Christians.

These are the fake refugees on whose behalf the left is protesting at airports.

President Trump has pledged to overturn Obamas covert ban on Christian refugees. The leftist protesters arent there to support refugees, but to oppose his plan to help Christian refugees.

These arent pro-refugee protests. Theyre pro-migrant and anti-refugee tantrums. Their real message is to keep Obamas ban on Syrian Christian refugees while importing more migrant Muslim terror.

The left does not support actual refugees because the majority of those are fleeing either leftist or Islamist regimes. And the left is the unofficial lobby for the former and supports the latter.

Joe Biden, Jerry Brown and other leftists fought tooth and nail against bringing Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees to America. George McGovern insisted that they would be better off going back to their own land.

Amnesty International, which beats the Muslim refugee drum louder than anyone else, joined in the effort to cover up Communist genocide in Cambodia. Allegations made by refugees must be examined with care in view of their possible partiality, the left-wing organization warned. It claimed that it did not want to embarrass the Communist mass murderers by exposing their misdeeds in public.

Cambodian genocide denial lived on until the bodies could no longer be covered up.

The left has shamelessly invoked the plight of Jewish refugees from the USSR and Nazi Germany.

It was FDR, the great hero of the left, who sent Jewish refugees to die in Nazi concentration camps. While leftists like to place the blame on Congress, the FDR administration went to great lengths to keep out even those Jewish refugees that could have been legally admitted with security reviews.

These tactics were used to keep out as many as 117,000 Jews.

An administration memo called for removing discretion from consuls so that there would no Raoul Wallenbergs or Chiune Sugiharas on FDRs watch while advising our consuls, to put every obstacle in the way and to require additional evidence and to resort to various administrative devices which would postpone and postpone and postpone the granting of the visas.

The FDR administration even pressured other countries in the region not to accept Jews.

FDR had a long history of anti-Semitic remarks. He had even defended Nazi anti-Semitism in private conversations. The most horrifying of his remarks came when Stalin and FDR were discussing the Jewish problem. Stalin had already been engaged in massacring the Jews. FDR quipped to Stalin that he would give the six million Jews of the United States to King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia.

Meanwhile the left had spent a long time denying that Jews were even persecuted in the USSR.

The first boom in Soviet Jewish emigration occurred under Nixon. More Jews were able to leave the USSR in one year of Nixon than during LBJs entire term in office. In Nixons last full year in office, 35,000 Soviet Jews were allowed to leave. In Carters first year, the numbers were barely half that. There was an equally dramatic difference between Carters last year in office and Reagans first year in office.

Nixons Attorney General, John Mitchell, had intervened to offer parole to Soviet Jewish refugees while Carter had sought to suspend Jackson-Vanik which was forcing the USSR to free Soviet Jews.

It is the left that stands on the side of the leftist anti-Semites who oppress and persecute Jews.

When the Marxist Sandinistas persecuted Jews, they were the toast of the left. John Kerry lobbied for them and Bill de Blasio supported them. But President Reagan courageously denounced them.

The Nicaraguan Communists claim that theyre not anti-Semitic, theyre just anti-Zionist. Well, as anti-Zionists, they desecrated Managuas synagogue and drove the small Jewish community into exile, President Reagan said, describing graffiti reading, Death to the Jewish pigs.

Who cared about those Jewish exiles? Reagan. Not the left which glorified the Marxists scribbling, Death to the Jewish pigs on synagogue walls.

Today the left is doing the same thing to Christian refugees that it did to Jewish refugees.

Obamas people fought hard to prevent the Boko Haram terrorists who were massacring thousands of Christians and bombing churches in Nigeria from being named as a foreign terrorist organization. He sided with the Muslim Brotherhood church bombers in Egypt and with Palestinian Authority Jihadists killing Jews in Israel.

Everything Obama did is the policy of the left. Not just in America, but also in Europe and in Canada.

The left has formed an alliance with Islamic terrorists. Some of the lawyers who rush to airports to aid Muslims detained on immigration charges also rush to prisons to help Muslim terrorists detained in plots to massacre Americans. They dont love refugees. They hate America. They hate us.

The left hates real refugees. It hates them because real refugees want freedom.

Cuban and Soviet Jewish refugees voted for Trump because they know what its like to live under the left. The Christian refugees fleeing the Middle East are the first to warn about the dangers of Islam.

