How Did America Become So Great?

Legal immigrants from around the world came to the New World to work hard, find land, and worship freely. Many died in the process during the arduous voyage across the sea, in the wilderness they were attempting to settle, from industrial accidents in factories they toiled in, from disease, or in battles with the natives.

All had to stop at Ellis Island for proper identification and quarantine when necessary. They were desperate but proud men and women who did not immigrate to become wards of the welfare system because there was none to be had. They had to work hard in order to survive. No hapless taxpayers were supporting the new arrivals and nobody waved the country’s flag where they hailed from. Most learned English as soon as they could no matter what level of education they had.

Today the legal immigrants fly in with papers and medical records and immigration authorities check the thoroughly and register their arrival. But the illegal immigrants cross the border themselves at great health risk, leaving behind a huge trail of trash, or cross with the help of expensive coyotes, or are herded into the country by government buses in the dead of night and on planes without proper health screenings.

Caravans of invading armies of illegals from Honduras and El Salvador have already jumped the fence at various points of the border, aided and abetted by Mexico, closer to California, where Democrat officials welcomed them with open arms and pockets at taxpayer expense while America’s poor and veterans are ignored.  Nobody knows or cares whether these illegals are sick, financially able to support themselves, able to work, and, most importantly, whether they are friends or foes of America.

Some legal immigrants were turned back at Ellis Island, their dreams shattered by disease. Many had to wait out the quarantine before they earned admission to the New World, an old world but new because it was full of possibilities and opportunities to settle the land.

These legal immigrant men and women built roads, bridges, towns, cities, skyscrapers, cars, airplanes, rockets, and the best medicine in the world. They built factories, invented drugs that saved millions around the world, created machines, built hospitals, ports, and our current civilization. They were armed, fierce, and fought in many wars.

They were Americans first who cherished their ethnic roots at home and during the holidays. They were free to invent, to experiment, to be themselves, but also be part of a larger and important whole. They cherished their families and God had a prominent place in their lives. And they made America great for many subsequent generations who appreciated the sacrifice and work of the previous generations and of their elders.

In the late 1970s, as a newly arrived legal immigrant who luckily escaped communism, I met a lot of nice, well-meaning, pleasant, happy, and ill-informed Americans and I wondered then, how did America become so great with so much willing and shameless ignorance? Now, forty years later, I have my answer.

People were not ashamed to say that they knew so little history and geography. They were enterprising and willing to work hard. They understood patriotism and respect for their elders. Their world revolved around family, happiness, consumerism, and church, all set within a certain mile radius of bucolic neighborhoods, streets, and towns they knew and loved.

Americans treasured their roads and had a love affair with big cars and the mobility that said cars afforded them, but they took for granted the freedom to use them, to move where a gambling spirit took them, the wide open spaces were theirs to take if they so desired.

Nobody stopped them or legislated them into high-rise, mixed use, tiny apartments or forced them into tin cans on wheels in order to save the planet from a manufactured global warming crisis. There was no Democrat New Green Deal to curtail freedom of movement, flying, forcing people to bike to work, and forbidding fossil fuels.

Students dozed off in history classes and shrugged their shoulders when they knew very little about their own country and government. Communism and millions of victims of it, you say? That might as well be a dark specter on another planet; it would never find its way here. We are Americans!

People with a lot of education and experience were no longer allowed in Jimmy Carter’s Department of Education-controlled classrooms. They could not take just anybody off the streets with a degree, as I was told a few times, one had to be licensed by the Department of Education and a member in good standing of the National Education Association.

Generous to a fault and eager to jump and help their fellow man, many Americans I’ve met would give the shirt off their backs if one asked. They naively helped many people in times of trouble, even those that bit the hands that fed them.

They talked optimistically about the freedoms they had and felt sorrow for those around the world who were not so free. America was great, they said, and it was first at everything because they were fearless and took chances to succeed. Family was very important, children were disciplined without fear of arrest by the government, and church and faith were very important to most Americans.

Americans were free to be self-sufficient and self-reliant; they were not free to freeload. There was no internet to bombard the public with constant fake news, communist indoctrination, miscommunication and misinformation. Political corruption was hidden, communists were enemies, and socialism was abhorrent. The best and the brightest succeeded. In time, excellence has been replaced by mediocrity and collectivism. The idea that everyone is special and equal gave birth to the award for walking without tripping or the award for just existing.

