When I left you, you were poor and stupid, when I returned I found you again, even poorer and even more stupid. - Constantin Brâncuși

Constantin Brâncuși was a Romanian artist that lived between 1876 and 1957 that left home at the age of 9 due to parental carelessness and poor conditions in order to find a better future elsewhere. Even though there are many stories that surround Brâncuși, for what it concerns this section, a case is made about mis-appropriation of prestige on the shallow grounds of origin. Mr. Brâncuși found most of his fame outside of Romania, or rather, as we would wish to imply, mainly explicitly due to leaving Romania, such that even though Romanians feel entitled to his magnus opus, Romania is simply not entitled to claim that Brâncuși ever was a Romanian sculptor.

One can use simple predicative logic to prove that Mr. Brâncuși is anything but Romanian and just making the judgment that iff. Mr. Brâncuși would not have left Romania, then none of this artworks would have come to fruition, given his condition and being at odds with the Romanian state, such by making Mr. Brâncuși Romanian, all his artworks could not have been created, which leads to a paradox. The harsh reality for Romanians is that Mr. Constantin Brâncuși, as much as Romanians would like to bask in the borrowed fame, is perhaps French, where he met an environment that allowed him to flourish, or maybe even German or American. Quite interestingly, historical records show that in multiple years, Romanian authorities attempted to destroy some of the artworks that had been made by Mr. Brâncuși, sometimes on the political grounds of the times, namely during communism, that the area hosting his sculptures had bourgeois influences and hence has betrayed the people (the incentive to drag everyone down to the same level), or otherwise even for scoring a profit out of the material that the artworks were assembled from. As an interesting parallel, if you listen to any of Mr. Ceausescu's discourse, a re-occuring theme is the longing for "specialists", with the claim that Romania is unable to produce capable individuals themselves, a theme that has bellowed for Romanians across time, from their dark past and up to modern times when the same theme re-occurs and with Romanian consistently destroying their own values.

The case of the Romanian "Integrated Information System", spells out a worrying reality that make Romania "security" agencies seem more like moral police (or, as labeled by activists, due to profound breaches of intimacy, as "protocols of the soul"), typically what Muslim states are accused of, especially given that the concerns, as spelled out in the image above greatly exceed opposition to any real adversary but rather seem more like a way to illicitly obtain blackmail material that will undoubtedly be used against both Romanian nationals and foreign nationals.

Ironically, "moral transgressions" seem to go hand-in-hand with Romania's very long backlog of crimes ranging from human-rights abuses and up to mass-murder (ie: the Danube-Black Sea Channel, being mostly referred to by historians as a work/extermination camp) that went unaccounted for with the Romanian justice system being either unable or deliberately avoiding the prosecution of responsible individuals (even those whose crimes are accounted for in documents and are backed by hard evidence).

The excuses for mass-surveillance, especially coming from a society that deep down refutes the contributions of the Magna Carta with a strong preference towards feudal structures, are simply moot and are unfortunately, not solely the rogue actions of some bad apples within the surveillance apparatus, but rather one of the fundamental pillars of Romanian governance (for instance, the fact that most phone-call interceptions enacted by Romanian surveillance had, in fact, judicial backing).

One of the most discussed cases in post-modern Romanian history is the case of Marius and Ruth Bodnariu, two individuals in Norway with Marius Bodnariu being a Romanian citizen, that had their children seized due to Mr. Bodnariu running his family along the lines of right-about any family in Romania with the notorious double-standard application of violence towards children, which is still very much acceptable today, and part of a much larger problem, in spite of dysfunctional child protection services that are only there as duds but will not take action.

