Bump for liberty!
My wife grew up in Morocco, not as brutal as the totalitarian countries, but nonetheless unfree.
I know a Russian builder who has a remarkable story of his parents/grandparents (father was only child of 8? who survived the family being sent to Siberia) and THEN he went on to WIRE all of MOSCOW (all THREE levels of the city) (hi-tech)....and almost didn’t get out on a religious visa (Reagan).....but, did...his children (this builder is one of them) feared they would have to leave without him up to the last hour....I could probably contact him and get him to give you an interview...
Great idea
I’d like to see your end product.
Good luck!
Funny, I think this is EXACTLY the kind of thing Repubs need to do - gather up immigrants willing to present to the public how different America is from where they came from. Put THEM on the stages rather than just another bunch of white guys who mostly don’t even get past the mealy-mouth half-assed platitudes that Dems have convinced them they must embrace.
reminder to self to post some stories Sunday for bootless.
Family has been here since the early 1600s. My latest arriving ancestor was driven out of France by the Huguenots after becoming a Protestant in 1774
Interesting thread!
I escaped from The Peoples Socialist Collective of Detroit some 20+ years ago. Does that count for anything?
Seriously (series-lee?) I’m looking forward to your product!
I moved to the USA from San Francisco in 1985. Unfortunately, the authoritarian libtard cancer I was attempting to flee seems to have metastasized and infected every rattin’ frattin’ nook and cranny of the country.
Ping for your list
Yes, my 9/11 happened to me in 1975 when I was a 10-year-old child, living and minding my own business, [in] a small town in south Lebanon. I was an only child to a businessman and his wife. I was blessed with a wonderful childhood . . . they showered me with love and everything life had blessed them with. However, our lives were turned upside down because in 1975, the Muslims declared Holy War on the Christians of Lebanon. My home exploded around me, buried in the rubble, wounded as the perpetrators shouted "Allahu Akbar" [God is great]. My only crime was that I was a Christian living in a Christian town. I learned at 10 years old the meaning of the word "infidel." I had a crash course in survival not in the Girl Scouts, but in the bomb shelter that I lived for seven years of my life in freezing cold, pitch darkness, drinking stale water and eating grass to live. I remember at the age of 13, I dressed in my burial clothes going to bed at night, waiting to be slaughtered. By the age of 20, I had buried most of my friends who were slaughtered by Muslims.
I work in a hospital, and for years I interacted with this Asian guy who worked on one of our x-ray machines. I have to admit, I never really liked the guy. I always had difficulty dealing with him, and I could never understand what he was saying. He could be fairly belligerent at times, and I used to dread when I would pick up the phone and it would be him on the other end.
As it happened, he and I had to spend about five or six hours together one day working on the machine. It was one of those kinds of things where we would try something, and if it didn’t work, we would make changes, and try it again. Each iteration left us sitting there for up to 10-15 minutes waiting for the software to finish initializing. During those long intervals, we began having some personal conversations. I asked him where he was from originally, and he told me Vietnam. This piqued my interest, and we began talking in earnest.
He told me his whole story.
He had been a lieutenant in the South Vietnamese Navy, in command of a small vessel. I gathered it must’ve been the size of a small minesweeper or something like that. When South Vietnam fell, he was unable to get out because he couldn’t leave his family behind. He (and his family) were sent to reeducation camps. He spent eight years in one of those camps out in the middle of a godforsaken jungle.
When we got to this point in the conversation, the conversation lagged. I was thinking about what he had been talking about, and I was lost in my thoughts. When it occurred to me that he had fallen silent, I looked up at him. He was just sitting there, looking off into the distance in this small room we were sitting in. He had a very odd, distant look on his face. He looked down at the floor, then after a second or two looked up at me again and said “Sometimes I can’t believe that those things really happened...”
I didn’t ask him what happened, I just waited. He looked at me and said “You wouldn’t believe the things that happened. Even if I told you, you wouldn’t believe me. “
He said that he managed to escape out into the jungle and made his way to the coast. He stole a boat, and spent a week in an open boat on the South China Sea all by himself. He eventually made his way to the United States.
As I looked at him, I realized just how true it is that as we live our lives, we just don’t have a clue about many of the people whose paths we cross every single day. It reminded me of a guy who told me that his mailman had been a paratrooper in World War II. At the time, when he told me that I was just a teenager. It didn’t make much of an impression on me at the time, but when I think of it now I try to imagine what that man went through.
What did he see? Where’d he go, and what kind of mark did the experience leave on him?
That was exactly how I felt after talking to this Vietnamese guy. From that point on, I go out of my way to say hello to him when I see him. I give him a smile, and shake his hand. That somehow seems right to me.
For too long, liberals have escaped accepting responsibility for their actions. I have a bumper sticker on my car that says “I’ve always been proud of my country”. That is true, as far as it goes. But there are a couple of things in my country’s history that I am not proud of.
I am not proud of the way that we sold out Eastern Europe at Yalta.
I am not proud of the stab in the back that we delivered to the Cuban opposition in the Bay of Pigs incident.
I am not proud of the way we treated the Iranians and the Shah of Iran.
And I am not proud of the way we sold out the South Vietnamese after we left Vietnam.
Ping.
I have a friend at work originally from Vietnam who fought for the South Vietnamese army before coming to the US. It’s extremely chilling to hear him tell me that we are on pretty much the same trajectory as Vietnam while the Commies were coming to power. I wish that all of the people who think I’m crazy for saying that we have a socialist (now Marxist) regime would take the time to listen to someone who actually lived through one.
