Litera I
 
IDEOLOGY

Science of guiding ideas taken to be valuable in themselves. We only had one ideology, Marxism-Leninism. Any other ideology was brutally rejected. (51)

In the ?80s I was a methodologist at the Center for Teachers? Training. My job was to organize the meetings, which could be either professional or aiming at indoctrination. I was also editor of the county journal ?Didactic Debates?. Meanwhile I passed the tenure exam, too, but some inner party instruction came to modify the ethics code of socialist labor that forbid acceptance of anyone who might not exhibit signs of moral-political rectitude fit for the teaching profession.

There were all sorts of communists, some were less humane and more indoctrinated, more inclined to fatalism and to discovering the evil everywhere, and others still preserved some conscience and could place things in a balance of good and evil. (I. P., 134)

ILLEGALITY

Very few people in Romania knew the laws and could draw the line between what was lawful and what was not. The legislation as well as the power of defining and applying it was in the discretionary hands of the party-state, so all the population could do was ?manage?. Even when it happened, on rare occasions, that the law was in favor of the individual, the decision still had to be received from an endless number of desks and with a little something for the persons behind them. Bribing worked, and so did ?knowing someone?.

As a matter of fact, laws were endlessly overwhelmed by ever newer ?provisions? and ?measures? pronounced ? on Ceausescu?s ?indications? ? by all sorts of ?party and state forums?. They were so insulting to the population, so unrealistic and overbearing that you couldn?t possibly abide by them, even if you wanted to. What really happened was that the party-state actually pushed the population in a general state of illegality, which was yet another means of enslaving it. We were all, with every gesture of our daily lives, guilty of something, liable to some penalty or other. In order to warm yourself, wash yourself, eat or work, you had to break some law or provision. (84)

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Martor nr 10/2005
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