Thats why the left will do everything it can to keep them out of this country. There is nothing that a totalitarian movement hates and fears more than people who love freedom.

Behind the moral theater of the editorial page and the sanctimonious circus at the airport is a horrific crime. The left has aided and abetted genocide from the USSR to Nazi Germany, from Asia to the Middle East, while providing aid and comfort to the monsters behind these horrors. The greatest intellectuals of the left defended the horrific crimes of Communism as they whitewash Islamist crimes today.

Nothing has changed.

Leftists are really protesting at airports for the continuation of Obamas Christian refugee ban. They are screaming their lungs out to keep the Christian refugees fleeing Islamic terror out of this country.

The left hasnt turned out in force to save Muslims. It has marshaled its haters to kill Christian refugees.

Excerpt from:
The Left's Persecution of Real Refugees from Islam and Communism - Canada Free Press

In his bold book "The Demon in Democracy", the Polish philosopher and longtime dissident Ryszard Legutko explains how democracies can quickly turn to totalitarianism.

Polish philosopher and former politician Ryszard Legutko is the author of "The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies", published by Encounter Books (Photos: http://www.encounterbooks.com)

While dialogue with non-Catholics, non-Christians, or even anti-Christians may sometimes be perfectly appropriate, Ryszard Legutko is quite right, in The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, to highlight the fine line which divides Catholics who are open to civil debate from those who act as useful idiots for the Left. In particular, Legutkoa professor of philosophy who held various high-ranking positions in the Polish governmentdescribes at length the problems which beset Catholic attempts to establish dialogue with the establishment of Communist Poland. When viewed in retrospect this nave effort to win over the Communists is not an uplifting spectacle, Legutko reflects soberly, and reveals an essential asymmetry between the two sides:

One [side] had to make serious concessions to accommodate itself to the communist reality. The other conceded nothing, promised nothing, and treated its opponents patronizingly. The Catholics concessions were the following: they spoke highly of socialism as both theory and practice and distanced themselves from those bad Catholics who did not appreciate the benefits and virtues of the new regime. They postulated that because Catholicism had much in common with socialism, the Church should be more listened to and its presence more recognized in the socialist society. The Marxists, in turn, made no concessions at all. They noted with satisfaction the fact that progressive Catholics finally came to accept socialism, although they should have done it sooner, and that they came to denounce the bad Catholics, although they should have done it more forcefully. To the Catholics postulate the Marxists responded that of course the Catholics could find their place in the process of building socialism, but they must be aware that socialism had the higher value and that because the historical record of the Church was ugly, they should try harder than others to earn the trust of the socialist community. [emphasis added]

Legutko argues that even if we admit that liberal democracy is less brutal than communism, the lessons of Communist Poland are nonetheless extremely relevant today. Like their Communist cousins, liberal democrats purge religion from culture, place totalitarian restrictions on thought and speech, and promote the revolutionary subversion of traditional institutions.

If we take the above quotation from Legutkos book and change terms like communist to egalitarian, Marxist to liberal, and socialism to democracy, we arrive at a remarkably accurate description of the dialogue now occurring between secular progressives and conciliatory Catholics in America. Liberals are always only one concession away from warming up to the Church and flocking to the baptismal fontor at least so some Catholic scholars and ecclesial authorities would have us believe. In reality, exaggerating the common ground Church teaching shares with the liberal ideology of human rights has accomplished remarkably little, except perhaps to indelibly stamp upon the plain mans mind the impression that Catholic faith equals globalism plus sacraments. When only one of the two parties takes the other seriously, dialogue devolves into little more than an elaborate ritual of submission.

And as time passes, the demands made upon those Catholics who have submitted to liberalism grow ever more extravagant:

In order for the Church to be praised, or even to be spared the heaviest blows, it is no longer enough to make the sacral architecture less hierarchical, and more democratic, or have the priest face the faithful during mass, or to consider the abolition of celibacy. Nowadays one must go much further: prohibit the condemnation of anything other than what the liberal-democratic orthodoxy mandates to condemn, and decree to praise everything that this orthodoxy mandates to praise.

Per the new democratic elite, sexism, homophobia, and nativism are the three deadly sins. Meanwhile greed, lust, and malice are virtues, provided they can be justified within the context of progressive politics.

