If you’ve known someone who had to flee from a place on this earth of ours, because of an authoritarian dictator’s iron-fisted rule, you just can’t shake something like that from your mind.
A dear person I knew, and his siblings, witnessed unspeakable atrocities, fleeing from such a place, to the place I’ve known all my life, the United States of America.
He rarely spoke about what he’d witnessed, but he had recurring nightmares.
I was thinking back to that, as I was reading about “former aides privately” comparing “the Presidential Personnel Office under President Donald Trump to the Gestapo in Nazi Germany or the East German Stasi,” according to political journalist, Jonathan Karl. “The Trump administration was obsessed with purging anyone seen as disloyal… the office transformed into an ‘internal police force,’ that was perpetually looking out for ‘traitors within.’”
When a U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) official once called to inform Mark Meadows, the White House Chief of Staff in the Trump administration, that a low-level HUD staffer had liked a famous singer-songwriter’s Instagram post, with a positive message about former President Trump’s opponent in the 2020 election, Mr. Meadows said… “We really can’t have our people liking posts promoting Joe Biden.”
Okay… in a way, I sort of get that, but then again, former aides comparing POTUS 45’s Presidential Personnel Office to the Gestapo and to Stasi, raises a whole bunch of red flags.
Writing about freedom and democracy, in the Daily Post earlier this month, I suggested that… “Being able to speak freely, sure seems better than having to look over your shoulder all the time,” and that “getting rounded up by storm troopers, or having to be in political indoctrination camps for hours on end, wouldn’t be much fun.”
Fleeing from an authoritarian regime, so many decades ago, that dear gentleman and his siblings knew all too well about that, perhaps, as they were making their way to a… better place.