Let me introduce you to the Romanian People's Republic re-education experiments at Piteșt prison (1949-1951.)
The program has been called among the worst acts of inhumanity by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
(THREAD)
Under the direction of communist Romania's secret police, the Securitate, political prisoners (mostly students) were subjected to non-stop psychological, spiritual and physical torture with the sole purpose of creating obedient slaves to the regime.
One of the key tactics involved "unmasking," which involved different but equally cruel stages. The following details are disturbing.
Re-education meant hanging 40 kg weights on the backs of prisoners, hair pulling, finger crushing, forcing students to knock heads like rams.
Often the people conducting the interrogations and torture were themselves prisoners
Humiliation was key. Prisoners would drink eachother's urine, eat their own feces or have multiple people stand on their bodies to crush them while banging their heads on the cement floor.
Others were burnt by cigarettes on every inch of their bodies until their flesh fell off from infection.
At each step of the way "demasking" would strip away the psychological defenses of victims. They would have no choice but to reveal the most intimate secrets of their life.
Inmates publicly denounced their religions, their beliefs, even their own families and loved ones.
Due to the vehemently atheist stance of the Communist party religious Christian and Jewish prisoners were forced to attend religious rites like "baptisms" (drowning) in sewage.
Brutality and violence were norms. Although many inmates committed suicide many didn't escape so easily.
Later on prisoners were prevented from committing suicide through the use of safety nets over stairwells, etc. Physical death was not allowed, only the death of the spirit.
Several movies and documentaries have been produced about this relatively unknown horror of the modern era.
This one with English subtitles is a decent start.
To all the tankies polluting my replies: how do you feel knowing I have more communist heritage than you LARPers yet I still think your ideology is garbage?
As some of you know, I've been in a nearly 2-year procedural battle with @ontariotech_u to release "anti-hate researcher" Dr. Barbary Perry's list of the 300 active "far-right hate groups" in Canada.
Now Ontario Tech has asked @PrivacyPrivee to dismiss the case.
I fully intend to complete the adjudication process but I thought I would give people a preview of some of my arguments.
Perry routinely “confirms” in left-wing media there's 300 right-wing “hate groups” in Canada, although she never names the actual groups
To put it into perspective, 300 would be more groups per capita than the 1,100 the SPLC claims operate in the US.
Clearly, it’s hard to believe and without an accounting of the groups, it seems Perry expects the public to take her word for it.
PM @JustinTrudeau is triggered by "American billionaire" @elonmusk labeling a public broadcaster but won't say a word about the CBC's CEO, Catherine Tait, being an American Democrat donor
@FEC records show Tait contributed to Hillary Clinton's run for president in 2016.
In the US, federal law explicitly prohibits election donations or contributions from foreign nationals.
We know from @CANADALAND reporting that Tait has a multi-million dollar residence in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband who she frequently visits.
The question is why is an American in charge of a public broadcaster that's supposed to be dedicated to preserving Canadian culture and heritage? And how does this fact influence her leadership?
In a talk on her biography on pedophile writer Norman Douglas, @uvic professor Rachel Hope Cleves described pederasty as "intergenerational sex" and says she won't use the discourse of "survivors or necessarily abuse."
Douglas was charged with raping 10-year-old children
Here Professor Hope Cleves giddily explains how Douglas bragged about having sex with over a thousand per-pubescent kids and goes into the details of his depraved sexual preferences.
With a smile on her face she describes how accounts of pederasty from the period were meant to be "titillating" and how Douglas "made fun of" the children he raped in his books.
PM @JustinTrudeau's gov is again calling legitimate concerns by farmers misinformation. Nobody is saying it's not voluntary. The issues are that it's arbitrary, unscientific and the government can't say where the 30% fertilizer figure comes from.
THREAD
The primary concerns expressed over and over again by farmers to the Liberals are the following:
- Farms already use optimal fertilizer efficiency and further reduction would cause yield loss
- There's no reliable benchmark data for fertilizer emissions
- Poor messaging
Ottawa has communicated this policy so poorly that it's no wonder people think there could be a fertilizer mandate incoming.
Even top industry groups like Fertilizer Canada blasted the Ministry of Agriculture for saying that the imperative was to "reduce fertilizer use."
For my latest feature I got to investigate rural crime in British Columbia. One family in the Okanagan recently suffered through a major theft while trying to rebuild their lives following a house fire.
In 2022, Statistics Canada reported that Kelowna had a Crime Severity Index (CSI) of 122.3 – the highest in the entire country. The CSI is a data point used by the Canadian government to track changes in the severity of police-reported crime each year.
The neighbourhood of Wiltse in Penticton is quiet, idyllic and at the same time, a perfect target for thieves, as the Sylvestres had the misfortune to discover.
$15,000 worth of tools were stolen from their charred property and it looks like the culprits could get away with it.