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.

Modernly however, Romanians have constantly tried to re-patriate his artwork, as well as being obsessed about repatriating his remains (a Romanian thing), with numerous scandals and scoffing entitled Romanian celebrities (whether political or not) making claims that Constantin Brâncuși somehow belongs to the Romanian patrimony. Most of Mr. Brâncuși work has however remained outside of Romania and it is only poetic how Romanians are running after the little bits of pieces, like his fallout scraps, trying to assemble them together, just for the sake of claiming that they have any national-identity, other than vagrants and even therefore vandalizing the memory of Constantin Brâncuși that only found solace in any place other than Romania.

Surveillance and/or espionage is wrongly deemed to be a subset of security. The concern of privacy activists has been over the years that the agencies involved (or, as Molvania would have it, "the 35 different security agencies") are granted too much power and end up being corrupt.

For instance, 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.

In the context of the discussion involving Romania's membership to the Schengen area, Schengen membership will grant Romania and thereby the aforementioned Romanian security services access to technology, databases and similar devices that would allow Romania to put the collected blackmail material to use.

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).

In the context of the international scene, the problem scales up due to Romania's membership to the European Community as well as The North Atlantic Treaty, that give the organizations that Romania is part of a bad name. For instance, while a clash of values concerning various rights spanning from free-speech to LGBTQ rights, between the west and the east can be seen as a debate, a state such as Romania not conveying the rights that they themselves have agreed to convey is not a matter of clash of value systems but rather damasks Romania as a fraudulent state.

It is even questionable whether Romanian espionage should be judged under "espionage" and illicit breaches of privacy or whether the espionage should be judged as … maybe theft, something that might be easier for Romanians to understand. Even though that seems snarky or edgy, it opens the question whether the firms, companies and/or corporations that would have been happy to do business with Romania, did not shy away on the guise that they might be spied upon. Ultimately, every company has their inner-magic and their own way to do business, which is something that a company would not want to be stolen and given the precedents and antecedents, it seems trivial that the proverbial Molvanian 34 "security" agencies would just love to take a foothold in such companies. Naturally, the industrial secrets stolen would probably end up being sold, given that Romania does not have any significant capabilities to speak of in order to not attract attention. Certainly the KFC secret would be spilled in Romania. Even in the "meager" terms of Wizardry and Steamworks, we consider both "espionage", "industrial espionage" and/or "theft" to be the accusations brought towards the Romanians (compared to other countries, as quoted, Romania contains an off-the charts membership to espionage services such that we permit ourselves to run with Romanians, in general, given the large participation of individuals).

Given the experience of Romanians generally acting as organized crime abroad, notably becoming some of the main proponents of violent crime and/or theft in states such as the United Kingdom, reaching so far as to attract the direct hatred of politicians, one side-problem that comes up is the question whether Romanians and the Romanian state, that are mostly aware of crimes committed abroad, will not attempt to profit off the access that Schengen and an unified criminal system would granted them, in order to extort money or favors off people that have been formerly involved with various criminal aspects.

Most of this can be said in context where historically speaking Romanians have oppressed the Roma population, pushing them to becoming police informers, with the promise to look away from some of the committed crimes, or also the Romanian Securitate that has been praying on young promising students with the purpose of ensnaring them to become part of the surveillance state. Of course, there is still the larger context of mass-murder, genocide and the fact that most Romanians are still, as per country evaluations, skeptical on matter of the holocaust. Most of the younger generations are not really being taught in schools, the darker sides of their own history, or rather it is brushed over and coated in heroism and that is observably, deliberately so, or it would create a mental schism between the mainstream propaganda even fortified in schools, and the harsh realities that govern Romania to this date.

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.

The case is of peak hilarity, effectively allowing a neutral watcher to roll around laughing, with massive uproar even from the most "progressive" individuals that preach "democracy", "rule of law" and other peaches that they would-be wanting to hype Romania into a glorious age with the benefit of hiding its filthy dark past that had nobody sanctioned even up to this day. It was a case that exposed the "new wing" progressives as fakes and even just a cover to offer international scrutiny something to chew on, whilst in the back room, Romania continues to run "business as usual" with "the same old guys" consisting in the natural double standards, acceptable violence, acceptable racism and all the other hallmarks of a country that is attempting to euthanize its people with the hopes of clensing itself of the burden of answering to its criminal past. In reality, the statement "you will end up so bad that you will not be able to beat up your children", is pretty much a threat to Romanian hegemony where such attitudes are normal, and in many cases, a desired status that is kept in place by corrupt police, kingpins and slumlords, which is most of the corpus of Romania's political playing field. However, as far as Mr. Bodnariu and his family goes, the same deceitful and spiteful Romanian attitude that can be observed is being played between Romanians trying to appease western powers that "they have changed" but at the same time running business as usual, with Mr. Bodnariu even being part of the new "IT generation", to use a citation, and devoid of any "communist" marks that could shadow the blame with an entire political system.

