One of the things that has always scared the shit out of me is the communist habit of "disappearing" people. When I was a boy scout, my scoutmaster was a man who was born in the Soviet union. His parents smuggled him out hidden in the trunk of a car when he was a teenager. He never saw or heard from them again. They were taken, because the government found out that they committed the sin of smuggling their child to safety. Shot in the head, sent to a gulag. Who knows?
When the Soviets disappeared someone, they didn't usually kill them. In fact, they usually didn't, unless the killing was being used as a high profile example to drive a point home. It was much more efficient to make them work until they died and then use their bones to pave a road. One such road was the Kolyma highway- Stalin's road of bones. That highway is 1200 miles long, and has a million people buried under it- or about one body every 6 and a half feet.
This is what communism has in store for those who oppose it. Go ahead, read all about it and look at the pictures. I spent my childhood hearing directly from a survivor of the terror that was communism. Greg was not only my scout master, he was a good friend of my parents. He was a short, round, hairy man with a loud voice and a hearty laugh. I'm sorry to say that he is dead now, having died 15 years ago, not long after my father. His eldest son is a homicide detective and hates communists with a passion. You can guess how he feels about the events of the past year. Greg's younger son died about ten years ago.
I will never give in to communism. I know what it brings. Sorrow and death.
2 comments:
I grew up in Miami in the '60s when the waves of Cuban refugees started. I knew many and was close friends with a few. Anybody who was old enough to remember adults being executed for not being Castro supporters, or that horrible psychotic Che Guevara, had the same stories. They remind me of your Scout master friend.
We used to joke about the number of people taking dangerous rafts to Cuba compared to the number escaping. Nobody every went to Cuba. The people who got out came on anything they could get to float.
With ya.
I have worked with several communist refugees over the years. Very similar stories and what can you say, they're horrifying to us westerners as you hear them and realize how disposable and cheap human life is and was to the communists. It's one thing to hear it on tv or read it, but having a guy who was in the camp watching people get shot, tell me about it while we were working was powerful.
That horrifying and casual dismissal of human life is the same whether it's N Vietnam, Cuba (I've known several folks from there who escaped Castro), Romania, or anywhere else.
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