Twenty years ago, three paratroopers shot Elena and Nicolae Ceausescu, rulers of Communist Romania, to death. Footage of the event, along with the hour-long secret trial, aired on Romanian television later that day. Christmas day. Do You Hear What I hear? Frosty the Romanian. Feliz Navi-dead.
Details are murky, though news outlets try to present the ruse of an objective account. Words like “revolution,” “coup,” “uprising,” and “justice” are all bandied about with doses of certainty. Still, all that remains certain is how few will ever know the facts around the execution of the Ceausescus, as well as the change in power, though many will make claims for knowledge. Meanwhile, people continue to quest for that dusty old grail: Truth.
Somewhat inexplicably, Christmas has the power to make something like a quest appear reasonable when it would normally seem silly. That doesn’t mean it isn’t scary, scary like The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, by L. Frank Baum. And seeing people hunting down Truth, in Romania or elsewhere, terrifies me. It has a way of oppressing people and ideas into authoritarian categories of what is right, what is wrong, what is irrelevant.
Bloody photographs of Nicolae Ceausecu are still relevant. The shredded brain of Elena too. And I’m quite sure it’s wrong, televised or not. Regardless of the facts, it stands that Christmas tidings in 1989 brought a few of the consequences of unilateralism onto screens around the world. But when Christmas gifts are bullet wounds, and Christmas tales are of bloody retribution, you have to wonder who would want to receive them, and what good could it ever do. Zealous Christians preaching the “singular path” ought to take notice. American patriots and Romanian kleptocrats too.
Have you been naughty? Because on television, killers killed die and die again.
[...] are gods of all of these places, that our god is worth more than theirs. Not once have I lost blood in slow motion and I am not certain if the loss of it requires all of this detail—time already [...]
[...] sometimes the bad guys aren’t pure evil, and the good guys aren’t pure good. When this happens, the officers begin to contemplate. Life and meaning are called into question. [...]
I remember these pictures, yet I have only partly faded memory about the events being just 10 year old that time, but it was indeed some bizarr moments at home. We sat in front of the tele, and watched these pictures through the hungarian national television.
We had no revolution, but seeing these happening in Romania it was obvious, that this was the last nail for the coffin of communism in Europe…
[...] are gods of all of these places, that our god is worth more than theirs. Not once have I lost blood in slow motion and I am not certain if the loss of it requires all of this detail—time already [...]
[...] sometimes the bad guys aren’t pure evil, and the good guys aren’t pure good. When this happens, the officers begin to contemplate. Life and meaning are called into question. [...]