The confiscation of the Bodnariu's children by the Norwegian child support services lead to funny headlines sprawled across the internet, one more hilarious than the other, as well as street protests and demonstrations held in Romania and Norway against the actions of the Norwegian authorities even though they were well within their right to seize the children due to the physical abuse. Whilst the infatuation is just casual for the Romanian people, the other problem is the religious fanatics that unfortunately seemed to have picked the wrong side to pitch for. The Bodnariu family turns out to be highly religious, even with their children following biblical names, yet it is important to understand that the case of physical violence against children is not of religious origin (and frighteningly, the so-called Christians attempted to defend the counter-point) but rather of ethnic origin with violence against children (formerly, women) being socially acceptable. In other words, the religious crowd tried to defend the case for "acceptable violence", in spite of the fact that Mr. Bodnariu is literally hiding behind a religious shield, with the normalized upbringing of labeling violence against children taking its toll. Aside from pitching for the wrong kind of people, the Bodnariu family is also part of the penticostal religion that has wreaked havoc in Romania, due to pandering to families with meager financial capabilities and then raising their children under the same obligation scheme as the mafia, deploying them as soldiers on demand later on when and if they occupy important positions. Mr. Bodnariu end up working for ROMATSA, a state-agency that would more than likely make Mr. Bodnariu at least a selection of Romania's criminal security-state.

One of the heritages of Sovietism has been the reclassification of "science" or namely "scientist" as a profession to a "work occupation" with the Romanian language essentially missing a word for "scientist" in the sense of a profession (just like the Romanian language misses "privacy" as an abstract concept, which is very telling of the society itself). Speculating, the re-classification is due to Soviet influence and thereby Romania's desire to obliterate the middle-class due to such occupations being considered "bourgeois" and pretentious for the mean-average person. Alas, because actions entail consequences, the reality of the matter is that since the fall of the Iron Curtain, science in Romania is moot, the playing field being mostly lined with scam-conferences, late cold-war habits, older ties (ie: the good old guys) and sometimes even some of the more shadier stuff. People of value generally have a tendency to leave and this is not due to some anti-patriotic feelings, but rather a trivial consequence of the antithesis that free-thinking cannot be enacted within a space that does not want free-thinking in the first place. Just like accession to Schengen, the main misunderstanding of people is that Romania is not, as it would like to seem, a beggar country, but rather a country that prefers to auto-sabotage itself for the purpose of eschewing leverage to be used for other purposes, or for the purposes of the "important people" for whom normal legislation does not apply to.

In spite of citing themselves as allies, Romania is profoundly anti-American, but not in the layman's sense of "liking people" but rather in the fundamental sense in terms of baseline beliefs, held opinions, foundational values and policy.

Romania is a collectivist top-down society, turned into some sort of anarcho-oligarchy with a management similar to Soviet dynamics with the feuds at the bottom and the "leadership", an ounce of economic power in the wake of the fall of communism, at the proverbial "top" of society. Romanians will frequently opt for non-democractic or non-free measures across the board, frequently heard demanding executions, making people suffer, stronger emphasis on religion, wide-spread xenophobia as well as frequently manifesting medieval outlooks on matters of sex, education, women, etc.

The mind-bender is that historically speaking Romania does seem more-or-less aligned with the USA so the basic question is, how come you get from being admirers of the US to the actual difference of view on life between Romanians and people in the US. In reality, like many other nations, Romania enjoys the bling of the US but they will not do the actual walk to ensure the same set of conditions for themselves, whether that reflects in state policy or in terms of views on life.

The brass that grew in the wake of World War 2 and then Communism had the primordial concern of control, given that a small country cannot be self-sustaining, such that implicitly any globalism, open-borders or any sort of international-cooperation was seen to periclitate the positions of power that the governance held. This adds more to the difference between the two mindsets where the governance of a country like Romania realizes that without etho-centrism and closed-borders, Romanians, just like any other individuals, will just opt for "the competition" and would wander off to whomever can provide a better deal. In some ways, this is the continuation of closed-border communist policies, packaged as some sort of ethno-centrism or "patriotism", yet sold out to the masses in order to ensure that Romanian governance maintain their positions of power and control over the entire society. Furthermore, Romania has been governed as a Soviet state, that exchanged natural resources in exchange for coin, that would end up percolated by "people of power" down to the people very similar to Russian satescraft, such that the concept of "services" or reaching into matters such as "art", "sciences" or even "craftsmanship" was seen more or less like a bourgeois endeavor and an entitlement, which, in turn, made "democratic rights" more of an infatuation rather than a necessity. In that context, obviously, for a Romanian, not being criticized is more important than free speech and it would much rather be preferred to do away with some shame in exchange for controlled speech.

