Lovers of a Free West have much to be grateful for this Christmas
“Only those who have not had freedom truly cherish it”
Dec 23, 2016 By Judi McLeod
In praise of author and popular CFP columnist Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh on Wednesday’s column ‘Half a Loaf of Bread, commenter Hans PFall points out most eloquently “only those who have not had freedom truly cherish it.”
As a child growing up in Communist Romania, Ileana longed for the freedom of the United States of America, dreaming from afar that she would one day grow up and make it to that ‘shining city on a hill’, which she eventually did.
Related: Do you Take Your Grocery Store for Granted? – below
Just as we are about to celebrate 2017, PFall takes us back to the film ‘Casablanca’, which was set in Nazi-occupied Morocco:
“There is a scene set in a cafe where the patrons, in defiance of the Nazis, start singing La Marseillaise. There is a shot of actress Madeleine Lebeau with tears in her eyes as she sings. That is not acting. She had just come over after escaping occupied France.
“If anyone needs to know what it means to lose your freedom, just look at that face, those eyes. That’s all you need to know.”
Madeleine Lebeau, was so much more than a flickering image on a long ago film. Her New York Times obituary stated that she had “attained movie immortality with one scene, when the camera zoomed in on her tear-stained face as she sang “La Marseillaise” in “Casablanca”.
But Ms. Lebeau, being real, attained so much more than “movie mortality”, immortalizing the very meaning of ‘Freedom’.
As PFall points out, she wasn’t acting, “at 19 years of age, she had just come over after escaping occupied France”.Some people end their lives in a newspaper obit, but icons like Madeleine Lebeau go on to live in human memory forever.
“Ms. Lebeau was 19 when she was cast in “Casablanca” as Yvonne, the spurned girlfriend of Rick Blaine, the owner of Rick’s Café Américain, played by Humphrey Bogart. (New York Times, May 17, 2016)
“In one of the film’s pivotal scenes, Nazi officers in the cafe begin singing the patriotic song “Watch on the Rhine,” whereupon the Czech resistance leader Victor Laszlo, played by Paul Henreid, orders the house band to strike up the French national anthem.
“One by one, the bar’s patrons rise and join in, drowning out the Germans. As the song nears its stirring finale, the camera closes in on Yvonne, her face lit with patriotic fervor, tears streaming from her eyes as she sings. At the song’s conclusion, the camera swings toward her again as she shouts a defiant “Vive la France! Vive la démocratie!”
“She was a free woman who lived by her own rules, totally inhabiting the roles entrusted to her by leading directors,” the French culture minister Audrey Azoulay said of Ms. Lebeau in a statement on Monday. “She will forever be the face of French resistance.”
Freedom seekers from the Nazis and Communists , having made it to the West, often spend their lives trying to remind us what happens when the light goes out on freedom, liberty and democracy.
In her books and columns Ileana Johnson Paugh is one such light in the threatening darkness.
Some come from Romania, some from other countries oppressed as Soviet satellites, and today—even after the death of brutal dictator Fidel Castro—the oppressed, freedom seeking people of Cuba.
Until November 8, in the same year that Madeleine Lebeau died at age 92, America was headed in the same direction of oppression.
Lovers of a Free West have much to be grateful for this Christmas.
To the never to be forgotten words of a 19-year-old escapee from Nazi-occupied France, who defiantly shouted “Vive la France! Vive la démocratie!” meaning every word, can be added: “Vive la United States of America.
Or, in the language of America’s long suffering patriots: “USA!USA!”
http://canadafreepress.com/article/only-those-who-have-not-had-freedom-truly-cherish-it
Until you have to stand in endless lines to buy food and basics for survival, such as bread, milk, sugar, oil, flour, butter, or toilet paper and vitamins, until you have to live in the dark and cold when lights, heat, and electricity go out daily
Do you Take Your Grocery Store for Granted?
Dec 23, 2016 By Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh
The Ceausescu clan and their communist useful idiots were quick to remind us of what an enchanted life we lived under his leadership and how terrible life was under evil capitalism and how their people suffered under the boot of the bourgeoisie. We were so protected and full of hope under “mother” Elena and “father” Nicolae’s leadership, we were told ad nauseam, while the opposite reality hit us in the face every day.
Commies lied to us in order to cover up their mismanagement of the economy, the disastrous five-year plans, the gross misuse of the land, squandered resources, sold produce and grain to the west for hard currency while people were on rationing cards and hungry, and funds stolen from the treasury or from citizens accused under dubious circumstances of treasonous activities such as enemy of the proletariat.
