“Iced Mint Mocha, please”. “Cherry Coke”. “DEATH TO
AMERICA!”
“I don’t know how to
make that”.
“(sigh)…...English Breakfast tea, please”.
And they all sat down to discuss politics, life, and
Facebook.
Not that Egyptians need more to riot than the corner bakery
running out of croissants but Morsi’s proposal for a new constitution has again
caused mass demonstrations. There are real stirrings in the Arab world for
modernization and democracy. However Islam is deeply conflicted about
modernization at best and openly hostile at worst. (See “MyGrandpa…”) What does Morsi want? Will he engage the world and lift his
people out of poverty or is he a radical who will settle for nothing less than
a medieval Koranic utopia? The stories of two men who transformed their
countries are instructive.
Pol Pot seized Cambodia in 1975. In “Year Zero”, a bloody
civil war ended and a bloodier peace began. “Brother Number One” was radical
even by Marxist standards. His egalitarian vision purged the nation of class
and wealth. The outside world knew nothing because media and foreigners had
been expelled. The movie “The Killing Fields”
recounted the discovery that the bizarre rumors of torture, mass murder, and
cannibalism were true. When the Khmer Rouge finally fled to the jungle, between
1 and 3 million bodies littered ditches, fields, and mass graves.
The irony of communism is its glorification of peasantry and
its simultaneous worship of elites. But Pot, never having graduated college,
executed anyone who reeked of education. Many were murdered for simply looking
smart because they wore glasses. Pot closed banks, schools, and churches.
Literally all institutions were shuttered and ransacked. Public servants were
arrested and executed. Private property was banned. Those caught hiding
personal possessions were tortured. Pot’s Eden was a socialist agrarian society
without industry, business or even doctors. All cities were evacuated so their
inhabitants could work the fields in proletariat harmony. Long lines of
evacuees passed bloated corpses on the road. Hundreds of thousands died from
starvation, dysentery, and heat stroke.
Deemed bourgeois, the family unit itself was banned. Not
that many were in a romantic mood but even sexual intercourse was outlawed.
Children under six were seized, raised and indoctrinated by Khmer
“grandmothers”. The KR utilized gangs of grade-schoolers to enforce their code.
Having been thoroughly indoctrinated, the 6 to 12 year olds, armed with AK-47’s
and appetites for sadism, murdered indiscriminately. Survivors remarked that
they seemed to enjoy making adults cower and beg for their lives.
Pot’s motivations were thoroughly Marxist but unlike most
Marxists who worship the future, Pot longed to recreate the glory days of the
Khmer Empire of the Middle Ages. Like the James Cameron/Avatar liberals, (See
also Kevin Costner/Dances with Wolves liberals) he believed that if man went
back to his primitive roots, he would be happy.
The nightmare ended
in 1979 with the invasion of the Vietnamese, of all people, who must have
thought, “Man, communism is awesome and all but these guys are crazy.”
Despising the oppressive totalitarianism of Hitler, the
Romanian people voted in the oppressive totalitarianism of communism in 1946.
It worked out well. Nicolae Ceausescu’s rise to the top in 1965 was uneventful.
For a while, he was quite popular as he stoked nationalistic pride by vowing to
fight Soviet hegemony. Yet, while rejecting the country of Stalin, he was
enamored with Stalin-ISM.
Ceausescu used the Securitate, the secret police, to spy on
citizens, deny free speech, and censor the press. He began a 37-mile long
“Death Canal” which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of forced
laborers. Treated worse than animals, they died from hunger, beatings, TB, and
dysentery. He used the project to rid the country of minorities including those
scourges of the earth, the Hungarians. In a nationalism and racial/cultural
superiority reminiscent of Nazi Germany and North Korea, he outlawed talking in
foreign languages, bulldozed villages, and redistributed 80% of Hungarian owned
land.
All this was standard fare for aspiring dictators but
Ceausescu was “The Visionary Architect of the Nation’s Future”. He was a man of
deep faith: In himself and the future. Birth rate is often seen as an indicator
of hope for the future. Ceausescu banned contraception and abortion. All women
in the factories were subjected to monthly gynecological examinations by the
“menstrual police”. In a famous speech, he deemed the fetus as “property of the
entire society”. A proliferation of dangerous back alley abortions damaged many
women and unborn children. Orphanages sprung up everywhere to deal with the
population boom in a society where living standards plummeted.
Impressed with Mao Tse Tung’s forced modernization,
Ceausescu emptied the countryside of inhabitants and, in contrast to Pol Pot,
forced the population to live in the cities. Food production plunged and
eventually, people were existing on 7 oz. of food per day. Life support
machines in hospitals flickered on and off due to constant power disruptions.
Ceausescu and his wife fostered a cult of personality.
Embracing the future and the coming socialist utopia, the first family prized
enlightenment and education. His wife Elena, not having finished grade school,
attached her name to scientific papers, gave herself a PhD in chemistry and
named herself the Director of the Institute for Chemistry.
Living in unimaginable luxury, everything fell apart for the
futurists when a crowd began to heckle the dictator during a speech of party
rhetoric and propaganda in 1989. The couple refused to cooperate with the trial
as it was clearly beneath them. The overgrown weeds above their bullet-riddled
bodies is not.
During their discussion about the past and the future, Morsi
had been rather quiet, scribbling furiously on his napkin. Pot and Nicolae
asked what he thought about their ideas. Morsi stated, “Come on guys, your
plans didn’t exactly work out well”.
Nicolae replied, “Meh. Mistakes were made”.
And thus was born Egypt’s current draft constitution, on a
napkin in a bar during a discussion with two of history’s strong men. True
story.
The napkin, its meaning and it’s recycled paper content, only
in the next Omnipotentblog…
