Romanian Miners vs. Antifa | 1990 vs. 2017

I was thinking of writing this post for some time now. I'll try to make it as short as possible and not go into too much history because it's a very long and complicated one.

As some may know, Romania after the second World War fell under the communists and remained that way for almost half a century. In December 1989 Romanians decided they had enough, said "f@ck this sh!t" and started a revolution. After days of fighting between civilians and the army and hundreds upon hundreds of deaths, it all ended on Christmas day, when, after a simulacrum of a trial, the communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife were shot dead by a firing battalion. Yeah, it happened on Christmas day.

Fast forward a few months later, in the spring of 1990 the first general elections took place. Romanians had to choose between two sides. Either vote for the left-wing parties, which were basically formed by and with communists from the second and third ranks of the now-ex Communist Party. Or, they could choose the newly formed right-wing parties, which weren't actually new. These right-wing parties had a long history in Romania but were made illegal during the communist regime and those that were right-leaning sympathizers were jailed/tortured/killed.

With these two options, Romanians overwhelmingly chose the ex-communists-now-socialists.

A 'few' Romanians were upset by the results of the elections and said "f@ck this sh!t" again and took to the streets. In a Occupy Wall Street style, over 100 000 Romanians occupied one of the larges squares in the capital city Bucharest and staid there day and night for over a month, protesting and demanding a new set of elections.

The newly elected ex-communists-now-socialists had a big problem on their hands. They couldn't really repress the protests with the help of the army or the police because that would have sent the wrong message both to the general population and the Western democratic countries. It would have resembled too much the repression that the communist regime tried just a few months earlier during the revolution. It would have been a PR nightmare.

So, the newly elected president of the country, Ion Iliescu, and his associates decided to solve the problem with the help of an organized civilian group: the miners. He ordered the syndicalist leaders of the miners to rally them up, gave them trains and other means of transportation and in just a few days they arrived in the capital city. Needless to say, they were very 'efficient' in what they were ordered to do.

They basically beat the living sh!t out of everyone that was protesting in the market and in just a few days the anti-communist protest was over. Some people died and many more were injured in the beatings of the miners. The headquarters of the right-wing parties were also trashed and destroyed.

After the massive violence and mess caused by the miners, the president thanked them, on public television, for "liberating" the square from what he called "fascists and hooligans". The miners were used in the same way a few more times in the years after 1990. Ion Iliescu was elected once more as president in 1992 and a third time in 2000. Also, the head of the Ministry of Transportation, Traian Basescu, who was responsible for facilitating the miners with trains and other means of transportation, was elected twice the mayor of Bucharest in 2000 and 2004, and twice as the president of the country in 2004 and 2009. Let's just say Romanians aren't very skilled when it comes to electing their representatives and leave it at that.

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Every time I see these radical left-leaning Antifa protests in the US and Western Europe, I'm reminded of how the Romanian miners were used by the socialist/communist politicians as a civilian group for causing unrest in society and violently repressing any dissent toward their socialist policies. This is a very worrying issue that should be taken into consideration much more seriously.

Every time I hear these Antifa people saying how they are fighting the fascists and white supremacists and how they are justified to use whatever means, it reminds me how the Romanian president Ion Iliescu called those people in the market exactly that, fascists. From a historical perspective, what's happening now in the so-called Western countries is a very worrying trend. The fast pace at which communism, masked as socialism, is growing in the West is truly remarkable in a negative way.

Who knows?! Maybe that's what is needed in the end. For the US to fall under a communist regime and experience the horrors and failures of this cancerous ideology that destroys everything it touches. If that would happen, the whole world would be f@cked.

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I've tried to put together a short video showing the violence of both the Romanian miners and Antifa. Please be advised, graphic content ahead.