It is clear that there is always a difference between groundwork policy and the actual implementation thereof, with the US being lined with very many interests groups that could have anti-democratic tendencies, yet as it stands Romanians would not see the benefits in very many of just the fundamental groundwork of a democratic society. For instance, there are entire generations in the wake of the Romanian revolution that grew up with Western media, however their contact with said media has only been purely prophylactic, in the sense that at the time the many songs, movies and thought patterns were "trendy" or "fashionable" such that Romanians ended up adopting them for simple purposes such as "FOMO", virtue signalling and being in-line with everyone else. Given that censuses show that of young Romanians hold authoritarian views, it stands to reason that while you will find someone dancing, say, to Dire Straights, or being a fan of the band but will concomitantly hold "traditional family" or anti-LGBT views. Pointing out to one of these young people that the media or lyrics withing the songs even contain passages that would hint to completely opposed views that they hold, would actually have them surprised.

In turn, control mechanisms and the European Community hold part of the blame, for over-financing a system that did not even think about changing and that presented a front-facing or "aspectual democracy" that did not correspond to any internal mechanism that would be truly democratic. It became a culture where it was clear that no matter the failure, no matter the abuse and no matter the transgression, Romania was "developing" with the E.U. subsidies being more or less unconditional and unsanctioned such that the E.U. ended up garnering a layer of individuals, mostly former communist turncoats, that became a perpetual government. Receiving unconditional funding just encouraged a "laissez-faire" politics where just the competition to be part of this layer of "rules" became primordial. The wealth-disconnect went so far that the term "political class" was coined, even though, these ruling people in terms of numbers were an extremely small minority.

Stupid Florentines, we have to save that mesmer…

Following the execution of Ceausescu, it is worth nothing that all the people that show up in the public, in particular, the sum of people that "took over" the national television TVR, all had varied degrees of involvement with the Romanian communist party and, for the most part, were far from constituting some sort of "resistance" against the Romanian communist party. Mr. Ion Illiescu, for example, that showed up as the centerpiece of the short TVR broadcast at the revolution proclaiming that the dictator had been removed, was, in fact, a lauded member of the communist party, a well-known member that had portraits of him placed up on the walls of schools and a full member of the Romanian youth and communist party. Note that these homages would not have been bestowed in Romanian communism to the weary, for example, just being a member of the youth communist party or the communist party at large would have granted the member the right to own another property (and the prices back then were negligible), along with many, many other economic benefits that definitely could not be chalked up to just "ideological gratification". In other words, in hindsight, the revolution seems more of putsch of a small sum of members that decided that shoving Mr. Nicolae Ceausescu aside would have gotten them more privilege than they already had but could not be attributed to some "grassroots movement", at least for the political figures that were public before-and-after the revolution, working in secret against some abstract concept of tyranny.

With that being said, even modernly and definitely at the time of writing, the Romanian state is a state where the powers, authorities or institutions within the state act as one as the complete opposite of the notion of "separation of state powers". There is no competition between state institutions and very little questioning on whether the requests or procedures as part of the communication between them take place in a totally legal (or ethical, if that must be specified) frame. For example, a Romanian prosecutor might be able to call up, say, the ministry of health in Romania and request some papers on some individual that is currently being investigated; now, even without a subpoena or anything that would denote some legal procedure and with proportionality in mind, the ministry will just hand over the papers without even questioning the request. It would also work in reverse, as "one hand washes the other" goes, such that when the police would like to silent an individual, they would just ask the medical system to deem them crazy and thereby discredit them to the point of their testimony not having any credibility due to being declared insane (fortunately though, only in past-and-present Romania).

