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Comment by flavius29663 | Hacker News Reader

Decent write-up, but I hate that the writing starts with 2 major mistakes:

> Vlad Dracula, the Impaler, the country’s most infamous anti-hero

First of all, his name was "Drăculea", Dracula doesn't mean anything in Romanian. Second, he's most definitely a national hero for Romanians, he managed to bring order, eliminate thieves, stand up against the Turks. Through his daring night attack he was very close to kill the sultan himself: he and a small group of soldiers dressed as Turks and entered their camp, causing great confusion and making them kill each other.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Attack_at_T%C3%A2rgovi%C...

We hand wave the impaling as something that was happening at the time in the region. Vlad learned this habit from the Turks, where he was a child prisoner.

Many gruesome stories about him are just invented by the German merchants that had beefs with him.

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I'm glad someone brought this up. Vlad Tepes was remembered by his people as a just ruler.

One story about him (paraphrased): A wealthy merchant lost a purse holding a large sum of money. He announced to everyone that whoever found it and brought it to him would receive a tenth of what it held. Eventually, a poor villager found it and brought it to him. The merchant looked inside and saw all of the money in there, but, not wanting to pay the promised reward, said "Oh thank you! And it seems you have already taken your share of the reward. Then all is well." But the villager protested that he took nothing from the purse, and that he deserved the promised reward. They took it up to Vlad Tepes. The prince heard the story, checked the bag, and decided "Since this did not have the money that was you say it was lost with, then it is not your purse." And he ruled that the purse and all of its contents go to the villager.

That doesn't sound like a very good precedent. Steal someone's wallet, throw away a single coin, and now they no longer have any claim over it and it's rightfully yours?

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.

> 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.

Right, and this isn't how the decision should be made. He shouldn't be trying to find a clever pretext to punish the person he doesn't like and reward the one he likes! Those kind of shenanigans rightly destroy the public's trust in the justice system.

Are you complaining that in the children books they kill the evil witch without a trial?

Also what justice system? There was no such thing at the time. Might was right in the purest form possible.

PS: are you making fun of me?

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

It's also a bit of a shame not to mention, in this context, that Vlad Țepeș is commonly used today as a symbol of law and order and anti-muslim sentiment by the (relatively weak) fascist sympathizers in the country.

seriously, what are you talking about ? and even if it was true, what does one have to do with another ?

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...

Could you take your fascist propaganda somewhere else please ?

Associating Vlad Tepes and the people above is like associating the indian religions with the nazis just because the nazis picked the swastika as their symbol.

It may seem interesting to you but it brings nothing but noise to the discussion.

The article is about a book that explicitly combines the image of Vlad Țepeș (apparently mostly from the foreign Dracula symbolism perspective) with modern-ish Romanian history. So, the use of his as a symbol in modern Romanian politics is, I think, interesting to note at least.

I only started presenting concrete examples because you claimed the association doesn't exist.

To be clear, I am not claiming in anyway that a 17th century prince was himself a fascist, or that any use of his image in modern discourse is fascistic or a dog whistle. I was just adding a bit of extra context about some local symbolism.

Also, not sure how you could misconstrue my post as "fascist propaganda". I could see how you might accuse me of seeing dogwhistles everywhere, but I think my stance was quite explicitly anti fascist.

"First of all, his name was "Drăculea", Dracula doesn't mean anything in Romanian."

That's not a mistake. Vlad Dracula is just the historical Anglicized form of the name. In the same way we say Rome for Roma and Pope Francis for Papa Francesco / Franciscus.

I thought he was called "Dracula" by foreigners only after Bram Stoker's novel.

Apparently I am wrong, he was already mentioned like that by the Germans during his lifetime.

https://medieval.gumlet.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/vlad-...

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vlad_Tepes_-_Blatt_1...

Also, the article has many too simplistic characterizations, which will be misleading for the vast majority of the people, who have not the foggiest idea about the history of Romania.

For example "far-right military general Ion Antonescu, an all-too-willing Nazi accomplice".

The former general and later dictator of Romania during WW2, is a human who has done many bad things, but also many good things, so it is not possible to describe him just in black-and-white as being good or bad.

Despite other things about which he may be accused, there is no ground in calling him as either "far-right" or "all-too-willing Nazi accomplice".

