Stenograma Şedinţei Comitetului Politic Executiv al C.C. al P.C.R. din ziua de 11 octombrie 1977. Translated.

In English that title comes to "The Minutes of the Session of the Executive Committee of the C.C.ⁱ of the P.C.R.ⁱⁱ in the day of October 11th, 1977".

You know how I often say that the slow but inexorable movement of the rogue US state of todayⁱⁱⁱ towards the (historically obsolete, but also historically unavoidable) forms of criminal^iv Soviet statal terrorism^v is striking to anyone with the experience ? Well, it occurs to me that perhaps it'd be a good idea to share some of that experience. What better way than looking through some of the paperwork ? So we begin.

The Session started at 10:00.

Chair, comrade Nicolae Ceausescu.

Tov.^vi Nicolae Ceausescu: "Proposals for the modifications of some normative acts^vii flowing from the application of the decision regarding the activities of informing the public opinion^viii. What do you have to say, comrades ? Did you complete^ix with the measures indicated in the Executive Political Committee, comrade Burtica ?

Tov. Cornel Burtica^x: Yes, it was completed.

Tov. Nicolae Ceausescu: We have discussed some further measures the day before yesterday ; have you introduced them ?^xi We established to introduce certain points, practiced in the whole world^xii : the right to stop a publication, of suspending it. Democracy shouldn't be understood denaturatedly.^xiii We discussed these the day before yesterday as well and I didn't check if the completions in question were introduced.

Tov. Miu Dobrescu: Article 4 in the Decret^xiv provides that, in exceptional cases of infringement of the order of law as established by the Constitution^xv, of breaching the law for the protection of state secrets^xvi and other laws, in cases of damages brought to the internal or external politics^xvii of the party and the state^xviii, the Council of Culture and Socialist Education^xix may order the suspension of the marketing of books, periodicals, other printed matter, as well as audio or video material, until a definitive decision is taken by either the courts or other agencies^xx so entitled.

Tov. Nicolae Ceausescu: By the entitled agencies and, on a case by case basis, the courts. First and foremost stand the entitled agencies.^xxi

Tov. Petre Lupu: I make the same observation : up on page 2 it is said the Culture Council works as an appeals agency.^xxii However, in the respective commissions there are organised already [sub]commissions by issues, and these should resolve any disputes that may appear.^xxiii

Tov. Miu Dobrescu: The competency and role of these commissions are detailed on page 6.^xxiv

Tov. Nicolae Ceausescu: So that there's a leadership council organised at the TV station^xxv ? We don't have one already I don't get it ?!

Tov. Dumitru Popescu: We have the National Council, its executive bureau and directorates.^xxvi

Tov. Nicolae Ceausescu: "To organise a leadership council", what's this mean ?^xxvii

Tov. Dumitru Popescu: In place of the executive bureau, to have a leadership council.^xxviii There's a general measure, in all press organs, in all daily newspapers we have leadership councils which meet monthly.

Tov. Nicolae Ceausescu: How about the National Council ?

Tov. Dumitru Popescu: This one doesn't meet monthly.

Tov. Nicolae Ceauşescu: This is the leadership organ. The National Council of The TV Station, with an executive bureau with operative attributions, that's it.

Tov. Dumitru Popescu: Until now, the press organs had an editorial college, and now we're organising the leadership council of the editorial board, in which members won't be just the comrades working there. So thus there's a council and a college.

Tov. Nicolae Ceausescu: The National Council is the collective leadership organ, corresponding to the board in other units^xxix, which has an executive organ of its own. The same principle is applicable to the press as well, where we have a broader council and a college, which leads operatively. Same principle must be preserved here as well. Here, we must have the National Council, as a leadership organ, and an executive committee, as an operative organ, for execution, led by the general director of The TV Station. Being a larger institution its name could remain the same. In the material there are introduced two names : leadership council and collegium, plus national council, so three organs.^xxx The National Council carries the responsibility for the whole programme of The TV Station. The President^xxxi carries the responsibility as the situation is in all leadership councils, even if the National Council meets quarterly or as often as needed and the executive committee ensures the program is translated to deed.^xxxii

Tov. Dumitru Popescu: The aim was to standardize to the editorial board structures.

