I was talking to an American friend today, who is a huge Bernie supporter. He won’t be voting for Hilary. He’s voting for some third party candidate. (Because fuck Hilary!) I was told I couldn’t understand because I’m not American. Oh, sweet child.
Sit down dearest, I’m going to teach you a thing.
In 2011 Canada had an election. The majority of us were tired of our conservative PM. He didn’t have enough support to win another term. There was absolutely no way this was going to happen. Except it did. Do you know how it did? We split the vote. I’m not going to bore you with details and Canadian politics. Basically, there were three parties. And the conservative PM got re-elected with only 39.62% of the vote. Because the other 60.38% was split between two other parties.
Fast forward to the 2015 election. Many of us voted outside of our political parties to make damn sure that didn’t happen a second time. Let me repeat that for you. I voted OUTSIDE of my political party for the good of my country. It was physically painful for me to do it. But it worked. We got rid of our conservative PM who was destroying our great nation, and we got Justin Trudeau. Who, honestly, luckily, is a damn delight.
Canada literally JUST went through this. We suffered four years of absolutely horrible leadership because our vote was split three ways. So don’t tell me I can’t understand because I’m not an American. And please, for the love of everything good in this world, don’t throw a temper tantrum because you can’t vote for Bernie. Suck it up. Be a grown up and don’t throw your vote away. I’m all for voting third party and supporting the little guy. But not this year. Not just because you didn’t get your way. You aren’t five.
I have a feeling that Bernie supporters are going to protest by not voting, which is almost as bad as voting for a nobody candidate…,
Another Canadian seconding this. I held my nose and ovted Liberal, because the alternative was four more years of active destruction. Trudeau has huge faults, but he’s better than Harper - and the same is true of Hillary and Drumpf. Vote third party. In droves. Build it up to the point where third parties are actually viable threats in the US. But do it when literally everything isn’t at stake.
Any time I see US Americans going ‘I’m voting Green!’, ‘I’m not voting at all!’, I want to fucking HOWL.
Let me tell you a story of Romania in the Year of Our Lord 2000. This presidential cycle is seared into my memory, for one particular reason.
Our choices for future president had been whittled down to Corneliu Vadim Tudor, an ultra-nationalist, far-right poet and senator, a personage much in the vein of Trump as far as sheer bigotry is concerned…. and Ion Iliescu, former Communist Party official, former president and a man whom many of us still consider guilty of crimes against humanity for the fact that he called down thousands of miners upon anti-Communist, pro-Western protesters shortly after the 1989 Revolution:
He, along with other figures in the leading FSN, was allegedly responsible for calling the Jiu Valley miners to Bucharest on 28 January and 14 June 1990 to end the protests of the citizens gathered in University Square, Bucharest, protests aimed against the ex-communist leaders of Romania (like himself). (source)
The Romanian miners of Jiu Valley were called by the newly elected power to Bucharest to end the riots that broke up on 13 June 1990. As President Ion Iliescu put it, the miners were called to save the “besieged democratic regime” and restore order and democracy in Bucharest. The government trucked in thousands of miners from the Jiu Valley to Bucharest to confront the demonstrators. The rest of Romania and the world watched the government television broadcasts of miners brutally grappling with students and other protesters.
The official figures say that during the third Mineriad, seven people were killed and more than a thousand were wounded. The opposition newspaper România Liberă claimed that on 29 June 1990 over 40 bodies were buried in a common grave in Străulești, near Bucharest. Conspiracy theories and rumors circulated as to the origins and development of the mineriad, with some believing that both the Romanian Presidency and Secret Service had a hand in it. Later parliamentary inquiries into the potential role of the Secret Service contributed to the widespread public mistrust of the post-Ceaușescu intelligence service.
Government inquiries would show that the miners had indeed been “joined by vigilantes who were later credibly identified as former officers of the Securitate”, and that for two days, the miners had been aided and abetted by the former Securitate members in their violent confrontation with the protesters and other targets. (source)
As for Corneliu Vadim Tudor….
In 1991, [Corneliu Vadim Tudor] founded the Greater Romania Party, the platform of which Time magazine described as “a crude mixture of anti-Semitism, racism and nostalgia for the good old days of communism”. Some statements and articles by Tudor and his colleagues can be described as ultra-nationalist, anti-Hungarian, anti-Roma, and homophobic. (source)
Tudor’s and his party’s change from national communism to ultranationalism took place after 1996. In 1999, Dan Corneliu Hudici, a former reporter at România Mare, claimed there was a “secret blacklist” of dozens of politicians (including then-president Emil Constantinescu), journalists, and businessmen to be arrested if Tudor’s party came to power.
On 18 October 2012, while speaking on the talk show Romania la Raport, Tudor said that “in Romania there was never a Holocaust … I will deny it till I die because I love my people.“ (source)
These two fine gentlemen were our two options for president in 2000. I was too young too vote then, so all I could do was watch on with a sense of muffled, resigned horror. And my people, foolish though we can be, limited through we can be, ridiculously racist through we can be, painfully homophobic through we can be, decided that out of the two, the former autocrat and presumed mass-murderer was still a better option than the goddamn fascist – so Iliescu got the vote with an overwhelming majority.
Even people who loathed him with every fiber of their being grit their teeth and voted for the old bastard, because at this point most of us would have voted for a steaming turd, rather than Vadim! We couldn’t unleash someone like Vadim upon our partners, we still had access to the European Union to fight for – so we were pragmatic about the whole thing and went with Iliescu instead, even those among us who believed he should end up in jail for the rest of his life.
And then I see US Americans going on and on about how they’ll vote for no one other than Bernie, they’ll never vote for Hillary, not in a million years… People, if your complete lack of political pragmatism and your ‘ideological purity at all costs’ bullshit unleashes Trump upon your country and the rest of the world, you will have no one to blame but yourselves.
Nota Bene: since this is Tumblr, I feel I need to specify this. In Eastern Europe, ‘anti-Communist’ as a political position is so widespread that it tells you almost nothing about the rest of the person’s politics. They could well be social-democrats like me. They could be centrists. They could be right-wing. So i don’t want to hear any ‘oh they were probably just a bunch of fascists, they deserved it’ in regards to the protesters injured and killed during the Mineriads. I’ve already had people on here laugh at / dismissmy father’s torture at the hands of NKVD and my great-grandfather’s murder in the Aiud gulag, so I put nothing past some. Understand that we came with deep scars out of what were totalitarian regimes, we’re never going to look at them as Americans do.