Antonescu imagined himself as a savior of Romania and he has chosen to become an ally of Germany for the same reason as Finland, to be able to fight against the Soviet Union and recover the large territories occupied by the Russians when they invaded Romania in 1940, immediately after France was occupied by Germany and Romania lost in this way its last ally.

There is no evidence of Antonescu having any sympathy for Hitler or fascism, he was just forced to be friends with them in the attempt of reaching his objectives.

Antonescu was forced to accept the Iron Guard as a partner, as requested by Hitler. Nevertheless as soon as he was able to convince Hitler to stop supporting them, he was happy to incarcerate the Iron Guard members or kill those who resisted.

I do not know why he could be named as "far right". What was most characteristic for him was that he, as as former military, not politician, has always attempted to rule the country like you rule an army, i.e. by giving orders that must be executed by everybody without comments and he did not have much, if any, respect for the traditional democratic institutions and parties.

However, this can be hardly considered as being either right or left.

Many years ago, I have seen a news coverage about a visit made by a couple of USA senators in Romania. The senators gave a speech in which they condemned the war criminal Antonescu.

I was astonished that the Romanian officials were so servile to USA that they did not try to correct in any way what the Americans said.

All the crimes of which Antonescu was accused were true.

Nevertheless, there was a problem with his labeling as a war criminal, because absolutely all the crimes on that list had also been done by the USA president Roosevelt, during the same time of WW2.

So the correct action is to either consider that both Roosevelt and Antonescu have been war criminals, or that both have been war heroes, or better, to accept that both have been complex humans, who, during a time of war, have done both very good things and very bad things.

(Regarding the list of war crimes of Antonescu & Roosevelt, that is quite long. However the most serious crime of Antonescu was ordering that the Jews should be sent in concentration camps, as suspected Russian collaborators.

This was almost identical to what Roosevelt had done earlier, when he sent all the Japanese-American citizens in concentration camps, as suspected Japanese collaborators.)

The Wiesel Commission was the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania […]. The report assessed that between 280,000 and 380,000 Jews were murdered or died under the supervision and as a result of the deliberate policies of Romanian civilian and military authorities. Over 11,000 Romani were also killed. The Wiesel Commission report also documented pervasive antisemitism and violence against Jews in Romania before World War II, when Romania's Jewish population was among the largest in Europe.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiesel_Commission

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.

> 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".

I'd argue that “camp administrators stealing resources” is such a common thing in these kinds of situations that not preventing it is effectively causing it. While it is still definitely on the administrators, blame also falls to those who designed the system that enabled this situation.

I completely agree with you.

Actually, after replying to the post above, I have searched the Wiesel report. While I did not have the time to study it now, the causes of death among those sent to concentration camps are listed as "typhus, hunger and cold".

It is also said that most of these occurred during the first year, after which there was an increased supervision of the camps, which caused an improvement in the living conditions.

Of course this is criminal negligence and it should have been predictable and preventable.

However, it is not really a case of "deliberate policies", because the primary purpose of the criminals was not to kill the deportees, but to become rich, regardless whether this required making other humans to suffer or even causing their death.

> This was almost identical to what Roosevelt had done earlier

Really? This is an insane claim. Sending people to be murdered in concentration camps is the same as relocating people to relatively well provisioned camps where they were treated relatively fairly (even though it still wrong)?

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.

It was România that had invaded the early soviets a few decades earlier, along with a dozen other capitalist countries.

Basarabia declared its independence against fascist România, partly because they had been invaded by the kingdom before as well.

România was the aggressor, despite what anti-communist post-89 history books might say.

Don’t defend Antonescu. He was very much a fascist, even if he had conflicts with other fascists like the Iron Guard.

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.

Don’t confuse the Russian Empire with the soviets. The ruling class is different, thus the behaviour of the state as well. The Empire expanded to extract wealth from other territories. The workers that built the 1917 revolution had no such material interests, their interest was only in solidarity with workers in other countries and against imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism.

Basarabia was subjugated by the kingdom of România in 1918, indeed. The fascists gaining power in România had already started on ethnic cleansing, so Basarabia declared independence and later joined the soviets in 1940. After all, it was the soviets that ended the pogroms in the territories of the former Russian Empire.

Don’t let fascists teach you history, they lie.

There have been many downvoters, who by downvoting have expressed their support for the official USA thesis, that the winner Roosevelt was a war hero, while the loser Antonescu was a war criminal.

Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but the truth is not established by votes.

Supporting the official USA point of view demonstrates an inconsistent self-contradictory logic, because there really isn't any significant difference between any of the actions committed by Roosevelt and by Antonescu, there is a perfect match for each one.

All human lives matter equally, it does not matter if they are of African-Americans, of Japanese-Americans, of Jews or of anyone else, all have the same value.

So when Roosevelt and Antonescu both decided to intern all the members of an ethnic group into concentration camps, these actions can be blamed only equally.

The same parity exists for the many other accusations against Antonescu.

For example the next accusation in importance was that Antonescu has allied with the criminal Hitler during the war.

This is also perfectly matched by Roosevelt, who has allied with the criminal Stalin, who had already done identical conquests in the Eastern Europe (Poland, Finland, the Baltic states and Romania) with the conquests made by Hitler in Western Europe.

Both leaders have chosen to make these alliances, regardless whether they liked their allies or not, because they believed that those alliances are the only way to win the war against their respective enemies.

During the war, USA has provided far more material aid to the Soviet Union than Romania has provided to Germany.

Moreover, Roosevelt has paid the assistance of Stalin in defeating Hitler only in a small part with American money but mostly with properties that did not belong to the Western allies by giving Stalin the permission to plunder Eastern Europe after the war.

So for this second accusation, Roosevelt also is not any better, if not worse.

The same comparison can be made for any other accusations, with the same results of a perfect match.

This should not be a surprise, because both leaders had the same purpose of winning a war and they both believed that any means to achieve that goal are acceptable.

Therefore, in the same international context they did much of the same things.

Like I have said, it is not right to consider any of them as either good or bad, but if one decides to label one of them in a way and the other in a different way, then that is irrational.

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.

Franco did little to affect people outside Spain and Morocco, so he is guilty mainly for what he has done to his own people.

Mussolini cannot be compared to Antonescu in any way.

Antonescu entered the war in 1941 only to recover the territories previously occupied by force by the Russians in 1940, while Mussolini was like Hitler and the Japanese, an initiator of wars against his neighbors, the only difference was that unlike the German and Japanese armies, the Italian army was incompetent and they failed to accomplish Mussolini's dreams of becoming a great conqueror.

I agree that the fact that Roosevelt was equally bad does not excuse in any way Antonescu's actions, but it is annoying to see US officials blaming Antonescu without first looking into their own yard and see if they have any right to criticize others without presenting excuses for the actions of their own people.

I would have nothing to object to a critique of Antonescu coming e.g. from Iceland or whatever other place not involved in those events, but any such critique coming from US officials appears far too hypocritical.

All this discussion started from the quoted article where the epithets applied to Antonescu are either meaningless ("far right") or completely false ("all-too-willing Nazi accomplice"), instead of making any correct reference to his actions, including those that can be indeed considered crimes.

Also, what you say "Hitler's aggression was significantly worse than Stalin's during the war" is false.

The Russians were much more brutal in the territories occupied in 1940 than the Germans ever were in Western Europe.

Later, the Germans behaved significantly worse in Russia and Eastern Europe than they did in Western Europe, but that only matched what was standard practice for the Russians.

In the territories occupied from Romania, during the winter of 1940/1941, so before having any war with Romania, all the people that could be distinguished somehow from the masses, e.g. the teachers and anyone else with higher education, those who previously had any public jobs, all that had some properties, and so on, were selected and sent to Siberia to labor camps, i.e. they were turned into slaves, like during the wars from Antiquity.

There the older people died, either killed by the guards when unable to work enough or due to illness. Many of those who were young and fit have survived, but they were never allowed to return to their homes, where Russian settlers have been installed and they live there until today.

The Romanians from Siberia were not sent to the same places, but they were dispersed there over vast territories. Because of that, many years later, after they could leave the labor camps, but not the region, they were forced to settle and marry Russians, as there was no other choice if they wanted to have a somewhat normal life.

> Also, what you say "Hitler's aggression was significantly worse than Stalin's during the war" is false.

I misspoke a little bit here. I know of the much more sinister behavior of the red army, from first hand accounts by my grandparents.

What I was referring to though was Hitler's much worse expansionism during the war, with plans actuary put inot action of controlling the entirety of Europe + Russia at the very least. Stalin also had expansionist plans, but they seem at least to have been more modest, for however little that's worth.

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