Each community had Christian churches and temples that united them in worship and principles. Everyone understood that God was an essential ingredient in the founding of America and life was precious inside and outside of the womb. Nobody killed babies for research or replacement parts.

Schools were run by each state and by counties, not Jimmy Carter’s Department of Education with Bill Gates’ Common Core collectivist standards and colleges indoctrinating young Americans with “social justice” and “white privilege” curricula and proselytizing for Islam. Technical schools thrived everywhere, teaching Americans life-long useful skills that enabled success and prosperity. Nobody relied on foreign labor, skilled or unskilled. The Braceros program had long been destroyed by lawyers.

Americans were willing to fight for their country with words, ideas, principles, and to give up effort and their lives on battle fields to keep intact their heritage, what they believed in, their country and its founding principles. Europe is strewn with graves of brave young Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice in order to save Europe and its often ungrateful citizens from the Nazi scourge.

Americans as a whole were lulled into a false sense of security because they lived two oceans away from the threat of communism and any potential war. Surely nobody would dare overrun American shores and our borders in order to occupy their beautiful and successful country, the shiny city on the hill! But nobody counted on the home-grown communist and islamo-fascist enemy within which grew like a contagion in the last forty years.

The indoctrination from public schools, colleges, universities, Hollywood, the main stream media, Communist Party USA, and corrupt politicians was so strong in the last forty years that we are now experiencing the fruits of their efforts – American young who hate their country, its achievements, its greatness, its origins, and even their own skin color.

Liberalism/progressivism/environmentalism/ feminism/socialism/communism created new generations of young Americans who are devoid of patriotism and would not hesitate to turn in their own parents to the government if that would bring them 15-minutes of worthless fame. They derisively laugh at patriotic Americans who helped make this country great, including some of their own relatives, as obsolete men and women, marginalizing and dehumanizing their existence. The sheer hatred coming constantly from the main stream media is not unlike the hatred ginned up against the Jews during Hitler’s Nazi regime.

Laws were upheld, the justice system worked, and politicians respected the legal system and tried to pass laws that represented the best interest of their constituents. Today, unfortunately, the corrupt politicians are only interested in becoming powerful, rich, and representing their crony capitalist friends and the citizens of other countries who are invading our borders for the generous welfare paid to them, no questions asked, from funds provided through taxation of the average working Americans. These illegal aliens are now the voting base in many overpopulated areas and states for the Democrat communist party.

Lately, the more Americans talk about freedoms they think they still have, the more I hear the rattling of the chains of captivity and servitude to the mighty government and to politicians who have stopped listening to the people whose tax money fund their wealth and unbounded and corrupt power.

Derek Hunter wrote, “There are no areas in which liberals, progressives, leftists, socialists, or whatever they want to call themselves this week, are working for the betterment of American citizens or to advance the cause of individual liberty. Their entire existence appears to be just the opposite.” https://townhall.com/columnists/derekhunter/2019/02/10/the-democratic-party-needs-to-be-destroyed-before-it-destroys-the-country-n2541109?fbclid=IwAR1EPvOn8HJ7BDsmV6gGgJfILd8nTGPmhJ2kRjXO5mW3goBc6rvSIYFjRYA

Many confused and brainwashed young Americans are saying that America was never great in response to President Trump’s signature campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again,” while they are living a life which is the envy of the world.  If life is so much better everywhere else, as they claim and wish for an European lifestyle that no longer exists, as they are flooded by Muslim immigrants, why are illegal aliens flocking to our shores asking for welfare and demanding the same rights as American citizens?

The mighty Roman Empire’s road to perdition was cluttered with corruption, traitorous acts, sexual deviance, disregard for life, greed, military expansion beyond ability to rule, disregard for the rule of law, and tolerance of the barbarians. According to the BBC, “Rome covered 1.9 million square miles in 390 A.D. Five years later, it had plummeted to 770,000 square miles. By 476, the empire’s reach was zero.”

We are not an empire and we are not Rome, we are a constitutional republic, “if you can keep it.” If you ask the average Americans who don’t understand their own history, we are a democracy. Are we a government by the people, a rule of the majority? Are we a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections? Does the government listen to the people anymore? Are representatives in Congress legislating on behalf of all American voters? How many illegal aliens who came here to dominate, not assimilate, are now cancelling our votes? How many politicians are listening to their constituents?

