Meh, I’d say a joke of questionable taste.
My immediate thought was “Thatcher’s Britain – hurr hurr”. Like either Bush, or Reagan, it does of course fail in comparison to the other regimes mentioned here. But, an interesting data point I have is something a left leaning American friend said, after she came to live here: "I thought people in the States hated Reagan but it’s nothing to the way people here (Northern English city) hate Thatcher. Looking back I think we all lived in fear that it could end up becoming much worse.
I grew up in Brezhnev’s Russia.
Anyone comparing GWB to Hitler is a moron.
My parents are Holocaust survivors, and after the war they both spent time under communist regimes in Eastern Europe, mainly Hungary. (My father also spent some time in East Germany.)
So they’ve had PLENTY of experience under oppressive regimes.
I have, when I was a kid. Not one of the worst ones out there, but it was an oppressive regime, all right.
You did not talk about the government. Ever. With anyone outside your immediate family, even your closest friends. Or about the laws, or about anything you didn’t like about the country. We were little kids and we knew that. We knew that if anyone, even our best friends, asked us what our parents thought of the government, we needed to say nothing beyond ‘I don’t know.’ We didn’t really understand why until much later when we were elsewhere, but we knew it was serious.
We were expats, so probably we would just have been PNGd (although that’s not definite - an expat friend of our family was jailed a few years later for speaking out against the government - he was lucky and got out again). I can’t swear this story is true, but I was told that a few years before we were there, the expat community from a tiny country was celebrating their independence day in a bar, singing and dancing and so on. The barman switched off the music to put on a radio address by the president. One of the party asked him to switch back to the music. He reported it, and the entire community from that country was PNGd. Again, this may not be true, but it’s definitely believable.
This one is true: the father of a guy I went to school with was an opposition politician who was getting a little too popular. He and two of his aides were killed in a car accident. The kind that gives you bullet holes.
All this ‘George W Bush is just like Hitler’ and ‘I live in Obama’s America’ crap becomes much less cute when you have even the first clue about the real thing, or even the slightest understanding of what it means that you can say those things without being terrified.
I never lived in Thailand, but I visited there this year. Things seemed pretty good except for one thing. Every time I saw a picture of the King, I wanted to blurt out something like “what a goofy looking guy!” I had heard that it was a crime to insult the King, so I managed to hold my tongue, but it was a bit of struggle most times.
Now that I’ve posted this on the internet, I guess I can’t go back there. 
J.
Does my mother’s house count?
Wimp.
Try Mother-In-Law!
I have a co-worker who grew up in Romania during the final years of the Ceausescu regime. I’ve never exactly probed him about his childhood, but he has mentioned that when he was a kid, he had to share a bicycle with his brothers and sisters and with the neighbors’ kids, and that it was already an old bicycle by the time he was old enough to ride it.
I grew up in Apartheid South Africa. I am not White. So…yes.
There were certain beaches, parks and theatres I never went to until I was an adult. I would have been jailed for even dating my wife, much less marrying her. My sister spent her senior year of High School living with relatives because she was on her school’s Student Council. My mother’s father was an alcoholic, likely schizophrenic, shell of a man because of government torture. I have scars from the sjambok. I am overly familiure with tear gas. I have had friends jailed for protesting, and classmates killed by the government.
When were you born BTW. And if its not rude, what was your ethnicity, I believe that being black African was fairly low on the totem pole and being mixed race or Indian was slightly better.
I repeat. We really need a “Ask the non-white SA’er about life under apartheid” thread.
Me too, except I am white. I consider myself to have lived under an oppressive regime, though I was the beneficiary of much of the oppression.
A previous thread on life in Spain under Franco.
My husband grew up in Iraq with Saddam. He has told me some stories that I wish I could forget, and thats just from hearing them, not living them. He had two uncles disappear. His mother, some years later, got a bill. It was for the bullets used to kill her brothers. Who can know what happened in the interim. He was lucky to come here as a refugee. He is the only one in his family who could. The rest are still there, and in FACT, it is still not a good place to live.
My girlfriend’s mother was in the Pakistan embassy in Iraq in the 1990’s. Her description of it boggles the mind. They went back in 2004 and it was 10 times worse.
Wonder what that makes Rand Rover then.
That’s a disgusting comment. My mother was in a concentration camp in Nazi Germany. She can tell you what it’s REALLY like to live under an oppressive regime.
First, at the pool in a gated community in Connecticut, my Sister in Law’s very young son asked a survivor, “Why did you write on yourself?” I cannot imagine what a ghastly, horrible frightening experience it was. I freaked out just seeing book jackets in a book store in Brookline while converting.
With that in mind, and asking respectively towards survivors of Nazi Germany, is the joke truly disgusting? Bad taste, perhaps, but I don’t thing it is meant to be compared to or belittle the horror your Mother and millions of others experienced.
Let’s just say more than 40 years ago, and leave it at that…
I’m Coloured. You could think of it as mixed race, but it is more of its own ethnicity than merely being mixed implies.
True, especially in education and the like. Coloureds and Indians were at least citizens of South Africa. Blacks were (nominally) citizens of their own homelands (think - reservations) and had to carry internal passports.
I think I’ve covered the high notes here…
This is not only a cheap political dig but insulting to the earnest posters here who have lived under unarguably repressive regimes. Don’t do it again, Rand Rover.