The five-year plans had impossible to achieve goals set by those apparatchiks with high ranking in the Communist Party. People would go to jail for not meeting these goals in the time frame dictated by the Stalinist bureaucrats, illiterate community organizers, who understood nothing about the economy, about industrial or agricultural planning. When things went missing in factories, and they did often, accountants and managers would go to jail as theft occurred under their blind watch.
At some point, they ran out of cattle feed and Ceausescu had to distress-slaughter cows. I remember mom saying that beef was tough to chew and purple-looking. To this day, we don’t eat beef. The meat was rationed to 2.5 kg per family per month. Butchers would chop up bones in the meat which turned it into a purplish grey mass thrown on the counter with contempt. We had to bring our own wrapping newspapers and expandable jute shopping bags to carry food home. In addition to this shopping jute bag, people carried extra cash in case a line developed somewhere which meant that they could not pass up the opportunity to buy whatever was on sale.
This type of pathological lying to the people is not unlike the Democrats covering up their failed economic policies by telling Americans for eight years now how the economic status quo is our new normal, we should get used to the global economy, to the manufacturing sector moving entirely outside of the U.S., and how our jobs are never coming back.
Living under the boot of communism
Living under the boot of communism, we could not compare our meager existence with how other people lived because we were forbidden to travel, television programming was tightly controlled, and so were radio broadcasting and the press.
Once in a while those in power slipped and broadcast successful mini-series like “Dallas” which gave us a glimpse of the opulent and dreamy life of the Ewings in Texas, the faraway Shangri La where money grew on trees and oil bubbled out of the ground. American movies were smuggled into Romania, translated by a very courageous lady, and sold on the black market when VCRs became available.
Romania was not the only Iron Curtain communist regime to treat their people this way, but it was one of the worst. Joe Keller described in a recent post, “When Victor Belenko defected and flew his Mig-25 Foxbat into Japan, he was taken to a safe house in Warrenton, Virginia, for debriefing and subsequent resettlement. Warrenton was not much of a town at the time. We had Peebles, shoe stores, grocery stores, an IHop and a couple of other restaurants and a bunch of gas stations. Belenko thought the Agency had staged the entire town for his benefit and did not believe stores had clothes, and restaurants had food in America. It ran against everything he had been told.”
The dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, a man with no formal education, ordered in 1982 the passage of the “Program of Scientific Nutrition for the Population,” a law that established the rationing of food, how many calories a person could eat, and how much one could weigh. Two years later, the nutritional standards were reduced even more.
Portions and consumption were controlled through the issuance of cards
Portions and consumption were controlled through the issuance of cards which could only be used at the local neighborhood grocery store where residents had to register each family member, present proof of identity and residence, and the number of people living in the house, including renters or temporary visitors. Food could only be bought based on the number of people registered.
Lying was impossible as the police informers, the beat cops, and the housing registration office knew exactly where each person lived or if they moved and where. Cards were color-coded by cities and towns. Urban residents could buy more food while farmers were given less rations on the assumption that they grew some themselves. Those who tried to purchase in excess of their rations, when found out, were sent to jail. It was considered speculation punishable by law if a person tried to barter goods or sell food on the black market. Many enterprising Romanians were clever enough and were never caught. (SOURCE)
Imagine how mesmerized I was when I first entered the one and only grocery store in a small town in the south, population 3,000, Horn’s Big Star. It was filled with food to the rafters. I was in awe and I kept filling the cart to the brim. My husband was laughing, putting things back and telling me that they will be there tomorrow. I did not believe him at first, I expected empty store shelves on my second trip.
I was so incredulous; I went to the grocery store every day to buy nectarines and Red Delicious apples. I was so shocked that I could buy fresh fruit in early January. I just knew that it was all staged for my benefit. Albert, the owner, who was a friend of the family, always greeted me with a big smile which I thought odd. Why is this man always smiling? I was used to sour employees, shouting and treating us like animals, while we pushed and shoved each other in endless lines, often getting to the front of the line and finding out that they ran out of whatever we were waiting to buy.
We have an abundance of food and people get irritated in the U.S. when they can’t find their particular brand. Few have any idea that our grocery stores only stock a three-day supply of food. When major storms strike or even the potential of inclement weather in the U.S., shelves of milk, water, and bread disappear really fast at Walmart.
Until you have to stand in endless lines to buy food and basics for survival, such as bread, milk, sugar, oil, flour, butter, or toilet paper and vitamins, until you have to live in the dark and cold when lights, heat, and electricity go out daily, when you have no running water at all or hot water is a rare occurrence, you cannot claim that you are poor, living in an “unjust country.” What you really need is a lesson in history, a trip to Cuba, to some other third world country, and an attitude adjustment to reality.
http://canadafreepress.com/article/do-you-take-your-grocery-store-for-granted
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