I was reading about the last days of Nicolae Ceausescu. Does he remind you of someone?
Quote:In a positively Orwellian turn of events, the starving people were actually told that ‘Romanians eat too much’ and Nicolae took to delivering a series of lectures on state TV about the benefits of dieting. Everyone with a brain knew that the ‘Rational Eating Programme’ was cover for the terrible food shortages blighting the country, but nobody dared whisper that truth outside their homes.
All the while, the preposterous and costly vanity project known as the ‘House of the People’ continued to be built. This gigantic building, covering 365,000 square metres and employing a team of 700 architects, came to be symbolize all that was wrong with Romania. Built to incorporate an enormous balcony and a gigantic boulevard, this would be the stage on which the Conducator planned to bore not thousands but potentially millions to death as vast crowds waved his picture and chanted his name.
Despite himself suffering from diabetes, Nicolae Ceausescu did not go on a diet and he and his family continued to live in luxury as they filled their Swiss bank account with cash. At their 80-room Primaverii (Spring) Palace in Bucharest, with its opulent rooms and gold-plated bathrooms, the leader, his wife and three children liked nothing more than to settle down in their private cinema and watch their favourite film, The Great Gatsby (1974), starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow without an apparent paradox in the world.
The AIDS pandemic which hit Romania harder than anywhere else in Europe. Government denial made matters worse and cash-strapped hospitals were obliged to recycle syringes as they struggled to deal with the crisis.
About 70 per cent of those who contracted HIV/AIDS were children, who by now were just about the only thing the country had in abundance as contraception and abortion (along with divorce) were illegal.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