Tov. Nicolae Ceausescu: The National Council can not be placed on the same plane with an editorial board of a newspaper or of a music.^xxxiii It is at the same time an educational organ, because it has educational programmes. It also has economical attributions.^xxxiv It must work with all the ministries^xxxv and even in the very council there must be representatives of the ministries. So it is much grander an organism. It has an entirely different character and can not be compared to the college of a newspaper. We must also provide some responsible men to debate and fundamentate the respective programmes.^xxxvi

Tov. Petre Lupu: Maybe it should be chaired by a secretary of the Central Committee.^xxxvii

Tov. Dumitru Popescu: It is chaired by the general director.

Tov. Elena Ceauşescu: The president is also the director, who coordinates the whole activity.

Tov. Nicolae Ceauşescu: Actually, similar solutions, based on the same principles, are to be found in the proposals regarding the workers councils. In the material dealing with those is proposed the enacting of two organs : the worker's council, a broadly representative organ, led by the party secretary of the entreprise in question, who is the president, and an executive bureau, led by the general director, who is either a vice president or first-vice president of that council. There are two attributions : daily party leadership and the possibility of intervening with measures on the state line, as a president.^xxxviii

Tov. Iosif Uglar: On page 13, article 10, where the composition of the Council of Culture and Socialist Education is detailed, I don't know^xxxix if it wouldn't be good for there to also be a representative of the popular councils. There's representatives of the National Union of Agricultural Production Cooperatives, of CENTROCOOP, of the Central Union of Artesanal Cooperatives, there's just nobody from the popular councils although, at article 19 it is said that the county level committees of culture and socialist education, of the Bucharest township, of other townships and the subdivisions of the Bucharest township work aside the executive committees or executive bureaus of the popular councils in their exercise of their attributions as flowing from the present decree and other decisions of party and state.

Tov. Nicolae Ceauşescu: The popular councils should also be represented, I agree.

Tov. Iosif Uglar: Article 19 further states that the committees of culture and socialist education at the county level, for the Bucharest township, for other townships and the subdivisions of the Bucharest township^xl are state organs. If they function aside the executive committees of popular councils I don't know if it's good to say that.

Tov. Nicolae Ceauşescu: It is good, let them function thus. In the council there should participate, as it was proposed, a representative of the popular councils as well.

Tov. Richard Winter: In annex 5, there's mention of moving some cultural instututions under the Council of Culture. The question is why would the Brukental Museum come to Bucharest for each and every matter ? Activity works better on the county level. A theatre is left there, another moves to the Council of Culture, it is hard to guess which will work better.^xli

Tov. Nicolae Ceausescu: There's intent to create a National Theatre, the Romanian Opera, some national theatres, as there were in the past. Of course they also remain under the popular county council, but the Council of Culture must more directly mind the programmes, to answer more closely for the good functioning of some national artistic institution. What did the comrades do in the past ? To avoid responsibility they passed them off to the county level. Even restaurants we've introduced in the system of the Ministry of Commerce. Which is why we must review and restructure some competencies and responsibilities.^xlii

Tov. Elena Ceausescu: In the material there are omitted the problems of scientifical research, the introduction of technology and the responsibilities of these organisms in agriculture.

Tov. Nicolae Ceauşescu: Let them be included, especially for The TV Station, where there must included representation of the Agriculture Ministry as well as the armed forces.^xliii If there's other comrades with concrete observations, please pass them to comrade Burtica.

Tov. Elena Ceausescu: It increases the dignitary count.^xliv

Tov. Nicolae Ceausescu: It doesn't increase, it's the same as before. It will be resolved by decree.^xlv I believe the comrades will keep in mind the improvements that must be brought to the programme, so as to improve the quality and efficiency of the whole activity.

Outright utopian, n'est pas ?

1. Central Committee, the thing normally known as the politburo in English. [↩]
2. Abbreviation of "Partidul Comunist Roman", Romanian Communist Party. An outlaw and consequently illegal criminal & terrorist organisation nominally active throughout the XXth century but only notable after the Soviet invasion. Briefly made both legal and mandatory by the rogue Romanian state installed by force of arms by the Soviet invader. [↩]
3. In no way can the current forms of the US state be considered either representative (which discusses whether they are or are not the fruits of the will of the people living there) or legitimate (which discusses whether they are or are not in agreement with natural morals and ethics). Irrespective the very loud but broadly unconvincing propaganda of their own state media, the fact that the US is in fact a rogue state today is directly observable and for that matter readily observed. [↩]
4. The common view of organised criminals of all stripes is that their control of some sort of tokenization process of criminality makes their own criminality a logical impossibility. Like you know, Preet Bharara pretending he's not a common racketeer up to his eyeballs in various criminal conspiracies because... he's not prosecuting himself. Needless to say that's not how it works. Cops can go to jail just as well as anyone else, there's nothing structurally wrong with this and nothing to make it any kind of logical impossibility. [↩]
5. Statal terrorism is nowhere nearly as rare as people who don't spend any time either reading history or thinking about politics like to imagine.

