I was talking to my coworker and he hates GW Bush. He says he’s as bad as Hitler. Now I don’t like GW Bush either but c’mon, I hate when people do that.
My question to any of you is this:
Have you ever lived in a country under an oppressive regime?
Like Romania under Chauchescu or maybe got away from Cuba under Castro.
I realize this is subjective, one man’s oppression is another’s freedom, well to a degree anyway.
I also realize many here may not have lived it, but if you knew of people who lived in a country with a repressive government, what was it like or what did the people you know say it was like?
I used to know someone who lived in Spain under Francisco Franco(who, apparently, is still dead). Basically, from what I gather, life was tolerable in an economic and legal sense, but there were certain things that you didn’t talk about or say. People didn’t live in terror that they would be raided the next dawn as long as they knew how to behave. Any indication of sympathy or association with Communism was RIGHT OUT.
My father’s father was heavily involved in the Indian independence movement, had Marxist leanings and was thrown in jail for quite a while by the British for his revolutionary activities (he met Gandhi! Had a revelation! Quit being an accountant and ran around Occupying India). We know plenty of families who had relatives shipped off to Andaman and the like for their political views.
I’m not sure if this counts in your mind, but I’m pretty certain people of his age and background considered the British to be their oppressors.
My wife grew up in Peru during the 1970s & 80s. The stories of direct government problems aren’t much but they also had the Shining Path movement which controlled much of the area where they lived (out in the mountains). Her family has a story about them being on a bus when it was stopped by guerrilla fighters who came on board and started taking all the boys and young men at gunpoint to join the movement. Her brother, who was 12, acted confused and started speaking only in English. I guess the guerrillas eventually decided “not worth the effort” because they left him and just took the others. When it wasn’t stuff like that, it was rampant corruption and bribes required to do any little thing. Anyway, they dealt with it by getting the hell out of Peru and moving to the United States.
I also know a guy who was born and raised in Eastern Bloc era Bulgaria and moved to the US after the Soviet Union fell. I don’t have any specific anecdotes about his life except to say that he’s super conservative right-wing now and will lecture long and hard about how every possible left-wing supported thing is going to ruin the United States he came here for and turn it into the Soviet Union.
I guess I qualify for living in oppressive regime of Tito’ Yugoslavia and then under occupation of JNA (Yugoslav Army) and Serb paramilitary made up from Serbs from Serbia and local ones.
One of the most fascinating things about people from former Yugoslavia is that most of them today do not consider Tito time to be oppressive especially in light of the destruction and loss of life during wars initiated by Serbs.
My take on that is that for some reason those same people simply don’t have understanding of what freedom means. For example, freedom of speech - in former Yugoslavia there was an article in the Criminal Code that allowed an arbitrary and highly subjective assessment of any form of speech including non-public speech and based on that assessment one might end up prosecuted and jailed. Common understanding was that there are some things one should not talk about.
Now, in Bush era probably it was not like that - so banal and so expansive. However, in Bush era it was not pretty being highly public and vocal in opposition to Iraq war like Joseph Wilson. While certainly very different, the methods for dealing with those who oppose regime are only different in subtlety but in in it’s essence. And that essence is to isolate, attack and destroy those deemed dangerous. Choosing who to go against is a function of what given regime can afford.
In the end, it applies that as long as one stays away from controversial subjects you will be fine. My family from mother and father side never had anyone in communist party but those who did, they had it good.
The difference is that in US the degree of success, some sort of threshold, is so much higher that any comparison is silly.
I lived in Saudi Arabia as a child. I was aware of some of the opression, but really didn’t feel it much personally because of my age, rather than my gender. I was pre-pubescent so many of the clothing restrictions didn’t actually apply, I never expected to drive at my tender age, and I was used to my father being the authority. For a child, it was business as usual, mostly.
My mother grew up during Hitler’s regime. She had many interesting stories.
I lived in communist Poland in the late 1980s. I remember the lack of variety in the stores, the sandpaper toilet paper, finding only bread and vinegar in a grocery. And lots of stupid rules and regulations without purpose.
I didn’t actually live in Panama during the Noriega regime, but I visited Panama regularly for up to a month at a time during its last couple of years. (I was here for one of the coup attempts against him, and missed being here during the invasion by 36 hours.) And I lived in Panama (well, actually in the Canal Zone) for a couple of years during when Omar Torrijos was dictator.