It is in this sense, that all indignation aside, the case of the Bodnariu's is a case that was perceived by Romanians, against Romanians, due to its causes to be found deep within the Romanian slavish soul, with the unfortunate side-effect of "good people" attempting to defend a case that they perceived more along the lines of "keeping the family together", "reunification" as well as the mandatory adagio of the case against the big-bad government trying to turn the proverbial frogs gay. The case still shines today, as a hallmark of Romanian vanity and international misunderstanding of how Romania really works, for which we have accumulated our own impressions and doubts, such that we feel it necessary to record it here within this section dedicated to Romania, if only for the sake of countering any favorable propaganda that might mislead people to an abusive country.

One of the foundational problems with globalization is the assessment of worth and the gauging of intent. For what it is worth, in a global system, professions will have a global scope, where one individual with a certain profession will be equivalent to a different individual with the same profession but from a different part of the world. However, depending on different country metrics, it becomes clear that the preparedness of some individuals in certain geographic areas exceed or are lower than other parts of the world and then it becomes uncertain whether one would want to have policy be set for all by the individuals that are less prepared in the other geographical areas.

As an example, and even due to local emergencies, Romania has had a wave of flash-hirings in the Romanian police admittedly due to staff shortages and the need to fill back the ranks for the police. Given the times, those policemen were ushered expletively into the police force, and even with the admission of the local populace and the press, much too soon, by passing them through the necessary training by skipping a lot of the actual necessary training. This resulted in the police force being supplemented with people that by all checks and balances were, very much, legitimate police officers and with the full legal backing of the Romanian state.

Having set the context, you can now think of the situation in terms of the European Union and the "cooperation" between states, where cross-country access is frequently granted. You then have a situation where a police officer that as ushered through training, perhaps even has connection to interlopes and criminal organizations is now suddenly granted access to the legal machinery that is available to the entire European Union. Put bluntly, you could receive a visit or a subpoena for your data cross-country, from a country like Romania, from a corrupt police officer that, in spite of your insider knowledge that they are corrupt, is still pretty much a legitimate individual with the whole legal backing necessary to make cross-country demands.

Given Romania's tumultuous past that was never addressed, and even with a "carte blanche" and invited into the European Union and left to their devices, being observed to have set up organized crime or, at the very least, not managed to prevent their local organized crime to migrate abroad, a country with an espionage apparatus that officially even exceeds the most industrialized and precious countries like Germany, France or the United Kingdom, their clear bias against the free speech or the press, as well as their employment of means that are deemed by legal scholars unjust or other means that are actually just soft-synonyms of domestic terrorism (ie: the Romanian police sub-contracting criminals to perform work that would reflect poorly upon them), it stands to reason that, perhaps, Romania should not be let into Schengen, given any weaponry meant to defend the European Union, nor should any access shared with them in terms of security of the European Union. Whilst Romanian propaganda, especially with the publication of scientific journals coining the phrase "anti-Romanian sentiment", makes strides to convince everyone that Romania is just a victim and that everyone is just racist, which is disproved even by the layman when they look up country metrics and realize that Romania's corruption index is worse than countries that are at war, the realities are that "old habits die hard" and it might just be that Romania is simply a bad actor within the European Union. It is simply not the case that Romania is an universal victim of the planet, and it never has been the case, even if only for the lack of being an important country on the global scene.

Whilst after the accession to the European Union, Romanians "managed" to surpass Albania in terms of crime in the United Kingdom, if keeping score is necessary, the results stand clear and it becomes pertinent that factual criticism simply cannot be dispelled via "racism", "victim-hood" or some sort of outlandish "anti-Romanian sentiment" all of which sound ridiculous.

One followup problem regarding the closing of the borders and/or rigorous background checks being in place is that Romanian dialectics hint that such measures will end up blocking people of worth that would be put at a disadvantage. Part of those worries are uncanny given that Romania actively ran a dedicated espionage division that was meant to meddle with the private lives of individuals abroad and then using blackmail bring them back to Romania, such that the "worries" seem to emanate mostly from the very people that are the actual criminals that factually have put Romanian citizens at a disadvantage. Otherwise, for all the rest, it is clear that there is a large distinction between people of worth and people that are just co-opted by the mafia, the latter being people that are not universal values nor universally needed. Quite on the contrary, countries that are driven by the "realpolitik" of having an economic advantage, compared to countries that are just stitched together with spite, are also countries that will also always attempt to hire people of worth regardless their background. Clearly, if you spend so much time doing, what Romanians would belittle, domestic terrorism or organized crime, the reason why a travel visa might be rejected for you, would definitely not be traced back to "anti-Romanian sentiment" and ultimately would not even appear to any rational mind as "conspiratorial". "You committed crime, we would not like more crime, so you are not welcome here!" - is just not that racist of a statement.

