If the volume or the press text were absolutely hostile to the communist regime or even to the Comrade and His Lady, the directly responsible people were fired and the withdrawn printings were burnt. Before the publication of a volume or the presentation of a film, the authors would usually find out which were the harmful sequences of those works. These were to be eliminated or modified. The negotiations between the author and the censor would start, as well as the appeals of the authors addressed to party instance higher than the censor, and finally, the complaints of the censor addressed to the same high instance. Most of the times, the authors would accept the mutilations imposed by the censor because otherwise the publication would have been blocked. Despite some lists of internal use, there never was a well-defined number of interdictions, so that everything could be ?interpreted?, thus censored. The allusions were called ?lizards?, a perfectly adequate metaphor. The slippery rapid lizard appears and disappears in tiny fissures, in interstices. Censors saw danger everywhere. Neron, volume published by Eugen Cizek in French is translated in Romanian in 1986 with the anodyne/dull title: ?Roman Sequence?. The change of the title presupposes a hallucinatory judgement of the editors. Firstly, the analogy between the malefic emperor and Nicolae Ceausescu, then the fear that any marked mention in the title of Nero?s name would make the readers think of the Romanian dictator.

It is said that the first retrospective exhibition of Corneliu Baba lasted very little because of the cycle of paintings ?The mad king?. The song Lino, Leano, the word has it, was censored because of the homonymy with Elena Ceausescu which could have harmed the august person. The portraits of Nicolae Ceausescu were banned and replaced after they noticed that the smiling figure had only on ear visible. The president, multiplied thousands of times, was wrong in the upper story. Even the proverbs in which one found out about the ruin of the household in which the cow was more important than the bull were censored. All the folklore had decided that the true malefic leader of Romania was Her, the Comrade, therefore the proverbial cow undoubtedly referred to the highly revered Elena.

In the Soviet Union, there was a joke in the ?60s about a guy who was a little crazy and spoke his mind. He was sitting in a cinema watching the News when at a certain moment he exclaimed: ?Look at that pig from the government!? On the screen the figures of Hrusciov and Kennedy appeared. The lights went on, then two sturdy fellows grab the poor man who can hardly mutter: I was talking about the American, not the? Never mind, we can figure out ourselves who is the pig from the government. Obviously, the censor is a double-sided being: he protects a regime whose weaknesses he knows all too well. In its normal status, censorship has many fissures through which the truth gets out, but pushing this to the limit, in pathological cases, all the works become suspicious, nobody is ideologically sane.