How meeting refugees at a young age affected me

This will be more of a personal reflection post than an explicitly political post, but it's also got a healthy dose of politics involved for good measure. You've probably noticed, if you have encountered me here or on some social media that I really really hate dictatorships. Did I mention I really hate dictatorships? Okay, I think you get the point. Where did that energy come from? Some if my animosity toward so-called "strongman" leaders and authoritarian and totalitarian governments certainly originated in what I was reading as a preteen, teen, and young adult. I read my share of books on WWII history and oral histories of the Spanish Civil War (thanks mostly to my dad's collection) as well as works of fiction (Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm, Huxley's Brave New World, just as examples). But the rest of my disdain for dictatorships comes from having met some of the survivors who managed to find refuge in whatever community I might have been living in at the time.

My encounters with Vietnamese refugees when I was in high school were mostly fairly superficial. But in those more serious moments, it was made clear to me how much my Vietnamese classmates hated communism. After all, Ho Chi Minh's conquest of Vietnam had meant that their lives and the lives of their parents had been turned upside down practically overnight, with them losing everything they had known. I also got to see firsthand how badly a lot of my white classmates (thanks to Facebook, I would go on to learn that to a person these individuals came to worship Trump) treated our Vietnamese classmates. In college, I would have some much deeper conversations with a friend and her mom about surviving Pol Pot's regime in Cambodia, the brutality of their existence, and their escape. I still keep in contact with my friend from Cambodia. She truly took to American ideals like a duck to water. But if you look at how Pol Pot and his thugs operated, they were adept at mixing communist rhetoric with racial/ethnic resentment. Those who escaped were truly the lucky ones. 

Over the years, I have had classes, labs, study sessions, and later worked with people who survived either the USSR, one of the Warsaw Pact communist countries prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall, or managed to escape from Cuba. The youngest were preteens when their experience with communist dictatorships ended. The ones closer to my age were young adults when the Berlin Wall fell. Not a one of them misses the old days nor shows any desire to revive communist regimes that thankfully crumbled. The time I visited Budapest in 2014 was quite fascinating. I got to spend some time with professionals who had survived the communist era and had enjoyed a about a quarter century of liberalism. The conversation seemed wistful, as it was already becoming obvious that what is now the ruling party has turned its back on liberal democracy altogether. They appreciated how fragile freedom can be. I worry about them. I am also acquainted with a Biologist who was born and raised in Venezuela, and for a while was able to work at a university in his native country. Life was not great for him during the Hugo Chavez era, but became entirely untenable once Maduro gained absolute power. My acquaintance had the good fortune of finding relevant work in Argentina and has been able to thrive there. 

Ever met anyone who has escaped a theocracy? Turns out I met plenty of refugees from Iran as a student in the 1980s and 1990s. The first students I met who had fled Iran with their families were activists at a community college I attended for a while. I found it interesting to talk with them and attended the occasional event they would hold as activists for the cause of overthrowing Ayatollah Khomeini's regime. They had varying views on what kind of government Iran had but they all wanted a return to something more secular. They had no interest in running afoul of morality police, along with all the reprisals and score-settling that definitely characterized Iran at the time and to this day. I knew a guy who was really more of a friend of a friend who managed to get out of Iran and used a student visa as a means to stay out for as long as possible. He even ended up working on and earning a Masters degree that he really did not need for the jobs he was seeking in order to keep from returning to Iran. It turned out that he knew that the moment he stepped off the plane in Tehran, he'd be hanging from one of those construction cranes. 

I could go on, but I think you get the idea. I have in my memory stories of survival in some very unforgiving social and political situations. And their stories shape how I react to our own political moment. We have a political party (GOP) that has embraced an authoritarian "strongman" and the cult of personality around him (MAGA). Those at the upper echelons of that political cult (that's a real thing) have a blueprint for how to turn a relatively liberal and democratic nation into what would be an authoritarian and theocratic nightmare (Project 2025). We've mostly taken for granted that we don't get monitored and harassed by morality police, that we can say and write what we want without fear of landing in a gulag, that we don't have to present our papers at armed checkpoints scattered throughout our country and communities, or to fear secret police knocking in the doors of our homes because someone thought it would be cute to accuse us of whatever would go against the ruling party line. We don't have to worry about being deported for being legal immigrants nor for merely attending protests as citizens. And yet that is the America Trump wants for us. It would not be a place worth making a life, to put it bluntly. 

In the meantime, even though I've spent something like 25 years living in a part of the US where liberal democracy still struggles a bit, I have been awakening each morning and thanking my lucky stars that I am here in the US with Constitutional protections that still matter. I don't know how much longer it will last, if I am going to be realistic with you. But I will continue with this ritual of expressing gratitude for as long is our particular democracy lasts. At least Harris and Walz give us a fighting chance of maintaining what we have, and offer something aspirational. It's a welcome contrast. I hope they succeed. The alternative is bleak.