O benfiquista alerta para se ter muito cuidado nas conduta de cada um , e pensar se de facto suas ações individuais ou estatais, as quais parecem normais corrententemente, não sejam elas amanhã consideradas crime grave. E você terá de sentar o trazeiro no mocho.
Quantos não andavam cegos com as ideologias dos fascismos, comunismos, nazismos, religiosimos, capitalismos, bureacratismos, oligarquismos, aristcracismos, plutocracismos, monarquismos e diabos a 4. Perderam o senso comum e deixaram de pensar por eles próprios por preguicite. Pensavam que estavam agindo corretamente segundo aquelas ideologias.
Depois quando aquela porcarias caíram, caíram também grandes preocupações e angústia nessa gente que andava na guloseima desses sistemas, a alimentarem-se disso desenvegonhadamente e sem códigos morais nem éticas. O único código que os regia era o apoio cego a esses sistemas e até matavam e esfolavam só para eles também terem direito a privilégios a dinheiros sujos.
Vendiam a alma ao diabo, e depois por fim, o diabo reclama a alma a eles e lhes despacham o resto para o purgatório, uma vida em sobressalto na cladestinidade, para os processos vergonhosos em tribunais, e depois despejados nas prisões para purgarem os pecados e nelas apoderecerem longe da humanidade.
Queremos dizer com isto que não venham depois dizer que não sabiam que aquilo seria considerado transgressão universal, e que a culpa era do sistema e nunca caíria sobre as pessoas individuais.
O artigo seguinte publicado hoje no New York Times conta as desculpas de um governador de um estabelecimento prisional Romeno, ao serviço de antigo sapateiro que chegou a presidente ditador estaliniano Romeno, Ceaucesco.
Diz ele que recebia ordens do sistema e tinha de as executar. Na posição dele, não há dúvida que muito da conduta daquela prisão dependia das ordens deste verdugo e não só das instruções do sistema. De qualquer dos modos, ele aceitou o lugar, o qual lhe dava imensos privilégios, portanto é responsável pelas atrocidades de tortura cometidas naquela pildra.
O velhote já tem 80 e tal anos e viveu sem ser inquietado durante muitos anos depois da queda daquele regime de terror. Mas teve sorte por as novas inteligências daquele país serem mais ou menos derivadas das do mesmas do passado. Apenas mudaram de nome e agem agora sob os códigos mais ou menos democráticos. Não estão dispostos a revoltear o passado. Obviamente!
New York Times 30 september 2013
In Trial, Romania Warily Revisits a Brutal Past
Cristian
Movila for The New York Times
Ramnicu Sarat
prison, which is 95 miles northeast of Bucharest, was reserved for political
offenders. More Photos »
Published:
September 29, 2013
BUCHAREST,
Romania — Remembered as a brutal sadist by inmates who managed to survive the
prisons he once ran, Alexandru Visinescu bubbles with violent fury. “Get away
from my door, or do you want me to get a stick and beat you?” the 88-year-old
former prison commander screamed recently when a reporter called at his fourth
floor apartment in the center of this capital city.
Multimedia
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and headlines.
Cristian Movila for The New York Times
Valentin
Cristea, 83, a former political prisoner from the Ceausescu dictatorship. More Photos »
Like other onetime servants
of the old Communist government, Mr. Visinescu — now a frail retiree with a
hunched back — does not like being disturbed. Until recently, he was not. He
was left alone with a generous pension and a comfortable apartment, surrounded
by black-and-white photographs of his fit, youthful self in uniform. He passed
his time with leisurely strolls in a nearby park.
His peace ended in early
September, when prosecutors in Bucharest announced that Mr. Visinescu would be put on trial over
his role in Communist-era abuses, the first case of its kind since Romania toppled
and executed the dictator Nicolae
Ceausescu in December 1989.
The case has opened a flood
of news media coverage here and raised hopes, however tentative, among victims
and their advocates that Romania may finally be following most of its neighbors
in Central and Eastern Europe in shaking off a national amnesia about its
brutal past and re-examining a culture of impunity that has fed rampant
corruption and constrained the country’s progress despite its entry into the
European Union in 2007.
In the eyes of many here,
the downfall and execution of Mr. Ceausescu merely removed the leader of the
old Communist Bloc’s most intrusive dictatorship, leaving the system beneath
largely intact. That continuity between the Communist and post-Communist elites
helps explain why resistance to a serious reckoning with past crimes has been
particularly strong in Romania, where there is still widespread nostalgia for
the Communist era.
“We are coming from very
deep and dirty waters,” said Laura Stefan of the Expert Forum, a Bucharest
group that campaigns to strengthen the rule of law. “Corruption has a big link
to the fact that we haven’t talked about our past,” she said. She welcomed the
prosecution of Mr. Visinescu as an encouraging sign, noting that “to even think
that these people are guilty and should pay is very new.”
A former work camp
commander, Ion Ficior, is also
under investigation and may face charges.
Still, Ms. Stefan doubts
that the authorities are “really serious” about putting Mr. Visinescu and
others in jail. “I am not optimistic at all,” she said.
Fueling those doubts is the
fact that Mr. Visinescu has been charged with genocide, which usually applies
only to efforts to liquidate, in part or entirely, a religious or ethnic group,
not to political repression. And the crimes he is said to have committed
stretch back more than half a century, predating the Ceausescu dictatorship,
which lasted from 1965 to 1989 and remains a far more politically delicate
period because so many members of Romania’s Communist establishment under
Ceausescu maintained positions of power even after the fall of the old regime.
The difficulty of making a
genocide charge stand up in a Romanian court — and then against any legal
challenge at the European Court of
Human Rights in Strasbourg, France — has raised concerns among
those who have long pushed for justice that the case could prove to be yet
another false start in the country’s fitful efforts to come to terms with its
past.
“They have charged him with
genocide just so they can close this file without a result,” said Dan Voinea, a
Romanian criminology professor who served as the prosecutor in the hasty Dec.
25, 1989, show trial of Mr. Ceausescu and his wife, Elena.
Romania’s political and
economic elites, Mr. Voinea said, are still dominated by former Communists,
their relatives and allies “who want to make sure that the crimes of Communism
are never unveiled and never prosecuted in a serious way.”
Indeed, critics of the
government say the prosecution of Mr. Visinescu was undertaken only because the
prosecutor received a detailed file from the Institute for the Investigation of
Communist Crimes, a semi-government body in Bucharest that researches cold
cases.
Romania under Mr. Ceausescu
was the most authoritarian, Stalinist government in Eastern Europe, a paranoid
nightmare in which one in 30 people worked as informers for the ruthless
security agency, the Securitate. Mr. Ceausescu’s repression of dissent was so
complete that Romanians were forbidden to own typewriters without a police
permit.
·
1
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George Calin
contributed reporting.
In Trial, Romania Warily Revisits a Brutal Past
Published:
September 29, 2013
(Page 2 of 2)
The General
Prosecutor’s office in Bucharest, headed by a former soldier who took part in
the shooting of protesters, or so-called terrorists, during the 1989 uprising
against Mr. Ceausescu, declined to discuss Mr. Visinescu’s case. It has not
explained why it chose to prosecute him with genocide, a crime that will be
very hard to prove but may offer a way around a statute of limitations on
lesser offenses.
Multimedia
Follow@nytimesworldfor international breaking news
and headlines.
Still, for many here, Mr.
Visinescu’s prosecution is significant for bringing a measure of accountability
for the first time to a penal system that, according to researchers at the
institute in Bucharest, not only subjected prisoners to physical and
psychological abuse but, at times, also sought the extermination of the
government’s opponents.
That was especially the
case at Ramnicu Sarat prison, 95 miles northeast of Bucharest, which was
reserved for political offenders singled out for harsh treatment. Mr. Visinescu
commanded the prison from 1956 until 1963.
“Evil now has a face in
Romania,” said Vladimir Tismaneanu, a University of Maryland professor who
headed a 2006 commission set up by the Romanian government to examine
Communist-era crimes in general. “It is one thing to have abstract evil, but
the public needs to see an individual.”
Aurora Dumitrescu, who was
arrested in 1951 at the age of 16 and sent to a women’s prison run by Mr.
Visinescu in the town of Mislea, remembers him as “a beast.” She said he
delighted in sending inmates to the “black chamber,” a dank, windowless
concrete room used for beatings and psychological torture. “For him we were all
just animals,” she said.
For his part, Mr.
Visinescu, who is accused of direct involvement in six deaths, told the
Romanian news media that he could not be held responsible for decisions made by
superiors.
Insisting that he had
“never killed anything, including a chicken,” Mr. Visinescu told Romanian
television that he had merely been carrying out prison rules dictated by the
General Directorate of Penitentiaries.
“Yes, people died,” he
said. “But people died in other places, too. They died here, there and
everywhere. The food and other conditions were all in accordance with the
program. If I hadn’t followed the program I would have been thrown out. Then
what would I have done?”
Even some of his victims
have some sympathy for his argument and wonder why only a relatively minor
figure from so long ago is being pursued.
“The chiefs are much more
guilty than he is — it was the system,” said Valentin Cristea, 83, the only
living survivor among the political prisoners sent to Ramnicu Sarat prison.
Mr. Cristea, a retired
electrical engineer who once designed listening devices for Romania’s Interior
Ministry, was first jailed in 1956, accused of belonging to a tiny
anti-Communist group headed by his aunt and her husband. He spent six years in
various jails, including Ramnicu Sarat.
Mr. Cristea said he was
never beaten by Mr. Visinescu but, while held in isolation like all other
inmates, heard the screams of prisoners who fell victim to the commander’s
violent rages. While insisting he has no thirst for revenge, Mr. Cristea says
he thinks it is important that the actions of Mr. Visinescu and his chiefs be
remembered.
“There should be big
photographs of these people in every town so that people can know they existed
and remember those terrible times,” he said.
Far from that, with the
exception of people directly implicated in the killing of unarmed civilians
during the murky 1989 uprising, including the defense minister at the time, no
significant figures in the organs of Communist power have been put on trial.
Efforts to bar former officials from office have all come to nothing.
When Mr. Tismaneanu’s
commission reported in 2006 that more than two million people were killed or
persecuted by Communist authorities, President Traian Basescu endorsed the
findings and said it was time to judge past crimes so as to lift “the burden of
an uncured illness.”
Members of Parliament booed
and jeered as he spoke. No prosecutions followed.
“They changed the name of
the system and its outward features, but its nature remained the same,” said
Anca Cernea, who runs a foundation dedicated to the rule of law and the memory
of political prisoners. “The people who are ruling now all come from this
system, so they don’t want to punish its crimes. They all say let’s forget and
move on.”
Mr. Visinescu, she added,
“is definitely a monster, but he is not the only one. They have thrown him to
the lions to save themselves. He committed crimes but not genocide.”
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1
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2
George Calin
contributed reporting.