I recently watched an interview of Xi Van Fleet by Tucker Carlson.  Van Fleet lived through the Chinese Cultural Revolution and eventually was able to flee Communist China to the United States in the mid-1980s.  Her harrowing story was all too familiar to my family and the many who have fled communism to find freedom in the United States of America.

My husband’s family fled Communist Hungary in the early 1970s.  He paid a heavy price.  My in-laws had to leave my husband behind in order to escape when he was only three years old.  They believed they would be able to get him out of the country within a few months because Hungarian law stated that you could not separate a child from his parents.  Unfortunately, after they left the country, the law was changed, and it took them almost five years to be reunited with their son.

My husband’s parents were forced to flee because they could not get housing or proper work.  They were living in a laundry kitchen until my mother-in-law became pregnant with my husband.  Since they were not members of the Communist Party, they were put on a ten-year waiting list to be able to rent an apartment.  In desperation, my father-in-law stole bricks and mortar to build an illegal room with a dirt floor onto his mother’s very small home for them to live in.

Life in Communist Hungary was difficult.   My mother-in-law’s family was devoutly Catholic, even in spite of communism’s heavy repression of religion.  Communist watchers in every community would mark down every family that attended church.  Since my mother-in-law went to church with her family, she was put on a list to be denied opportunities in school.  She was advanced in mathematics and science, and even though she excelled in school, she was denied the ability to move ahead academically because she was Catholic.  Instead of being able to go to college, she was forced into factory work.  They made only enough money to eat, and if they needed a new pair of shoes or underwear, they would have to skip meals and groceries to save up money.

Twenty-three years ago, I lived in Communist China during a summer exchange program in college.  I was in my early twenties and naïve; I had no idea what I was going to experience, and it changed my life.

I had assumed there was no poverty in China.  Even though I knew that the people lived simply, I did not expect abject poverty.  I didn’t expect to see babies and families living in the gutter, literally.  I lived in the foreign teachers’ apartments, which were posh by Chinese standards, with tile floors, a small kitchen, a Western toilet, and air-conditioning that occasionally worked.  When I would visit my friends, who were professors at the college, I was shocked by how they lived.  They lived in 12-by-12 cinderblock rooms with cement floors, a small sink, a bed, and a small table.  The student dorms were even more reminiscent of prison cells, with six students per room and  nothing more than stacked beds for furniture.  Toilets?  There were none, besides the shared squatty-hole down the hall.

The students would often cheat on their exams, because if they failed, they would be kicked out permanently and be forced into hard labor.  They were not allowed to choose their majors or career paths; they were given aptitude tests in high school, the results of which were what they had to do, without appeal or choice, for the rest of their lives.

The experiences of people like Xi Van Fleet, who have escaped communist regimes, are all too common and yet all too unknown in America today.  Americans should be frightened by these stories, as we can see the diabolical ideology of Marxism rapidly infiltrating American society, institutions, and government.  Marxist ideologies such as CRT, DIE, and Queer Theory have gotten a stranglehold on every corporation, university, public school, legacy media outlet, and government bureaucracy in the United States.

Many of us feel the icy grip of Marxism encroaching upon and destroying the hard won rights of our nation’s Founding Fathers.  Unfortunately, a large portion of U.S. citizens are oblivious to what is going on around them, while a zealous few even encourage it and cheer it on.

When the citizenry finally wakes up and sees that all of their rights have been stripped away and realize they are nothing but slaves, it will be too late.  That is, it will be too late for everything except Stockholm syndrome–based self-delusion and trying to make yourself feel better by turning in your friends and neighbors for “anti-American” beliefs.  Then come the arrests, the incarcerations, the gulags, the substance abuse and death on a scale not seen even in wartime.

The United States of America was “the shining city upon a hill” for the whole world because it was where freedom lived and thrived.  If the United States falls to communism, there will be nowhere left to flee.  If the United States dies a Marxist death, it will be the end of freedom and liberty in the world.

My in-laws reminisce about their favorite billboard, which they saw shortly after arriving in the U.S.  It was clearly visible from the New Jersey Turnpike, and it stated, “The 3 things that made America Great: God, Guts, and Guns.”  This was true then, and it is still true today.

Image: Praveenp via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped).