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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   32104 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 2, 2024

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Romanian Supreme Court Cancels Election, Overthrows Results of First Round

Recently, unknown dark horse anti-NATO candidate Călin Georgescu shocked the world by winning a plurality of the vote in the first round of Romania's presidential election. Key to his victory was an intense social media campaign, with a particular emphasis on Tik-Tok.

Romania's Supereme Court has today declared these results null and void. The full opinion setting out their reasoning has yet to be published, but this is almost certainly due to allegations of Russian interference. I have not seen any credible accusations that votes themselves were fraudulently cast, only that Georgescu's campaign recieved improper (illegal?) assistance from Russian media operations. This is IMO the most important outstanding question.

The allegations of Russian media operations seems to stem from Calin Georgescu's social media success on TikTok. I've previously discussed how the TikTok ban was ultimately determined by Zionist support for deplatforming a source of highly-successful anti-Israel content, with accusations of China manipulating the algorithm to boost pro-Palestine content only being substantiated by pointing to the success of those content tags. China was a scapegoat for the TikTok ban in the US, and Russia appears to be the scapegoat for the cancelled elections in Romania based on a very similar logic, as @theSinisterMushroom pointed out the actual evidence of content manipulation on TikTok in Georgescu engagement is basically non-existent.

On that note, it was only a few days ago that the American Jewish Committee, uh, wrote letters that they were very concerned about the first round of the election:

AJC Expresses Concern About Romanian Presidential Candidate with History of Antisemitism and Holocaust Revisionism:

Rabbi Andrew Baker, Director of International Jewish Affairs for American Jewish Committee, has written a letter to Romanian President Klaus Iohannis and Romanian Foreign Minister Luminita Odobescu expressing concern about the victory in the first round of the Romanian presidential election by Cailin Georgescu.

In the letter, Baker called Georgescu a “person who fuels the flames of anti-Semitism, who personally promotes Holocaust revisionism, and who, through his political views, defies the essential purpose of NATO."

The full text of the letter is below:

...

The first round of the Romanian Presidential elections last week has seen the victory of a candidate who is anathema to everything that we have worked for together. He is someone who fans the flames of antisemitism, who personally promotes Holocaust revisionism, and who by his political views challenges the essential purpose of NATO. Surely, this cannot be indicative of Romania today.

Calin Georgescu's "Holocaust Revisionism" amounts to praise for Romania's WWII wartime leader Ion Antonescu, who was in the 90s still well-regarded among anti-Communist sympathizers. Antonescu's image was dinged some as Elie Wiesel Commission did its relentless Holocaust guilt-tripping campaign. Western-aligned media focused on maligning the Antonescu administration due to deporting Jews to the East in Transnistria without the proper supplies, doing mass reprisal shootings in response to partisan attacks and other stuff, grossly exaggerating the intentions behind it. After a while it had become increasingly untenable to make positive statements about Antonescu's leadership in the presence of the left, in high society or among politicians. (And of course it's illegal "Holocaust denial" too.)

So the question of Russian interference in TikTok is likely the least important question, as that issue is a scapegoat for other problems, as alluded to by Reuters:

Also of concern to European allies is Georgescu describing as national heroes and "martyrs" Ion Antonescu, Romania's de facto World War Two leader, sentenced to death for his part in Romania's Holocaust, and Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, a pre-World War Two leader of the Iron Guard, one of Europe's most violent anti-Semitic movements.

The EU diplomat said Georgescu's views on the pair, as well as on NATO, would increase tensions both at home and abroad if he came to power. "Imagine the discussions in the (European) Council, imagine the polarisation he would bring at home," said the EU diplomat.

EU "Democracy" is just the biggest lie there is. On another note, that Elie Wiesel National Institute for Studying the Holocaust in Romania referenced by the Rabbi in his letter expressing, uhm, concern over the first round of the election? That exact same institute is now, as of last month, a Trusted flagger under the Digital Services Act (DSA) in the EU. The line between Holocaust studies and outright legal censorship of political dissidents no longer even exists, the same "institutes" just have both jobs at the same time officially, now.

You know, this ‘the ADL uses Russian/Chinese influence concerns as a fig leaf to go after TikTok because it boosts anti Zionism’ is a well evidenced enough take that I didn’t realize where you were going with it until you got to Ion Antonescu, who regardless of his other merits as a leader was definitely a willing and enthusiastic participant in the Holocaust even when compared to other axis leaders like Horthy and Tiso who collaborated in such matters.

In Rumania even the S.S. were taken aback, and occasionally frightened, by the horrors of oldfashioned, spontaneous pogroms on a gigantic scale; they often intervened to save Jews from sheer butchery, so that the killing could be done in what, according to them, was a civilized way.

Things became so bad that the local Nazi representative, German noble Manfred von Killinger, intervened and asked them to stop and defer to the Third Reich’s own efforts. I feel like when a Nazi named “Baron von Killinger” is horrified by your brutality, it’s time to take a step back and evaluate whether you may have crossed a line.

(Slate Star Codex, Review of Eichmann In Jerusalem, January 2017.)

Not only that, but it's pretty odd to say "Calin Georgescu's "Holocaust Revisionism" amounts to praise for Romania's WWII wartime leader Ion Antonescu" when it's followed by a quote indicating that Georgescu also praised Corneliu Codreanu, whose antisemitism was absolutely under zero doubt by any standards.

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