This is an amazing book Kita - it is a much more frightening book than 1984: it's REAL history.
Reading about the history of Romania as it came under communist (Bolshevik) rule, we can see how a totalitarian regime gets into power. We should all read this; and do so with an eye on the things we see happening today, right now, in the middle east, and right here at home.
From the Introduction:
THE ANTI-HUMANS
STUDENT RE-EDUCATION IN ROMANIAN PRISONSby Dumitru Bacu
INTRODUCTIONby Warren B. Heath (a.k.a. Revilo Pendleton Oliver)
The author of this book, a Romanian born in Greek territory, went to Romania for his
university education and there became a member of the anti-Communist
organization that flourished in that nation before and during the tragic and fratricidal
Second World War. After the Bolshevik conquest of Romania, the Soviets,
undoubtedly on orders from their masters,
maintained a pretense that their
occupation was merely temporary and further disguised their purposes by keeping
on the throne as King of Romania the legitimate heir, a young man who was merely a
puppet in their hands, but served to give to the people an illusive hope that Romania,
though devastated and impoverished, might again become a free nation. In this
hope, of course, the Romanians (like many other captive peoples) were encouraged
by the governments of the Western nations that had won the military victory. Those
governments, especially in the United States, maintained a pretense that they were
not the servants of the Bolsheviks’ masters, and, whenever they deemed it
expedient to administer a little verbal paregoric to their own population,
manufactured oratory about “defending the Free World” and “containing
Communism.” Americans, who were so charmed by those phrases that they did not
notice what their own government was doing, cannot blame the Romanians (or the
others) for having supposed that the official verbiage was an indication of national
policy.
During the early years of Soviet occupation, therefore, the Romanian people
entertained delusive hopes of eventual liberation, and the author of this book
accordingly remained in Romania, his true fatherland. When he was at last arrested
and imprisoned on suspicion of holding opinions inimical to Bolshevism, he, luckily,
suffered only the excruciating tortures and hardships that are normal in what is
called a Great Society.
During his imprisonment, however, he had by chance an
opportunity to learn of an experiment conducted on a select group of young men,
and he had the acumen and patience to discover precisely what that experiment
was. In this book he discloses for the first time the facts about a practice of which the
peoples of the West still know nothing.Bacu speaks only of what he knows of what he witnessed with his own eyes and
learned from the lips of men who had, despite themselves,
been stripped of their
humanity by an infallible scientific technique. His subject, therefore, is what the
Bolsheviks secretly did to human beings in the prison at Pitesti[1] from 1949, when
the experiment began, to 1951, when it seems to have been temporarily
discontinued for some reason unknown.
What is described in these pages is not, however, an isolated event. Everyone who
has had experience in military intelligence dealing with the Bolsheviks, or who has
made a close study of information that is available from little known but authentic
sources, will recognize in Bacu’s pages a detailed description of a technique that the
implacable enemies of mankind have used in many lands perhaps in all countries
that are officially Communist for many years.
The military intelligence agencies of
Western nations have long known that a film demonstrating basic Pavlovian
procedures was produced in Russia for training the Bolshevik secret police in 1928,
and that the intelligence service of at least one nation succeeded in obtaining a copy
of that film. After the notorious “purge” trials in Russia in 1936, when the masters of
that country for some reason thought it advisable to exhibit to the world their ability
to elicit the most incredible confessions from highly-placed and hardened Bolsheviks,
intelligent observers naturally wondered what means could have been employed to
produce such amazing results.
Certain Western intelligence services sought to
ascertain what means had been used, and eventually ascertained them in sufficient
detail to show that the essentials of the method were precisely those that Mr. Bacu
has described for us.Military intelligence services naturally do not publish what they have learned by their
secret and often perilous operations. Perhaps the first hint of the new method given
to the general public came from George Orwell, who, in his 1984, portrayed the
internationalists’ Utopia and described some parts of the Communist technique,
eliminating much that was too realistic for the taste of the reading public at that
time, and replacing it with some episodes that could give a dramatic touch to what
was in reality unspeakably vile and interminably monotonous. From 1984, however,
an alert reader could have surmised much that was left unsaid. Since then,
confirmatory evidence has become available from many sources, often fragmentary,
for victims who have the stamina to tell what was done to them may nevertheless be
understandably reticent about the worst aspects of the degradation imposed on
them. They often censor their reports, to avoid harrowing unendurably the feelings of
a humane reader or arousing total disbelief in tender-minded individuals from whom
miseducation or innate sentimentality has concealed the ultimate horrors that lie
hidden in creatures anatomically indistinguishable from human beings.
It almost never happens that we have a report from a survivor who at the time
observed and interviewed the piteous victims of scientific bestiality, but, by a lucky
chance, himself escaped the traumatic and mind-destroying shock of the torments
they had undergone. That is what makes the book here translated from the
Romanian unique. Bacu, to whom we owe our only authoritative report on the “Pitesti
Phenomenon,”[2] was such a survivor.
...
The students of Romania, patriots and Christians, were selected by the anti-humans
as victims of the process described in this book, not so much because they were the
objects of the beasts’ most venomous hatred, as because they provided material for
an experiment that would confirm the universal validity of a technique that the world
conquerors had elaborated long before and thus far used with uniform success. The anti-humans rightly judged that if the courageous and devoted youth of the Iron
Guard, exalted by the most ardent Christian faith, could not resist the application of a
fiendish science, no humans could ever resist.
That is what makes this narrative so tragic.
The Legion took its motto from Seneca: “He who is willing to die need never be a
slave.” Aye. But what of those who are not permitted to die?
WARREN B. HEATH
New York City, 1968