For example, the Romanian constitution forbids certain people from voting with "insane" being a translation of the Romanian word "debil" or "mentally alienated" with "debil" being a Latin word debilis meaning "weak, frail, feeble, modernly interpreted by languages stemming from Latin as moron or idiot showing that extra exquisite narcissism of Romanian governmental fascism that took Plato's republic as an instruction manual by prohibiting the weak and the feeble from voting:

Article 36 of the Romanian constitution, "Right to Vote", paragraph (2); "Nu au drept de vot debilii sau alienaţii mintal, puşi sub interdicţie, şi nici persoanele condamnate, prin hotărâre judecătorească definitivă, la pierderea drepturilor electorale."

Given that the constitution mentions these exclusions, it is questionable how the team at https://www.worldpolicycenter.org/ was able to draw the following info-graphics that would claim that Romania provides even constitutional protections for people with disabilities when, in fact, such people are even denied the right to vote as the primordial mark of a democracy.

Does the legislation explicitly prohibit indirect discrimination on the basis of disability?	Does the constitution explicitly guarantee equality or non-discrimination for persons of disabilities?

If you look up the official translation of the Romanian constitution on presidency.ro into English, then you will notice that the translation fudges both "debil" as "mentally deficient" but leaves "mentally alienated" alone, which is a mis-translation of the original text and of the term "debil", which also means weak and feeble. If you are Romanian, then you know that that this mis-translation is more than likely deliberate in order to avoid international scrutiny.

Can you see why discussions on anti-semitism, generalized "hate", "incels" or "lone gunment" as well as other "import-scandals" are tough to judge within the same legal frame than other countries, especially when the government itself via its own constitution carefully words the right to vote by banning the weak, frail and feeble from voting? The talks on "anti-semitism" and the "holocaust" as well as the oppression of marginalized groups has only been used to arrest one-or-two lone gunmen that look negligible when they're placed next to the many cases of institutionalized oppression considering the atrocious conditions in Romanian hospitals or the conditions of Romanian orphanages some with practices that look like they are grossly violating the principles established by the proceedings of the Nuremberg trials, given the lack of the ability to consent. We also have to consider that the exceptions that the Romanian right-to-vote targets, namely the "debils" and "mentally alienated" constitute a very small percentage of the total population, such that these exceptions do not seem to prevent or protect the Romanian state from much, just given their sheer statistical insignificance in terms of numbers, such that such formulations just look like a shameless display of fascism. Furthermore, it seems a continuation of the Romanian Securitate and the communist "unistate" where bastardizations are created along the lines of "using psychological data" for legal prosecutions which is a hallmark of the past that seems to be having a resurgence in modern times. Nevertheless, institutions aside, Romania does have "secret laws", and some degree of "collaboration" between the criminal world and the official one, such that mixing those two together, with very many cases in the past that looked like political hits rather than some enactment of justice, which results in a justice system that is not worth much. A query along the former lines was sent to worldpolicycenter.org and here it is, for your viewing pleasure:

Even though most people would call this some form of corruption that decays fundamental principles justice, the Romanian government apologetically considers that this "communication" is natural and goes without saying mostly because Romanians interpret the government in a "feudal" frame, where the "government" is not a servant of the people, by the people, or rather, is just mentioned as such within formalities, but the government is rather seen as some form of "ruling" in a Nietzschean master-slave dynamic. In the Nietzschean sense, Romania establishes a triangle where some powers at the top might be competing with each other, with the reserve that the competition between the various politicians is mostly for material gains rather than ideological differences, but also with a third component being "the people", with "the people" being mostly seen as "the ruled" in a feudal sense very similar to the Narodnost dynamics highlighted by Martti J. Kari. More than often, the proverbial conveyor belt between institutions are the very many Romanian "security agencies" that have the tendency to strongarm judicial processes by interfering under the guise of "security". However, that is not something too new because even the political processes is hampered by "extreme measures", such as declaring a "state of emergency" just for the purpose of bypassing various chambers of the state in order to enact laws that might not even have passed if the complete political processes would have been followed. This is possible due to the conditions of a "state of emergency" being shallow enough to qualify from anything ranging from war to "economic hardships", the latter being trivial for a country like Romania.

