Children of the night: the strange and epic tale of modern Romania

Good leaders know how to make practical, human-centric decisions.

Forgetting the human by hyperrationalizing, creating rules and following them too strictly etc is a good way to become an absolute ass of a person.

There are fields that reward that type of thinking though and i recommend going into game design for example if you want to learn how to create fair rulesets that "remember the human" (or rather, put the player's enjoyment of the game as a priority).

The decision was not meant to be fair or rational, but to find some clever pretext to punish the greedy noble and reward the honest peasant.

The story is fiction of course, Vlad would not have presided over so small issues. The unjust nobles and noble peasants are also stereotypes of popular stories like this.

It's not DnD. Vlad likely decided who was the liar based on context.

It's relevant to a discussion of how he's seen to modern audiences.

Vlad Țepeș is commonly used and invoked in 'national democratic' fascist imagery, from frequent invocations by late fascist leader Corneliu Vadim Tudor[0] to the official symbol of the short-lived 'United Romania Party' (PRU) [1], to Facebook posts by the Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR)[2]. He is usually seen as a (a) a symbol of law and order, for the way he is perceived as having been extraordinarily tough on crime, impaling criminals; and (b) a Christian fighter against the Islamic (Ottoman) Turks, similarly to the recently sainted Ștefan cel Mare and other historic leaders - a common source of nationalistic, xenophobic pride in Romanian fascist circles.

Links in Romanian.

[0] https://m.poetii-nostri.ro/corneliu-vadim-tudor-in-tara-lui-...

[1] https://m.digi24.ro/stiri/actualitate/politica/pru-partidul-...

[2] https://m.facebook.com/alianta.pentru.unirea.romanilor.a.u.r...

The conclusions of the Wiesel report are somewhat doubtful, because its authors had the interest to blame the Romanian authorities as much as possible and there was nobody to check if the report truly matches the facts.

I assume that the total number of deaths must be correct, but I doubt that most of them are due to "deliberate policies" of the authorities.

It is likely that many might have been caused by things like the camp administrators stealing from the food intended for the detainees.

Of course those are crimes, but not really indicative of "deliberate policies".

Anecdotally, where my mother grew up, in Eastern Romania, a large part of her colleagues and friends, maybe a quarter of them, were Jews.

Where I grew up, in Southern Romania, there were fewer Jews, but even so, in all the schools through which I have been, there was no class in which there was not at least one Jew.

All the families of these Jew colleagues lived usually significantly better than the median of the Romanian families, so they did not resemble survivors of a persecuted community.

I do not doubt that all of them must have had relatives who suffered during the war for being Jews, like also me or any other colleagues had relatives who also suffered during the war only for being Romanian or whatever other nationality, but one must not take the Wiesel report as documenting the extermination of the Jews in Romania.

The number of Jews in Romania decreased dramatically only when Ceausescu sold them to Israel.

A while ago I was following George Takei on twitter, and he tells stories in which he does not make it sound like anyone was well provisioned nor treated relatively fairly.

Personally, I feel yours is the insane claim. Go read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_America...

and think of how well you are going to provision prisoners during a war.

I'm not going to measure which one is worse, nor will I call them identical, but I feel you are making light of an ugly moment in US history.

You do not know about what you are talking.

Both Roosevelt and Antonescu have ordered a collective punishment for an entire ethnic group as a consequence of facts proven only for a few members of those group, i.e. a few agents recruited by the Russians from the Romanian Jews, respectively a few Japanese from Hawaii who provided assistance for the attackers of Pearl Harbor.

In both cases, the collective punishments were not intended to cause any death, but in fact in both cases there were many premature deaths, which nonetheless cannot be directly attributed to Roosevelt and Antonescu but to those who were in charge at much lower levels. Obviously, leaders like Roosevelt and Antonescu should have been able to predict the consequences of their orders.

With "Sending people to be murdered in concentration camps" you confuse Romania with Germany.

