What Is It Good For?

After almost a week of crashing thunderstorms, it has turned super-hot and muggy again in Bucharest. I love thunderstorms, especially because we hardly ever get them in LA. (LA is pretty famous for being immune to natural disasters.) We took advantage of the sunshine to go out and visit the great-grandparents in Rahova.

The Poopmaster General was super-colicky, unfortunately, so he spent most of his time inside with mom and various people who came in to offer their miracle cures for colic. But he got some time in with the G-G's, and in any case Gagi, Aunt Reli, Io and I all got to spend some time visiting them as well.

Later in the week, my stepfather-in-law Gagi took me on a field trip to the Bucharest Museum of Military History.

Long-time readers of the blog will probably remember my amazement when I went to the Village Museum in Bucharest. It's a collection of buildings, some of them over 400 years old, and they're all just out there. You can walk up to them and touch them. There's an old wooden church from like the 1600's with faded Bible scenes painted on the walls, and if you want to you can reach out and put your hand right on the paint. To an American, this is insane.

The Military Museum is the same way. Many of the artifacts are behind glass, but lots and lots of them are out where you can walk up and touch them. It's like, if you had the keys you could probably drive this Nazi tank right out of there and take it on a rompin' stompin' tour of downtown Bucharest.

The museum's collection was really extensive, with prehistorical stuff from Bronze Age axeheads to the corroded Iron Age helmet seen at right. From there, it went forward through history, taking you through Roman times, up through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, finally into the industrial era, World War I and then World War II.

Looking down the sights of a restored Roman ballista

The World War II stuff was interesting to see. As an American, the story of World War 2 is mostly tied up with the western front and the Pacific theater -- Pearl Harbor, Normandy Beach, island-hopping, fighting through France and Italy, that sort of thing.

The Romanian history is tied up with the Eastern front, but more than that it seems (to me, anyway) much more locally focused. Americans tend to look at WW2 as a global conflict, and a titanic fight against the evils of Nazism and Imperial Japan. The Romanians seem to look at it more as part of their long-running disputes with the Turks and the Slavs, another fight in their long history of trying to keep their country unified and their borders secured.

They don't seem to have a lot of issue over the fact that they were allies of the Germans for most of the war; it seems like, to them, the Germans were simply the most useful ally at the time and the only power that could help them regain territories they felt were unfairly lawyered away from them in the interwar period. Their attitude seems to be "Look, we tried to ally with Britain and France to guarantee our national borders, and then France got crushed and Britain got kicked out of Europe. What do you expect? Once you guys were kicking ass in Europe, we joined you."

And they did, albeit belatedly when the outcome of the war was fairly certain. Still, they savaged the Axis armies in the area and people who study this sort of thing say that the Romanian change of allegiance probably shortened World War 2 by six months. In exchange, after hostilities were over Romania was given to the Soviet sphere of influence, which resulted in decades of Communist tyranny that blew the country's economy to splinters. The museum has several military pieces from the Communist era, including the MiG jet pictured at right.

The museum has lots of stuff on display related to the democratic revolution of 1989. The revolutionaries' symbol was a flag like the one at left: it has the Communist Party's seal cut out of the middle of it. (The current flag is now just the three bars of color.)

The museum exhibit covered several rooms and included things like doors with bulletholes from where people had been shot at, banners carried by the revolutionaries, and so on. Considering everything that's going on with the Arab Spring right now, it gave me chills to look at all this stuff.

"Down With Tyranny"

As with the WW2 history, though, here I found that the Romanian perspective differs from the American one in some pretty significant ways. I tend to see the 1989 revolution as the people rising up against a tyrannical Communist dictator, and throwing him out (of life) in favor of a democratic government that exists to this day. Gagi, though, views it as (in his words) not a revolution, but a coup d'etat. Power was not seized by the people, but instead by a different set of oligarchs (a political organization called the FSN) who had manipulated the people to get rid of Ceausescu so that the FSN could take power. The FSN did inded run Romania after the revolution and won Romania's first democratic election by a wide margin. Conspiracy theories abound regarding FSN's potential involvement in killing protesters during the 1989 demonstrations and blaming it on Ceausecu. Above left is the museum's memorial to those who died in the revolution. Makes you wonder.

So all in all, a great and educational trip to the Military Museum. It was awesome to see all that stuff, particularly all the things that you could walk right up to and touch. Thanks, Gagi!

I assume this is an artifact of grave historical significance.

And now we're back to normal life at home with Gabriel, who is still just as colicky as ever. I keep waiting for the colic to end, and it keeps not happening. On Friday we are leaving for our big vacation to the Black Sea. What originally started as a planned two-day trip for someone's wedding has turned into a nearly week-long vacation by the seaside. I'm really looking forward to it. Hopefully Gabe will be OK!

And now here it is, your moment of Zen:

Gangsta!