Legutko advises those who would resist current trends to consider the strategy of the faithful Polish Primate Stefan Wyszynski, a churchman who did not trust the intellectuals, and in fact had never trusted them. Wyszynski opted to make the Catholicism of the peoplethe folk Catholicism, so to speakhe stronghold of the Catholic faith, Legutko notes. This decision

had far-reaching and generally positive effects: by relying on rural religiosity the Church managed to preserve a large area of social practices and religious traditions that was not accessible to the communist ideology. In countries where this type of folk Christianity did not exist or was considerably weaker, the communist system managed to wreak more havoc and penetrated deeper into the social fabric.

Legutkos account of Wyszinski only reinforces my own longstanding conviction that American Catholicism accords too little weight to the collective experience embodied in small towns and farming communities, and too much to an intelligentsia and bureaucracy sequestered within metropolitan bubbles like D.C., New York, Boston, and Dallas. As Marx himself acknowledged with his sneer at the idiocy of rural life, country folk tend to be conservative, and so are wont to resist political pressure to reinterpret the Faith in terms of equality or diversity or some other chic new god-term. By contrast, Catholic intellectuals have consistently proven themselves extremely susceptible to fashion and the allure of power, seeking (as Legutko puts it) acceptance of Catholicism not as Catholics but as a group whose creed does not threaten liberal democracy and can evenonce they present their case with sufficient skill and credibilitybe considered as supportive of it.

Legutkos treatment of religion would by itself make this book well worth the while, but let the reader note that the former anticommunist dissident also dwells fruitfully and at length upon other fundamental dimensions of liberal modernity including politics, utopia, and history. In the chapter entitled Ideology, Legutko describes how various fanatical ideologies are the inevitable consequence of egalitarianism:

Because egalitarianism weakens communities and thus deprives men of an identity-giving habitat, it creates a vacuum around them. Hence a desire exists for a new identity, this time modern and in line with the spirit of militant egalitarianism. The ideologies fulfill this role perfectly. They organize peoples consciousness by providing them with the meaning of life, an individual and collective purpose, an inspiration for further endeavors, and a sense of belonging. With the emergence of ideology the problem of a lonely individual in an egalitarian society no longer exists: feminism makes all women sisters; all homosexuals become brothers in struggle; all environmentalists become a part of an international green movement; all advocates of tolerance join the ranks of a universal antifascist crusade, and so on. [emphasis added]

Having shattered religious traditions and undermined cultural integrity, the liberal revolution set into motion what conservative scholar Robert Nisbet famously called the quest for community. Lost, frantic, restless, modern man tries to compensate for the disruption of natural order and absence of inherited identity by embracing artificial order and manufactured identity. The results have not been such as to inspire optimism.

Worse still, says Legutko, propaganda and distorted teaching of history has instilled in the intellectual class a superstitious fear of leaving the secure territories of liberal-democratic orthodoxy, so any attempt to criticize liberal democracy will run up against an army of loud and assertive defenders:

[L]iberal democracy, like communism, produced large numbers of lumpen-intellectuals, [so] there is no shortage of people who ecstatically become involved in tracking disloyalty and fostering a new orthodoxy. It happens that both systems never suffered from a shortage of people willingoften without being askedto survey the political purity in communities, institutions, groups, and all types of social behavior.

Naturally Legutkos chief interest is his native Poland, so he does not mentionand indeed may not even be awarethat in America enforcers of liberal democratic orthodoxy very frequently style themselves conservative. The writings of the late Christopher Hitchens are within the pale for the conservative establishment, as are defenses of Hitchens inspiration, the Marxist Leon Trotsky. Patrick Buchanan is not. Why? To borrow Legutkos wording, democratic liberals intuitively sensed they had a deeper bond, no matter how unclear, with the communists than with the anticommunists.

Having established such hegemony over discourse as to render their own suppositions almost invisible, liberal democrats have far surpassed the Communist Party when it comes to effecting a revolutionary transformation of society. In the modern West there is no need for anything like a liberal democratic faction as such, for nobody feels obliged to argue on behalf of liberal democracy. It is simply assumed, like the air we breathe. Yet according to Legutko the air is poisoned. Those who want something fresh whereby they might clear their minds are advised to seek out this bold and extraordinary book.

The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societiesby Ryszard Legutko Encounter Books Hardcover, 200 pages

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Is Liberal Democracy Closer to Communism or Catholicism? - Catholic World Report