Patriot's History® of the Modern World, Vol. II: From the Cold War to the Age of Entitlement, 1945-2012
INTRODUCTION
It could have been a postwar American town or the Farmer’s Market in Los Angeles. Busy streets served as the setting for a bustling vegetable market, teeming with customers, awash in produce—a rich bounty spread out over hundreds of stands. As far as one could see, makeshift shops in the open air stretched down the street—in post–World War II Romania. Communism, in the early 1950s, still had not gained total control of the Romanian market, and farmers came from the countryside to sell their goods. A young Romanian, Gabriel Bohm, walked through the marketplace with his mother in awe of the cornucopia of fruits and vegetables, displayed under homemade tents or on crates by ordinary farmers. Bohm remembered seeing a market “full of merchandise . . . good looking, healthy stuff.” Yet within twenty years, Bohm witnessed a dramatic change. The same scene in 1965 would be much different: empty streets, devoid of vendors, patrolled by police. “Those markets were deserted,” he recalled years later: “not a single carrot, not a single vendor selling a carrot.”
