modern Bucharest smacks of post-Communist Eastern Europe ethos. Same dank concrete apartment buildings. Same drinking issues. Same neighbors who hate your cats and worry you're not eating right
Ho-hum, I think old ladies not worrying whether you are eating right is unique to the US, and the opposite universal... *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
They were also familiar to me. Most of the film was in an eerie way. I'm not sure if that's more of a reflection of my own experiences or the talent of the filmmaker. Apparently, the actors were professional actors, but chosen like people off the street, and told not to act, but to be themselves.
Ho-hum, I think old ladies not worrying whether you are eating right is unique to the US,
It's possible. Well, in America, old ladies who actually know you worry about these things. But the persistent advice, even meddling, of random people - we don't really have that. With the exception of the stereotypical Jewish mother. Maybe that's why I associate that behavior with Eastern Europe. I've only experienced it with Jews in America and in Russia. I mean, there is a difference between concern, and just not taking no for an answer! "Pretending that you already know the answer when you don't is not actually very helpful." ~Migeru.
At the end of the eighties, within the Eastern Bloc, Romania was particularly in bad shape economically. To my knowledge (but I shall be corrected if this is bad info), this had to do with something Ceauşescu did differently from his colleagues.
From the seventies, the Eastern Bloc states minus the USSR began to take Western credit, and spend it -- building up a growing debt. (I have read recently te claim that this was conscious policy by the West after they saw that revolutionary propaganda doesn't work after 1956 and 1968, but I wasn't convinced.) Ceauşescu, who followed a separate line since refusing to join the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, however decided one day that enough is enough: Romania shall pay back all its debt! Which came to be, cash-starving the already poor economy, bringing similar hardship as what followed only after the arrival of capitalism elsewhere. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
The way I know it, the execution was not the work of those who suffered, but orchestrated in secret by a circle in the Party/Army elite that long planned a coup and only used the unrest for their own benefit (Iliescu's rule being the end result), but I should read up on the state of research on this myself. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
One definite effect of the execution, and the fast publication of the videotape, was that the troops fighting for him gave up. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
Well like Stalin, Ceauşescu has his incorrigible fans, too. According to the latest poll I could find, 23% think he is the greatest Romanian politician of the last century (while 24% think he was the one doing the most damage over the same period).
