A car from our dark past
The dilemma of our time... why would someone be proud of a dark past?
This is a picture I captured these days, on my street. The car is an old Dacia 1300, a shitty car, built in the early 1970s in the Communist Romania. In fact, nothing more but a poorly built clone of a Renault 12 (the car was built in Pitesti, under a license from the french company). I remember the car from my childhood, as my parents bought a new one in 1986, after staying 4 years on a waiting list. It was the only car that you could buy in the Communist Romania (except for the very few privileged ones that could buy cars imported from other communist countries - Trabant, Lada, Moskvich, and some times even a Skoda).
The quality was that bad, that my father filled the trunk with spare parts... The longest trip we could have, was the yearly vacation on the sea side; a long 450 km trip, too long to reach the destination without any mechanical breakdown.
And this is no everything bad about my picture. The car has the markings of Militia, the communist police, infamous for their stupidity (actually they hired mainly workers without education, teaching them how to read, and used them to impose the will of the dictatorial regime).
The car should sit in a museum, to remind our young generation about the dark times of our history, and not to be shown proudly on the street. Sorry, but I find this situation offensive... It's like being proud of driving a historical car, with a big Nazi swastika on it.
Eh, come on. It was’t that bad :) the car had one big advantage man: you could fix it yourself. And once u knew how to fix it, the skills can be transported to other cars or vehicles that used the same engine principle.
I see this with nostalgy not necesarily with offense. And comparing our Miliția with the SS? Really?! Come on...SS would shot u dead on the side of the road while the majority of the Militia employees were peasants that didn’t even know how to slap a person.
A piece of junk that can easily be repaired, remains a piece of junk! :-)
Agree, comparing Militia to SS is an exaggeration. Still, Militia was a military organisation, directly under the control of the Communist Party and used as a repressive force against the enemies of the communist party.