Posted on 06/29/2012 9:23:02 PM PDT by moonshot925
Have you even lived in or visited a communist country? What was your experience?
Two weeks ago I met a man who escaped Hungary in 1956 as the Soviet tanks were rolling across the Romanian border. Lived in U.S. since. This week he moved back to Hungary. He said he never though he’d be moving back to Hungary to escape communism.
Not quite communism here in the States yet.
But this past Thursday, ‘We Are All Socialists Now’ by John Roberts. Or very close to it. We will see what happens next few months.
Yeah, I would never have dreamed USA to spiral downward like this, in such a short time. I came here in 1985, and it was a whole lot of different country back then.
Visits only; New York City, Chicago, Boston, Newark, Columbus, St. Louis...
I got to go on a tightly controlled, guided tour of East Berlin when I was 10 or 11 in the late ‘80s. So from a child’s perspective: they seemed to be a hundred years behind the Western World in toy technology... Seriously though, in the area we were allowed to shop in, I was disappointed to find that the toys were all like something from my grandparent’s generation: wooden blocks, tin whistles, ball and cup, ect. Nothing electronic. I ended up getting a small brass telescope that turned out to be more decorative than functional.
I lived on Taiwan for a few years in the Mid 1960’s. Not a communist country but it was effectively a totalitarian dictatorship/kleptocracy. Chiang Kai-Shek was the leader and his wife owned the only TV station on the Island. I remember the open-air sewers aka Benjo-ditches. The people were generally pretty poor with a very small middle-class mostly shop owners.
The houses for the most part had Steely-bars on the windows to keep out the thieves. The house we lived in had a raised cistern to provide minimal water pressure. The water however was not potable. We bought bottled water to drink like most people did. The hot water heater was coal fired and there was no air-conditioning.
I would say that the people were on the whole fairly content as long as the regime just left them alone. In many ways I would say that local populace was living the same lifestyle that their grand-parents and great grand-parents had lived.
Food was fairly plentiful as the majority of the country was still farmers. Oh yes, I nearly forgot, they were the darndest copiers of anything they could get their hands on. Intellectual property was nowhere in their lexicon.
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