My attempts were rather timid because I was never good at promoting myself. I tweeted quotes about art, and each new follower made me happy as I knew I need many of them to create a platform. Ha-ha! Who thought by then that I will end up posting about politics alone?
The more I was into it, the more I realized that Twitter is very political, that there are ways to fight injustice beyond joining street demos, which hardly happen here in Germany anyway.
Was I interested in politics before? Yes. But I lacked the understanding of the bigger picture.
I was born in Romania, Timisoara (1961) at a time when life was not a struggle for survival and people could afford to live a decent life, but they lacked the freedom of speech and movement.
My town is situated close to the Hungarian and ex-Yugoslavian borders and was called the “little Occident” because of its vicinity to the West. We could watch international TV from the neighboring countries and were looking with envy to the liberties they enjoyed compared to the big prison we were living in.
Nobody believed in change, so the only hope seemed to be the escape to the West, legally or illegally.
I got my first radio receiver at the age of fifteen, and I started to pull out the antenna through the kitchen window every night to listen to Radio Free Europe, back then believed by many to be the ultimate voice of truth broadcasting inside the communist bloc.
By that time, things in my country got bad. I remember my parents having to wake up at 3:00 AM to stand in queues for meat, eggs or milk before going to work, and coming home late after having to wait in other queues for similar cupboard essentials, including oil and sugar.
Other issues like electricity shortage, warm water twice a week, and hardly any heating in winter solidified the dream to go West.
RFE, BBC, and etcetera, fed my frustration. What they omitted to say was that our suffering was caused by the West, that, after courting Ceausescu with advantageous credits, they were now blackmailing him into either paying everything back under harsh austerity conditions or bowing his head.
It was years after the so-called revolution that I found out the truth about both the RFE being a CIA mouthpiece and about how the IMF pushed us into misery.
I left Romania two years before the “uprising.” I first lived in Greece for a few years, then decided to come to Germany where most members of my dad’s family settled. As “ethnical Germans,” we could immigrate, after years of waiting and lots of bribe money paid to middlemen who negotiated the procedure.
It was in Greece where I first saw a big demonstration. The cradle of democracy in action! I was overwhelmed by the power of masses demanding their rights with one voice. My body was shivering all over, and I started to cry.
All the years in Romania I had to give up my external liberties to preserve my inner ones.
Did I radically change after leaving my country?
I was in the West, and I was free…I thought. Not enough, as I was still caught in my own alienation and prejudiced views about the world.
Having arrived in Germany, I first swallowed the news as being truthful, just like I did with RFE in my young years. The much-respected State Media in a great democracy can impossibly lie!
Somehow, I got stuck in the naive, adolescent view that the Western society is the only one respecting human values.
I was fine with everything, I didn’t question, and I kept living my little life until the war against Yugoslavia started.
To me, Yugoslavia was the perfect compromise between socialism and the free market. I admired their system, and I was shocked and heartbroken as I saw how the Western powers were destroying it.
This war was my political awakening where I started to look behind the curtain and try to understand the unknown mechanisms and interests that lead to such a disaster.
Already then, I was confronted with accusations for “backing the criminal Serbs.” I was called names, and even friends took distance from me for not swallowing the official narrative.
It is somehow sad that I feel more “at home” in the virtual world than among family and friends.
People around me don’t want to hear about carnage, famine, injustice…
Some say, “Don’t show me. It is too gruesome”. Others say, “I am too little to change anything in this world.”
They are wrong.
As I started to express myself on Twitter, I also felt at times there are just words in the wind until I discovered, and it made me remember the protest in Athens, that we are many speaking with one voice.
Now I am more focused and more organized trying to investigate one subject at the time. It is hard because everything is connected and the more you dig, the deeper the rabbit hole gets.
Collaborating with Vanessa taught me that conflicts are too complex as to be able to fully cover them all and that it is more important to concentrate on one card that could bring the whole house of lies to fall, just like it happened with the White Helmets.
After they were refused the Nobel Peace Prize, she told me: “Would be nice to believe” and I think she does, “that we contributed a whole lot to them being denied the award.”
This gives me the confidence that we can have an impact, no matter how insignificant we are, no matter how much we are brand marked as Putinists, Assadists or conspiracy theorists. Sooner or later, truth always prevails. Without truth, there can’t be justice, without justice, there can’t be peace. Who said that? MLK?
So, this is my long journey, and I am still on my way!
As I said, Carmen’s path to the forefront of this social media free-for-all was tentative, unusual, yet in some ways typical of all of us. My wife Mihaela is from the same Romania that Carmen recounted in her contribution, and their two stories intersect at key points. While Mihaela’s home in Bucharest underwent a different communism and revolution than that experienced in Timisoara, and while Carmen left the country much earlier than my wife, the truth of the West’s role is evident through both their experiences.
Mihaela tells me as I write this, “What Carmen probably never knew was that Ceausescu ended up paying off all of Romania’s debt”. So, while other debtor nations chose to extend their debts with the IMF and other lenders, Romanians suffered austerity and paid back everything they owed.[31]
Romania and Eastern Europe are in the center of Putin’s chess board, Syria is at the bottom center.
On September 17, 2015, New Eastern Outlook published my article entitled “Italy’s Role in a New European Disorder,” in which I outlined and differentiated the relative roles of honorable military commanders from their political counterparts. Of specific note was Italian Lieutenant General Giuseppe Bernardis, whose role in the Libya regime change and disdain for the business of war these days present a crystal ball view of current crises. I cited the Italian Air Force legend regarding arms sales and related military complaining. Bernardi’s part in the book by the Italian Air Force, “Missione Libia 2011. Il contributo dell-Aeronautica militare” reveals Italy’s part in operations Odyssey Dawn and Unified Protector, and his comments on arms dealers prove unarguably that a huge component of the Libya affair was armaments marketing. In answer to the question; “Is there a danger of Libya becoming more a marketing opportunity for aircraft than a military operation?” the general replied:
“We are built to mount operations — we are not built for demonstrations. Le Bourget (referring to the Paris Air Show) should stay in Paris and Farnborough (UK variant) should stay in the U.K. One can start talking about being combat-proven at the end of the operation, but not during. An operation is a serious thing.”[32]
31
Cornel Ban, Sovereign Debt, “Austerity, and Regime Change: The Case of Nicolae Ceausescu’s Romania”, in
32
Lt. Gen. Giuseppe Bernardis Chief of Staff, Italian Air Force, interview with