The summer I graduated from High School (1970) I went to work for a man by the name of Ira Turkinov. He was a WWII veteran from the Soviet army. He was a Major when the war ended, and was in the battle of Stalingrad. He returned to Kiev after the war, and found out that his entire family had been rounded up by Stalin’s goons, and executed. He was able to escape the USSR, and immigrated to the U.S. in the early 50’s. He absolutely hated LBJ, and could not comprehend why the Nixon Administration would want to be friends with the Soviets or the Chi-coms. To this day, I never met a more patriotic U.S. Citizen.
We had a wonderful speaker at our local Tea Party last month. He was a child when his family came to the US from Cuba...he remembers throwing all of the family’s belongings to neighbors out of the back window before they left their home, because they knew the gov’t would sieze everything.
His parents told him so many horror stories about the oppresion they lived under in Cuba, he will certainly never take his freedom for granted.
His name escapes me, I’ll try and find out how to contact him from others that were there.
My mom is in her eighties and grew up in Eastern Europe. She lived under the Nazis and then under the Communists. She is very concerned that we are undergoing a similar regime change here.
Just wanted to say your book idea sounds fantastic, and please spread the word on FR when it is completed so we can all run out and buy a copy! Also hello from a fellow Bay area FReeper ... I’ve heard some of Suss’s callers too, and you’re right, they sound worried. With good cause, I think. :(
That’s wonderful. Be sure and get video of these people.
Does moving from Washington state count? It should.
I was stationed in NJ for 4 years... does that count?
National Unity of Hope (UNE) President is accused of murder,from the grave.
Given the political situation in Quatemala, the residents here (from there) will no doubt have stories to tell. A lawyer for Perez Molina (patriotic party PP )produced a video to be released upon his death accusing the president (UNE) of having assassinated him. His video, released a week ago, has got thousands into the streets. The accused president is a member of the UNE. (Hopey/Changey)
The local TV channels are avoiding the story altogether, and have been on a campaign for awhile now trying to discredit the written press.
SNIP
Rosenberg was the legal representative of two murdered Guatemalans: Khalil Musa and his daughter Marjorie Musa. Guatemalan president Alvaro Colom approached Khalil Musa and asked of him to work in the board of Banrural, one of the state banks in Guatemala. Khalil Musa accepted the job but the government didn’t put him in the post, after three months he told the president that he was resigning to the position he never took, because his good name was being used to say that no more strange transactions were happening within the bank. Musa was murdered. and the police and judicial system didn’t find anything about the murderers, as a matter of fact, they said that it was their own factory workers that murdered them, finally saying in private to members of the family of the murdered Khalil Musa, that it was indeed because of the corruption that was going on at Banrural and that it was their own fault.
SNIP
Rosenberg filmed and wrote this document, because he didn’t want to shut up.
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/05/12/guatemala-slain-lawy.html
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/05/11/guatemala-in-youtube.html
The Patriotic Party (Partido Patriota) is a political party in Guatemala. It was founded on 24 February 2001 by retired Army General Otto Pérez Molina.
In the 9 September 2007 legislative election, the Patriotic Party won 15.91% of the vote and 30 seats in Congress. Presidential candidate General Otto Pérez Molina placed second in the presidential race with 23.5% of the vote, eventually losing in the 4 November run-off to centrist Álvaro Colom of the National Unity of Hope (UNE).
THIS VIDEO AT 99 MENTION HAS COMPLETE TRANSCRIPT BELOW. SOMEONE WISH TO POST THE STORY OF GUATEMELA AT A MURDEROUS TURN OF EVENT, BE A GUEST.
GUATEMELA HAS BEEN A FRIENDLY STATE. THE SITUATION IS NOW IN HANDS OF DEATH SQUAD
I have a Polish friend who lived under Kruschev's communism as a child. She lived in an orphanage for a while because her mother couldn't afford to feed and keep her. She told me the children were beaten if the orphanage wasn't kept spotlessly clean. She was able to emigrate when she was about 20 and brought her baby sister over some years later.
One of my sisters and her husband adopted a Korean boy from a Ukrainian orphanage. Interesting how he ended up there in the first place (Communism's tentacles). My sister organized the delivery of several large donations of food, medicine, clothing and other needed items to the orphanage. (Funny that your screen name is bootless because most of those poor children wore boots several sizes too small or had none at all.)
My nephew is now a chef at a hospital and is also learning the welding trade. He was 7 when he came to America. I can't imagine what his life would have been like if he hadn't been adopted. Even after that experience, my highly intelligent but unbelievably ignorant sister voted for and continues to support Øbama.
I look forward to your finished project. I'm an avid reader who happens to be a prodigiously pedantic proofreader, so Freepmail me if you need my services. =o)
btt
Thank you for taking on this important project.
Frankly the Smithsonian should be funding this effort. But in absence of that, you might try the Heritage Foundation or other conservative philanthropic groups that would find publishing a book about these stories worthwhile.
I know people from Pakistan and Iran who moved here for the freedom and to get away from Muslim nutjobs. I’ll see if they’re interested.
Funny, they appreciate America more than most Americans do.
Bump
Sorry I never saw this. GREAT idea! Exactly the kind of factual thing necessary to counter the liberal desire to let illegals come here and milk America.
We need more stories, testimonials, etc. of those who came here for liberty’s sake and the principles that provide its foundations.
Here’s a good link of an Iranian. If you can contact him and get his story it would be a good one to have:
Amir Fakhravar
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzNr5alD_TQ
Authoritarian ain’t totalitarian, Poland and Cuba don’t qualify for your, uhm, “study”. Back to the ABCs, sorry.
Do California and Massachusetts count?