At the end of World War II while the USSR and its Red Army were the occupying powers in all Romania, in 1947 Romania forcibly and ironically became a “People’s Republic” (1947–1989), after the rise of the Iron Curtain. The first “president,” Gheorghiu-Dej (1947) ruled as puppet of Moscow, but when he died, his Secretary General of the Communist Party of Romania, Nicolae Ceausescu, was elected as the second “president” (1965-1989), shifting his savage dictatorship into a harsher Romanian “Gulag” than known in the USSR. For two decades, I neither understood the dimensions of tragic history of Transylvania, nor did I yet realize that I would have to escape the Gulag of Romania, even if by the “skin of my teeth.” For peoples of the world Transylvania seems to be a faraway place, where most people know the werewolves and vampires have been “seen” to in the imagination of Transylvanians, whose beliefs was soaked in mystical folklore. Even today it is hardly possible to have a rational conversation with most the Transylvanian folk on any subject without recourse to try to understand where their distorted imagination has befuddled them. The population has consisted of Romanians, Hungarians, Germans, and some Ukrainians. languages are still being spoken in Romania’s Maramures province, but
To protect myself as best I could, I turned to humor, seeking to ridicule Ceausescu’s “national paradise.” But when I encouraged my classmates to laugh at the propaganda embedded in the wooden language of the national bureaucracy, I soon fell under the heavy scrutiny of university authorities, who were furious that I trying to expose the fact that all classes had been organized to befuddle the student body into confused submission. Indeed, each professor had favorite students to help drown out legitimate questions and stifle any competing analysis—the university lived under nepotism, favoritism, the threat of rape (virtual and real) by the Securitate officers, and open bribery by the your garden variety. MY 1986 FLIGHT FROM ROMANIA BACKFIRES By 1986, at age 23, I had decided to flee Romania—an illegal act because Ceausescu did not want anyone (especially women of child-bearing age) to escape his plan to building his “ideal socialist industries” on farms and ranches as well as in the cities. In June, I made my way to the border of Yugoslavia and paid a smuggler to evade the Romanian security forces that were preventing the “nations workers” from escaping. The smuggler, who took me across the border, turned out to be working for Romanian Border Police. Thus, soon after crossing into Yugoslavia, he turned his wagon around and I was again in Romania again when I realized what had happened too late. I had
Ceausescu government—which was selling the country’s food supplies to Russia in order to pay down Roman’s official debt with exports. Those Securitate officers ate well and ominously watched us virtually starve. They said, be calm, like your parents in the face of their starvation. Secu’ officers were the vampires and the wolverines that I was talking about in my first paragraph. They are surveillance officers, and this is what they do: inform on innocent people, place all types of microphones under people’s tables and beds, and that have fun as perverted this may sound in almost every home in Sighet, Maramures County. They report on you, and this earns them a living. Thus, I furiously called out in my classes that our very existence was being compromised by Ceausescu's abandonment of the population, which was ordered to, as Lenin famously said, “work, work, and work.” To protect myself as best I I turned to humor, seeking to ridicule Ceausescu’s “national paradise.” But when I encouraged my classmates to laugh at the propaganda embedded in the wooden language of the national bureaucracy, I soon fell under the heavy scrutiny of university authorities, who were furious that I trying to expose the fact that all classes had been organized to befuddle the student body into confused submission. Indeed, each professor had favorite students to help drown out legitimate questions and stifle any competing analysis—the university lived under nepotism, favoritism, the threat
--------- Jim and I have been involved with many academic activities, but those are beyond the scope of my analysis here of our role in extending PROFMEX around the globe, especially to Europe and Latin America. My courses at UCLA under Jim and Professors Carlos Alberto Torres, Richard Weiss, and Ivan T. Berend led me to the M.A. in Latin American Studies (1996) Ph.D. in History (2001) UCLA Here is title of my first book as sole author: http://www.Decentralized Globalization.com 2017 March 10. The second book: mercado, fundaciones, sociedad cívica y gobierno civil en las regiones del mundo (2007) Olga Magdalena Lazín. My third book, co-authored with James W. Wilkie, contains images that reflect my travels with Jim: . , These books show how U.S. Tax Exempt Organization (TEO) law has evolved to become the most important in the world owing to its flexibility. Where the laws of most countries require prior legal authorization to launch in a new direction, the United States TEO law recognizes no such limit. Thus, U.S. TEO law, unlike most other countries, is never trying to make legal what is already underway and working in the world. For the USA and now Mexico, both Treasury Ministries together have signed the first collaborative agreement that stands as the blueprint for global NPPOs.
about all this suffering and atrocities committed by the dictator and his army of followers. So here is the book: My Book cover here for Decentralized Globalization illustrates my concern with climate change, and sustainability for the planet. With Ceausescu finally gone, after 40 years of dictatorship, in 1990 I was able to secure a passport in order to ready myself to leave Romania by gaining visas for Germany and France. The question remained, how to get there by land without a visa to Austria—my region had no air connection to the outside world til late in 1990. I succeeded to finally extract myself from that virtual prison, and had to do it by car. Pumped up and having all the visas, I took off with Jim September 16, 1990 in an Opel, which remains my favorite car to this day. MY FATEFUL 1991 MEETING IN SIGHET WITH JIM WILKIE Almost age 27 in 1991, I was in the right place at the right time when UCLA Professor Jim Wilkie arrived in Sighet September 17th, with Professor James Platler (his friend and driver). They came as part of their trip to assess the impact of the 1989 Fall of