Given the historical context, as well as the observed realities (such as Romania being rated BBB- on international markets), the question of "agency" comes up where it is unsure why Romania would have any credibility at all. Would this have been communism, the usual reaction would have been some other "extreme measures", ranging up from falsifying the data reported to the international scene and then followed by "extreme measures" to silence any dissent. Unfortunately, in an international frame, due to joining international organizations, Romania is still beholden to international agreements that it cannot violate as easily as it can internally by less-than-Orthodox means. Snuffing out "free speech" or outright admitting that Romania is still a "state of gang" that does not follow the judicial path generates noise that scare the international markets away and ultimately member states would criticize Romania for the affront to democratic processes. However, within Romanian higher echelons, given that the situation has not changed much and that the very same Stasi measures that were used in communism are still in effect, there is still a very deep longing for the old Romanian communist state where the selection of privileged people that had the power and now still have the power had a much easier time in subverting any sort of equitable processes in order to rule the Romanian people and the state by the fist. Regrettably, there is no way back except, maybe, by eroding democratic principles or establishing antecedents where Romania would be able to point fingers at their international partners and claim that they are the same and would do the same.

The cringe part and for other Europeans the problem is that in spite of the overwhelming corruption or the rampant criminality, Romania still officially figures as full and respectable member of the EU and NATO, with full access to all the international levers at their disposition as their international colleagues. This is somewhat of a problem because it seem antithetical to put together a country that is rated BBB- with a country that is rated AAA and expect some sort of "uniform" implementation of justice - if you are policeman in Germany, and say you are governed by a certain set of ethics, rest assured that a policeman in Romania would stoop much, much lower than you and on the very same topics. This is also trivial, say, in the evaluation of, say, prisons, with the irony that Romanian criminals "prefer" to be jailed in Italy due to the inhumane treatment within Romanian prisons. Nevertheless, even though the former establishes that there is a massive difference in terms of sheer "ethics" between countries in the EU, for whatever official mechanisms, those evaluations are irrelevant and a corrupt Romanian state is technically to be placed at the same level of respect of any other EU state - otherwise, Romania would even have a claim on "discrimination" and "racism" (which is something that has been pushed a lot by Romania, albeit, we'd argue deliberately, for leverage and hardly for the benefit of "the Romanian people" that are completely powerless in the Romanian system of governance).

As a case study, in a recent case regarding a fugitive from Romania that attacked a policeman with a sword and then fled to Norway, it would be difficult to judge whether the claims made by the Romanian police are sound or untarnished given established antecedents, in order to cooperate with the Romanian police and hand over the custody of the fugitive. Even in terms of profession, two chemists in two different countries are still the same and interchangeable, two biologists the same and also the very same reasoning applies to the Romanian police such that it becomes very difficult to contradict Romanian officials and even in spite of ghastly past transgressions without being called a bigot (which, unfortunately, seems to be the capital sin of the decade). Clearly, if a Norwegian police officer can be fired on diversity charges whilst Romanian authorities are free to openly slander minorities, then diversity claims, while still valid, would have to be constrained to local contexts and would not be transitive across jurisdictions. Similar for any other transgressions and punishments, which will always be unbalanced between extremely poorly performing countries and countries that perform much better. For what it is worth, the gradient from bad to good does not curve too much, with countries like Germany, France and the United Kingdom being all very good performers and with the former Soviet block being mostly the bad performers with a huge gap between them. Although this judgement holds true with the European Union, it also holds trivially true outside of the EU, with, say "France" being a country with a better judicial process than, say, "Somalia", which is a funny statement to make, if only these processes would not affect the lives of people.

On the other hand, given the established "state of gang" with a system that is made to distinguish between "the ruled" and "the rulers", it is very difficult to even pitch the concept of "democracy" to Romanian officials. Due to this established "state of gang", a person that would "be lucky" to run along with the rest of Romanian dignitaries would be able to make a lot of money over a very short time-span, with the involvement within the political apparatus not seen as "maybe something that I'd like to do because I like politics (and Plato)" but rather some sort of golden lottery ticket inspired from the "Slumdog Millionaire" movie. As an example, just for being part of the EU parliament results in wages never seen before on the "regular market" in Romania as high as 8500 euros per month as well as a life-long pension fund that would even dwarf the intrinsic impulse to say, become a scientist or an artist. Telling Romanian officials that somehow they would have to give up on hoarding access to this revenue in favor of sharing with the people is just simply a downright bad economical suggestion. Instead of pocketing funds, you'd have to build roads through villages of people, many of whom would be unable to say in which galaxy humans find themselves, or whether the moon is made of cheese or not, which seems like a fool's errand with very little personal rewards given the economic disparities even internationally.