   In fact, the vast majority of terrorists are statal agents, not individuals. Argentina, as a convenient example, went through a well documented period of statal terrorism in the 70s, and if you look close enough so did most other states.

   So to speak, the greatest trick the state ever pulled was convincing people that a terrorist is an individual. Virtually never is this the case, a good third of the current population of Washington DC is directly involved in terrorism. That's millions of people, hundreds of millions of distinct acts, trillions of prosecutable counts. Compared to that, the fact that three mentally deficient rednecks somewhere in Idaho allowed themselves to be entrapped by some marketeer or other, who then turned out to have been working for the FBI at the scam of "prosecuting terrorism" instead of some other office of the USG, at more common versions of the "selling people shit they didn't intend to buy" scam fails to even register. [↩]

6. Literally, comrade in Romanian. As you can imagine it's a sparsely used word under normal circumstances. It then suddenly saw itself forced into very common use, and as a result all the goodwill it accumulated over centuries evaporated in a few short years. By the 80s it was a slur, practically.

   The fate of words the socialists latch on is both sad and revolting, vaguely reminescent of that joke with the she-bear on the rag. [↩]

7. They couldn't say laws, ie legi in Romanian, because it was too... too what ? So they're stuck with acte normative which is ridiculously periphrastic. Do you know who else can't really run a government agency in charge of fucking people over if it's not called Homeland Security or something equally pointlessly pompous ? [↩]
8. I just wanted to smile at you. What, you think someone somewhere invented bureaucratese ? You think periphrasis is clever ? Well done, trying to copy long dead Romanian derps. They failed at everything else, now you're trying to be more like them, it's nothing short of trying to be more African, I swear. [↩]
9. He is functionally illiterate, which means that he has no compunction crossing the verb/noun distinction arbitrarily, and often jarringly. I wish I could do something to help, but words just don't go the way he wants them to (and he only wants them to because his use of speech is based on auditory experience, he's never considered what it all means). [↩]
10. His name literally is the diminutive form of "potbelly", so he's Comrade Pottybelly or something. Truly hysterical.

    He's also the reason I even starded doing all this, I was explaining how in Communist Romania the state had a serious problem, because it was so inept and so ripe for ridicule but also so intolerant of being mocked. They didn't really want to chill humor completely (mostly because that'd have been for their taste much too indicative) so they kept striving to create politically neutral avenues of humor, such as little vignettes about bad drivers or hysterical kitchen accidents. So audience suddenly realised that "oh my god, there was actually someone in charge of this, wasn't there". As it happens... yes, there was. Comrade PottyBelly. [↩]

11. You can tell by the indirect reference that he knows it's not something he's allowed to do ; that he's being a bad boy, and knows it. [↩]
12. Two strikes. Stuff done "the world over" usually covers patent nonsense like "global warming" and whatnot. [↩]
13. Something tells me I shall be smiling at you a whole lot before this is all done. [↩]
14. Executive Order. [↩]
15. Check it out, they had one too! And they paid lip service to it too! Just like your set does! [↩]
16. Cheshire! [↩]
17. Like you know, inadvertently proving that they're liars or something. It does harm their politics, right ? Never you mind whether it's true or not, that's not what's being discussed. Because you know, we're not doing X, we're doing Y, X just happens, maybe, whatevers. Bureaucratism is neither novel nor remarkable for a very simple reason : the banality of evil.

    Because yes, that's exactly what it is : bureaucratism is simply... evil. Given a new coat of paint and a new breath of life, evil. [↩]