Even for a US citizen, who was relatively safe, the oppressive thing was that you felt the Guardia (National Guard) could do pretty much anything they wanted to and get away with it. So you watched your step pretty much anytime they were around.
Well, I wouldn’t call it truly oppressive, certainly not severely, but there have been military coups and juntas in charge here in Thailand. And I maintain that Thailand has a false veneer of democracy, as the military is always – always – calling the shots behind the scenes. (A main reason Thaksin was overthrown was he started feeling he was bigger than the military.) And of course there is a Family Who Must Not Be Named, because if you do, you could be spending 15 years in the monkey house, and I don’t mean at Dusit Zoo. But it’s usually pretty mild overall regardless of the odd sporadic outbreaks of mayhem. Your average Thai would look at you like you were from Mars – I mean more so than they already do – if you were to suggest they were living under an oppressive regime. (Well, maybe that’s not quite true. These days, the yellow-shirt supporters will claim the red shirts who are in power now are oppressive, and vice-versa when the yellow shirts are in power. But you get what I mean.)
But I have no patience for Americans who natter on about how oppressive it is in the US. Large numbers of these wingnuts seem to find their way to Thailand and are quick to bend the ear of anyone who will listen to how horribly they were repressed back stateside. They often take it for granted that I must feel the same way or else why would I be living here and are usually surprised when I tell them to stuff it. I even had a friend back in Albuquerque who, under the George Bush Sr presidency – that’s George HW Bush mind you, not his son – told me to expect him to show up on my doorstep over here at any time. Said he kept his passport within easy reach and a small bag packed at all times for when – not if – Bush’s jackbooted thugs tried breaking down his door, causing him to flee.
I lived in Suharto’s Indonesia and Mubarak’s Egypt. The lack of a free press was very obvious. Life under Bush or Obama is nothing like that, and both the OP’s friend and Rand Rover are silly to make the comparison.
I haven’t but I’ve known people who have, and the common theme in thier stories isn’t so much about the all-knowing Ministry of Fear with its Iron Fist, but rather the constant low-level corruption and lack of accountability.
So if a soldier is in a bad mood and feels like shooting some little girl’s dog, he’ll never have to answer for it. He’s a kid with a gun in a country where kids with guns is pretty much all it has going for it.
There’s no official policy that elevator operators may freely feel up the tits of teenage girls left alone with them, but since the cops depend on elevator operators to keep them abreast (pun) of who’s coming and going, the operator takes his perqs with impunity.
Or the amulance drivers who show up at emergencies blind drunk. Nobody’s going to complain to their bosses: if the EMT’s didn’t have more pull than the average person they wouldn’t have gotten sinecure jobs like that in the first place.
-If you type a certain religious leader into the search bar, or a certain chinese artist, or a certain nobel prize winner, or a certain exercise cult into google, my internet stops working for a few minutes. AND that’s only in English…Oh anything to do with a certain square is also a bad idea. Not to mention that war with Vietnam in 1979 is also blocked as China NEVER fights other countries in Asia. Except bad BAD Japan.
Although I lived in West Berlin while the Wall was up, I would go to East Berlin almost every weekend (purely for financial reasons - I was poor and I could exchange money on the black market and eat and drink cheap!).
Those weekend excursions allowed me to make friends in the East and hang out for parties and go to bars and clubs.
East Berlin was bleak, to say the least. Very sad looking buildings and apartments, drab clothing, few choices in food or drinks, ages behind in technology and simply poor folk making do. Politically it was scary - military at the checkpoints with machine guns, Stasi spies everywhere, people being arrested and never heard from again.
So, although I didn’t really live there, I think I was in East Berlin often enough, and had enough friends, that I can safely say I know a bit of what it was like to live under an oppressive regime. Everybody I knew there hated the government and political leaders with a passion, but feared for their lives if they said it in public. Only late at night, after lots of cheap beer, would they be brave enough to talk much about it. Even then, others would whisper, “Shut up, you don’t know who is listening!”
And even in West Berlin - smack dab in the middle of East Germany - you always knew you were encircled by a very dangerous regime that was waiting for an excuse to march in.