Under these circumstances, quite frankly, any delegation that would pitch "an open society" with "accountability" and "responsibility" as goals or suggesting that there should be some "rule of law", should in "tactical terms", be thrown out by Romanian officials because that would indeed make governance some sort of civil servants. With that said, it's clear that the issue with a country like Romania in terms of separation of powers, does not hinge on "a few bad apples", "young men not working" or other frou-frou media-psychological terms but rather on a crass dichotomy of the people into "the ruled" and "the ruling" that is intrinsic to the country itself. Any future bet on "a democratic society", structured while being inspired from US society, is not only an unaffordable risk to the Romanian oligarchical structure that would have to wait decades before they would be able to reap what they sow now, but also would not produce too much reward in the short run for anyone that would go at length to make sacrifices "for the people" in order to implement the necessary changes.

It is clear that under these circumstances of "familiar faces", Romanians did opt for a more equitable form of governance, which ultimately includes the grand corpus of the individuals that did indeed seek the ending of the communist regime and not necessarily out of sheer self-interest. Given Romanian communist isolationism where individuals were unable to travel outside of the country, one of the gains in terms of globalization for Romania would have been third-party arbitration due to local governance lacking any credibility, such that becoming a connected country would have allowed third party and foreign powers to mediate the internal mechanisms to ensure that atrocities such as the "Danube-Black Sea canal" or the "Pitesti phenomenon", labor camps respectively extermination camps, as features of Romanian communism (a few terms to look up for light reading) would not repeat itself. Perhaps the emerging dangers of a globalized world would be the opposite result where a globalized world would only be joined at the hip in terms of governance, such that corrupt countries like Romania, would in fact, become less free with the "ruling oligarchy" becoming "freerer" instead of the people. The former would constitute an expansion of criminal-governance, "extreme measures" and other behaviors only formerly typical of communist regimes, to nations that never experienced such phenomenons and even worse, ending up adopting such anti-civil tactics to the gains of "the ruling few". As an example, we can now back-reference the https://www.worldpolicycenter.org/ website and ask whether Romania is marked as "green" as a favor because otherwise, given the actual constitution, there would be no reason why it should be marked as a country that respects the equality of people with disabilities when the right to vote itself is curbed (and that is, without even more terse discussion of how the term "debil" found itself being used in the article in the first place).

As a more recent case-study, it is even questionable whether the Romanian state would be even able to function without corruption, given say, a clever individual that would be able to stay entirely on the side of the law and yet perceivably damage Romania otherwise. Hits and scores such as Mr. Călin Georgescu becoming an elect president have been reported to be actually legal in terms of written and organic law, such that either making up laws or applying laws retroactively, which is, in itself, illegal, seems to be the only possible way invalidate a competition that has been won at the time with the players being compliant with the rules of the game. To all of that a note of characteristically-Romanian pornography is added where individuals that manage to accomplish such feats while still compliant with the law, are struck with barbaric albeit barbaric punitive measures that make a mockery of "proportionality", such as "25 years of jail", the maximal sentence that Mr. Călin Georgescu faces, that by far exceed say, the incarceration time of a rapist or match the incarceration time of a murderer (life, or 15 to 25 years as per Article 189, paragraph (h) of the Romanian penal code), just on the basis of being a phenomenally sore looser of a country. As a diametrically-opposed opinion, Mr. Călin Georgescu should be thanked, given pats on the back and even paid a sum for discovering a way to subvert the system while still being legal and then and only then should the mechanisms be built behind to ensure that this situation does not happen again, yet far be it from a narcissistic and pugilistic Romanian gang to admit that they have been beaten to a pulp by a magician specializing as a mesmer in the book of magic.