18. The party and the state, always together, never apart. Like Church and Crown, which is exactly what's going on. The socialists tend to reconstruct this medieval arrangement for very good reasons : the level of intellectual refinement they've reached, the particular relations they entertain with the metaphysical are necessarily and exclusively served by the ideas put forth generally in the world throughout the early medieval period. It's where they're at, mentally, and so they will reconstruct the forms of that level of comprehension willy-nilly, as a direct result of simply existing. Much like the worm makes holes in apples while the silkwork makes silken cocoons, the socialist will recreate the context of the concordat of Worms. [↩]
19. Check it out, they had made a Bitcoin Foundation. Just like Vessenes! [↩]
20. Yeah, the "agency" you have today did exist in Romania. It was called an "organ" like say the spleen, to suggest just how integral each of them is to the well functioning Leviathan. And what you call today "relevant agencies" (it seems to be the emerging fixed form for this concept) were "organele in drept" ie, "the organs [so] entitled". [↩]
21. This one's more like a grin. [↩]
22. They don't mean they sue when they don't like what the courts ruled, they mean you're supposed to petition to them, as if they were a court, and they'll make a call. Because reasons. And so... the "appeals agency". [↩]
23. It is absolutely impossible to establish what the man is in fact saying from a sane point of view. The reason being that he's a socialist talking with other socialists, no sane points of view may be entertained. For a detailed discussion of this problem, see The problem of ideal social systems. [↩]
24. The exceedingly low page count is to my eyes today by far the most striking feature of this bunch of illiterate derps with no aides. How many pages did Obamacare end up at, anyone recall ? [↩]
25. Only one in the whole country, yup. [↩]
26. Almost philatelic, this thing. [↩]
27. Obviously he's reading off the paper. [↩]
28. Hear Gogol yet ? [↩]
29. He means corporations, but he can't use the evil burgeois word. Because you know, if you don't call adultery adultery you're neither going to hell nor to the maternity ward. It's the consensus of the scientists studying the topic. [↩]
30. The organs being a state's greatest assets and chief weapons. [↩]
31. He doesn't mean himself, he means the station's head, ambiguously identified as general director and whatever else, much like the same corporation is sometimes called "unit" and sometimes "institution" notwithstanding that in common practice among learned gentlemen words have meanings. The socialists dun care about all this burgeois sentimentality. [↩]
32. Infaptuirea, literally the en-deed-ification, the translation of ideal into practice, is a major knot in socialist thought. For practical lulz, see stuff such as Traim decenii de impliniri marete, where the damned copywriters changed the word - it was supposed to be infaptuiri marete but then... N-au gasit alta rima. [↩]
33. It makes exactly zero sense in Romanian too, but hey, it's a word. Why shouldn't it work shoehorned in there, what's this, an attack on equalitarianism ?! [↩]
34. Admire the beauty of perniciousness. So, in a state economy, patrimony is a matter of attribution, right ? You have it because you were allocated it, you didn't build any business and it's certainly not your business. Further, economics being a matter of patrimony (not according to the theoreticians, the... you know, National Council of Socialism, dead and burried between Trotsky and Engels - but according to the little read and even less thinking practitioners, that "operative executive bureau", Ceausescu himself) it then follows that a corporation may have "economical" attributed to it, or not. Problem ? [↩]
35. As organs of the government, in turn organ of the party. [↩]
36. Yes, Communist TV was incredibly boring an affair. [↩]
37. Pork. [↩]
38. Staff and ring, always intertwined. [↩]
39. The cannonical Romanian statement of "I wonder if" is "I don't know if". This specificity betrays, specifically the amusingly retarded & dangerously delusional outlook of the Romanian : he knows! Everything, by and large, the implicit baseline for him is that... he knows. A more idiot-friendly place could scarcely be imagined. Meanwhile, what the fuck do they know ? [↩]
40. Really, they had these endless prefab strings of words that had to be learned verbatim and used like fucking gpg keys. By the time you're done even phrasing what you were going to ask you're probably too exhausted to even remember the answer. [↩]
41. He means the opposite. [↩]
42. Ie, the monarchy has come to that time when Louis wants to centralize it. Because the nobles are lazy and inept and etc, you know how history goes. [↩]
43. He's trying to make a joke, which not only doesn't work but actually backfires, seeing how the entire thing is so nonsensical you really can't tell this and that apart, like a self parody that keeps on giving.

    More importantly, his attempted joke is fundamentally sexist - of that grobian, peasantly kind of sexism that you're probably wholly ignorant of. "Ha-ha, woman is talking, let's laugh" sort of affair, essential in the maintenance of particular social forms among the medieval peasantry. That it's pretty much the only form of humor the man seems aware of in a thousand or so words speaks a lot more about practical socialism than ten billion pages penned by clueless social justice manchildren. [↩]

44. She's slighted, and that's the reserve bomb. [↩]
45. He's not actually listening to her, for some reason. These are stock answers, the very stupid peasantly complete denial (that "nu-i adevarat tototot ce-o spus" previously discussed here) and the fundamental article of faith of any practical attempt of socialism : "it will be resolved by decree". Notwithstanding that no decree ever resolved anything... Heh. Whatevers. [↩]