That being said, the opening of the borders has not benefited people of worth too much, but have had the counter-intuitive opposite effect and allowed criminals and go-getters to establish a foothold in other countries that are backed by the very same legal procedures, without needing a contract, a job or purpose for travel or leaving. Perhaps, as history is written, the initiative to have "open borders" is one of those infamous do-good enterprises that has had the opposite effect in spite of seeming to wave the flag of best intentions.

Perhaps as one example for the former "problem of intent" issue when the intents and outlooks simply do not align between countries, as a smaller and lesser example, could be the case of the police officer, interviewed by Recorder (a journalist association), that explains within the cited video how he chose to consciously not follow the uniform code and just purchase his own gear. Within the interview goes on and explains how the handcuffs cost him 350 RON, how he bought special "tactical" boots, the fine trousers, explains how the vest is bought by him as well, along with the cool police baton that he whips out in order to demonstrate its effectiveness.

The problem here is that the Recorder journalists seem to present the story as a case of bad management of the police in terms of acquisitions and, the way the story looks, that "this poor policeman" has "gone out of his way" to purchase equipment, as some sort of self-sacrifice, and due to the ministry of internal affairs that is not providing adequate gear to the police. However, legally speaking this police officer is stating on camera that he is literally breaking the law (due to violating the uniform code) and, quote-unquote being fully aware that he is doing so, but proceeding anyway by justifying that his life might be at stake. In fact, if anything, it casts more of a curiosity on Recorder, wondering whether and what intents they might have with the story, given that they now have the "poor guy" on camera making an admission of guilt that he is now, well, operating equipped like a paramilitary outside the law.

On the other side of his views, you would have people that consider that adhering to the law, uniform code or using equipment that underwent testing and evaluation by the ministry of foreign affairs, is the proper way to ensure there is no megalomaniac "the ends justifies the means" allure to the story, as well as in being compliant additionally provide the necessary contingency, just in case a misjudgment is made where some of this individual's gear (or other gear he might have that he does not talk about on screen) just might place someone in danger, with the repercussions spreading definitely not only on himself but rather that whole institution that hired him and is now responsible for his actions. It even begs the question how upset this police officer might be if he just manages to scratch the fine lush black paint off the 350RON handcuffs and whether he'll throw a hussy fit (we would, that's expensive!) if he does and become even more abusive.

The solutions seem pretty clear, and most people would just consider it normal to resign when being placed in a situation where they cannot fulfill their duty with the provided equipment. The choice to resign is also the only organic mechanism where the institution would see the resignation along with the reason and would have to adapt accordingly; perhaps, by starting to provide better equipment. Otherwise, with no registered protest, he self-equips and the government turns a blind eye and things just carry on like that.

It should be mentioned that there is also that fine-grain of "finesserie" that should be discussed where his equipment makes the police seem "militarized" which might or might not be the intents of the ministry, especially given issues of image and the on-going discussions of police overreach. The former is being said, to address the concerns of this police officer that he expresses just before this video clip stating that the current Romanian police uniform seems more like an "office outfit". However, making the police look like "office employees" which just might be intentional, to not scare the populace and gain trust and not necessarily because the police is "ill-adjusted" to the times. After all this is a country where "security" agencies stack one upon each other and even for a small population relative to other states has both police and a Gendarmerie, that is seen as excessive in most states - for example, the U.K. does not even have a Gendarmerie, even though it is the point of creation of "the police".

At the latest census, from 2023, using the statistics from INSCOP for news.ro, half of Romanians consider that it was much better living in communism. We will not debate whether that is true or not, but we will point out that very few Romanians that are born even know about "Romanian communism", except what they have been told.

Partly this is due to Romanian disinformation services that have almost cleansed the Internet of data on Romanian communism, the C.N.S.A.S. that have still withheld the Securitate files in spite of international agreements as well as, well, the apex of bias, the ageing generation that is very large in Romania and for whom the past contains their best memories that are embellished. As a similitude, a millennial can recall one of those computer games that used to be popular but also realize that the game was made during the pioneering years of computers and that factually the game was pretty bad with only melancholy left over to make the game good. As for disinformation, try looking up Ceausescu on YouTube and you will find just a few videos, and most of them having the same material, the very last days before the revolution and not much else to be found on the Internet except a few nests of conspiracies. Similarly, Romanian education completely avoided the subject of Romanian communism, since the revolution in 1989, such that the saying on being doomed to repeat history might be a real concern.

As a polarizing example, Romanians love to push the fact that everyone could have a job in communism, yet the same Romanians would shy away if they were asked what would realistically have happened to people born in communism with disabilities or born / became orphans during communism.

In any case, one thesis put forth, without actually taking a stance pro-or-against "Romanian communism" is that very few people actually have very good details about communism or the realities of those times.