Social Media Communist Trolls

But one little detail was way off in his narrative--there was no middle class under communism, just the apparatchiks at the top and the rest of the proletariat, whether they were college degreed or not, they all made very poor wages and pensions by any standards.

There was no welfare in communism, no free speech, no free press, no free anything if you did not work, education was free but rationed, you were admitted at the university only after the children of the party members got in first, food, water, heat, housing were rationed, there were no six-figures incomes, no living wages, just bare survival wages.

If you were a party informer or a paid communist activist, you received more pay, more benefits, and perhaps you owned a car which you polished every weekend and seldom drove very far. It was a status symbol that you worked for the party or that you were involved in wheeling and dealing, meaning theft from work which you traded with other people who also stole from their work whatever goods they produced. Survival through bribery and knowing how to survive was paramount.

Doctors and lab techs took bribes from their patients in exchange for potential better care. Surgeons had envelopes in their files with the patient’s name inscribed on them and the amount they bribed him with. (My dad’s envelope was among them, 5,000 lei, while he was dying in the hospital without any care.) Pharmacists took bribes to sell drugs missing from the shelves that were hidden behind the counter.

Most government or service employees took bribes in the discharge of their jobs. If you knew someone who knew somebody else, they took bribes and you “bought” the item or the service you were seeking.

Bribes allowed you to have a phone installed ahead of the typical wait time of fourteen years. Bribes would allow you to buy oranges and bananas in season. Bribes would allow you to move ahead in line while waiting for a refrigerator or a sought-after TV.

The rest of the population barely survived and had to spend a good portion of their every day standing in line with a jute shopping bag to carry the items home.

Ceausescu, the dear leader, forced the population to stand in long lines for forty-five years. Nobody could imagine that shopping could be done without endless lines if you lived in a free country. One of the reasons was that the borders were locked down so tightly that few could travel abroad.

People stood in endless lines for bread, oil, sugar, flour, milk, butter, and other necessities daily. Moms, dads, children, grandmas stood in line in the numbing cold, pounding the ground to stay warm in the biting temperatures, dressed in layers like onions.

We wore rough wool sweaters on top of pajamas, shirts, and whatever else grandmas had knitted. The adults talked in a chatter to keep warm, always careful what they said about the dear leader and his party. Silence and whispering were dialects of fear of reprisal.

The social media trolls today are either deceptive in their rants and attacks or do not understand that the world runs on greed. Even socialists and communists run their countries on greed and brutality which lead to frightful fear.

There is no society or political organization of humans that does not run on greed. Nobody is so altruistic that they will let total strangers who wish them bodily harm and even death to come into their homes and take over everything they’ve worked hard for or have taken from others via legal means. But the state’s brutal force will make them acquiesce.

There is nothing that social media trolls would not say to total strangers in their blind and ignorant support of socialist and communist ideologies. When their superficial knowledge is exposed or exhausted, they resort to vile ad-hominem attacks. This is true for the entire western world.