In fact when Hitler asked all its allies to give him their Jews, to do what you say, Antonescu refused, unlike, for example Horthy, who has accepted Hitler's request and gave the Jews from the part of Romania occupied by Hungary to Germany. This is another example that "an all-too-willing Nazi accomplice" is an incorrect expression when applied to Antonescu.

There is no doubt that the Jews sent to the Romanian concentration camps suffered a lot, but had they been sent to Germany for the "final solution", that would have been much worse.

Also, the punishment of the Jews was not very different from what others suffered at the same time. Antonescu increased a lot the punishments even for various petty crimes. For example many Romanians were sent to labor camps for "disturbing the peace", e.g. by singing too loud and annoying thus the neighbors.

After the WW2, it is likely that most Jews from Romania had relatives who had lost their properties or their lives or had suffered while in concentration camps, but the same was true for most of the ethnic Romanians or for any other kinds of citizens. I was born in Romania and most of my maternal family relatives have been sent by the Russians to labor camps in Siberia during the 1940/1941 winter, half of year after the Soviet Union invaded Romania. Both my maternal grand-grandfathers have been murdered in the labor camp.

While the tragedy of the Jews during WW2 is very well known and some of their organizations have received significant material compensations for that, there have been millions of people in Eastern Europe who have had exactly the same fate like the Jews, but very few still remember that and they had never been compensated in any way.

There is also little doubt that the fact that both Roosevelt and Antonescu were able to decide such identical collective punishments, without much hesitations, shows that both had some racial prejudices, so both considered the Japanese, respectively the Jews, as some kind of lesser humans, who do not deserve to be trusted so much and who do not have the same rights for justice as the "normal" people.

Nevertheless, both Roosevelt and Antonescu have also done actions that benefited most of the people whose leaders they were, so they both must be analyzed taking into account both their defects and their qualities.

First Basarabia was occupied by Russia for only one century, after a war with Turkey, who owned Romania at that time.

After WW1, Lenin said that all the territories belonging to the Russian Empire may choose whether to remain in the new Soviet Union or no.

To Lenin's dismay, Basarabia and the Baltic states said farewell to Russia. That was also true for other territories, but Lenin succeeded to reconquer the others.

So Romania did not invade Basarabia, but Basarabia voted to go back where it belonged until a century before.

When Russia invaded Romania in 1940, having a free-pass for that from Hitler, who had given the Baltic countries (including Finland) and Romania to Stalin, Russia not only occupied Basarabia, which had belonged to the tsar for one century, but also the Northern Bucovina, which had never belonged to Russia, and also Herta, which had also never belonged to Russia.

When it is about any of Russia's neighbors, during the last half of millenium, the only aggressor has always been Russia, not its neighbors.

Most individual Russians are very nice people and good friends, including many great engineers, scientists, artists and so on.

On the other hand, the Russian government, regardless if under the tsar or under the communists, has always been composed only of a gang of thieves and murderers, and the Russian government has always been considered as such by all the Russia's neighbors and by all the people supposedly "freed" by Russia.

It's also possible that many people do view Teddy Roosevelt as a war criminal, which anyway doesn't excuse Antonescu's actions. In fact, many if not all of your arguments could be used to defend if not Hitler, then at least Mussolini, Franco and other Axis leaders just as much as Antonescu.

It's true that there is a clear element of "history being written by the victors". Allying with Stalin's USSR is definitely hard to sell as purely moral. Still, the fact remains that Hitler's aggression was significantly worse than Stalin's during the war. Whether this was simply a difference of speed and/or ambition will remain forever unknown (would Stalin have invaded Germany had the opposite not happened, or would he have stopped at Poland/Moldova/Finland? we'll never know, of course).

By the standards of the Nurenberg trials, as Noam Chomsky often reminds everyone, all American presidents (perhaps, ironically, after Roosevelt - as he was not personally guilty of the war crime of aggression) should be hung. So should Stalin and most USSR leaders.