Brasov, The Black Church
Photo: Wikipedia
Many Americans have asked me where they could retire away from this country’s advancement towards Marxism. I was wracking my brain trying to find a place that would be suitable for my retirement years where I could continue to live in the relative freedom I found in the 1970s America. As long as we follow the law, we have nothing to hide and nothing to fear except the arm of “environmental justice” and “social justice.”
After all, who wants to live their formative youth years under the Iron Curtain of communism and then their retirement years under the boot of communism on steroids in America? The Eastern Europeans’ Security Police were novices when compared to all sorts of 24/7 electronic surveillance in the U.S. , more sophisticated than the Soviets could have ever devised.
We have smart meters, water meters, gas meters, A/C meters, smart appliance meters, drones attached to our homes, flying drones, NSA spying, laptops, smart gadgets, smart TVs, smart phones, social networks like Facebook, and many other devices I don’t even know exist, aimed at controlling everything that we do, speak, create, think, and write.
In a sense, we are surrounded by regular police in the streets, cameras on every street corner, building, or intersection, and security police on a mountain top, usually college graduates in their best pajamas or fatigues, watching a bank of monitors, not just the lowly street-snitches variety, who recorded long time ago our comings and goings, or the poor shmucks who recorded, listened to our conversations, and wrote a report at the end of the day.
Is there such a place on the planet where communism/totalitarianism no longer exists? Not really, since global communism is not just on a relentless march, it is on a trot, thanks to government elites around the world and the United Nations.
A Romanian journalist suggested in a recent article that retirees should move back to Romania, more specifically, to the Brasov-Sinaia-Sibiu region, an ideal place where life in general resembles the life in a resort with clean streets, little traffic congestion, fresh mountain air, relatively inexpensive housing, and a very good standard of living. Not sure about the medical amenities which retirees usually need. I am sure there are some private clinics.
His invitation was not based on altruism and care for the wellbeing of the retirees as much as the uncomplicated financial salvation of the Romanian struggling economy affected by the worldwide deep and prolonged recession.
Based on his calculations, the average retiree would spend monthly 600 euros and save 400 euros. I cannot imagine being able to save 40 percent of their gross income in such hard times, but I will go along with his overly optimistic formula.
If 100,000 Romanians living abroad would repatriate in the next five years, and each family would invest 50,000 euros in the Brasov area as an epicenter of development, it would result in a 5 billion euro of new infusion of cash benefiting economic growth in housing, apartments, consumption, and services such as medical, tourism, transportation, construction, and other basic household goods.
Investors would not have to wait on corrupt politicians to fund economic development sporadically after they had squandered on themselves and on their pet projects the bulk of the money earmarked for economic development for impoverished areas that truly needed it.
Living well and salvaging the Romanian economy at the same time seems like a no-brainer, a win-win situation for everyone. There is a little nagging question in the back of my mind, a sort of “what if” based on my pessimistic realpolitik experience with Marxists.
The European Union brand of socialism that has been infused into Romania with the new capital for economic development, for environmental “green growth” projects, and other partnerships with corrupt politicians that were already scions of former hard-core commies, has given rise to a new class of global communism supporters who could confiscate or nationalize wealth, pensions, bank accounts, and investments just for “social justice” and the “common good.”
So, the short answer to the question, is there a place where you can retire away from communism, is no, the reason being that it has gone global.
Copyright: Ileana Johnson 2015