The Soviets' Inner Wall

A Memorial to victims who died at the Berlin Wall
Photo credit: Wikipedia

…'from Stettin on the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended over Europe'    – speech made by Winston Churchill in 1946 in Fulton, Missouri

At the end of World War II, the victorious Allies divided Germany from 1945 to 1949 into four sections, each administered by a different allied country, in order to prevent the spread of Nazism (National Socialism).

The Americans, the French, and the British did not take as seriously as the Soviets did the virtual division line between their controlled territories and those controlled by the Soviet Union. People from the western and eastern parts came and went as they pleased, crossing this imaginary border and angering the Soviets in the process who were very partial to their communist ideology and boundaries.

On May 26, 1952 the newly-formed Soviet East Germany (Deutsche Demokratische Republik, DDR) began building an actual inner border concrete wall, 9 ft. tall and topped with barbed wire, which they dubbed “the anti-imperialist wall.”

In reality it was not a wall built to keep imperialist invaders from West Germany (Bundesrepublik Deutschland, BRD) out of East Germany (DDR) but to keep their own East German people inside a one giant Stalinist prison.

To protect their zone and their ideology, the Soviets built one of the deadliest border walls in history. If their citizen dared to even try escaping to the West, they were summarily shot and killed. The wall was so long, over 866 miles from the Baltic Sea to the center of Germany, that it put the Berlin Wall to shame. The concrete wall topped with barbed wire snaked around the countryside with no trees a certain distance from it so that escapees would have no ground cover in any direction.

There was a vehicle barrier in front of this concrete wall and a six foot wide plowed strip of dirt to record foot prints. Watch towers and manned posts made sure that guards caught those attempting to flee. If caught after the fact, the citizens were heavily fined and imprisoned for three years.

Trees were cut down and underbrush was cleared so that there was always a clear line of sight and a clear line of fire. With electronic sensors strategically placed, this “death strip” was running through towns, manicured stretches of land, farms, coal mines, and even through the middle of a house. Many communities were split in half, very similar to the Berlin Wall which split streets in half.

According to historians, out of 17 million East Germans, one million people a year were trying to flee to the west. The border with its buffer zones, no man’s lands, and more guard towers than one could imagine, became so elaborate and strict that the population’s flight or attempts to flee were reduced by 75 percent.

An impregnable barrier of iron, concrete, barbed wire, electric sensors, watch towers, plowed strips, and mine fields was thus built between the German Democratic Republic in the East and the Federal Republic of Germany in the West. When historians refer to the communist Iron Curtain of Eastern Europe, they are referring to this border wall between the two divided Germanys. The first reference to the Iron Curtain, fearing the spread of communism, was made by Winston Churchill in his 1946 speech in Fulton, Missouri.

By the 1980s thirty guards were protecting each three-and-a-half mile stretch of the entire border wall. Sixty thousand anti-personnel mines to deter border crossings further reduced the escape rate to less than one percent.

Hundreds of people trying to escape to West Germany from East Germany were shot, stepped over land mine wires, or were killed by dogs. Some of the guards themselves tried to escape to the west.

For over thirty years the Soviets built an elaborate system to imprison East German citizens in their own communist prison country. On November 9, 1989, a series of revolutions caused the demise of this border, the “Iron Curtain” between the East and the West.

The more visible and more photographed wall by the press, The Berlin Wall, a symbol of oppression and shame, of dividing a city between the communist ideology of the Soviets and the capitalist one of the West, was dismantled with much fanfare and celebration, chunk by chunk, by people who escalated the graffiti-painted side of the West. Checkpoint Charlie, the actual crossing point in Berlin, became part of the dustbin of history.

The main stream media revisits the Berlin Wall when it’s convenient to support the progressive globalist narrative of ‘no borders.’ They equate a wall today which protects the sovereignty of any nation as an oppression of the migratory masses from third world countries who are entitled to invade well-developed nations with generous welfare systems, a social security which is missing in their basket-case nations from which they hail. Asylum-seekers and economic refugees have certainly already overwhelmed several European countries.  

The inner East German border wall was also dismantled with less press coverage, creating almost two million tons of debris. A small section of this wall is preserved today in Hötensleben as a memorial to the death zone created between the free state in the West and the communist prison state in the East.

 

Borders Do Matter

Fintina Alba Memorial called "Troita"
 

Political elites have used social engineering to control masses of people and territories over the millennia. They have redrawn borders and moved tribes and herded people into harsher environments, not ideally suitable for human habitation and agriculture; they have sent humans to occupy already heavily populated areas through invasion, conquering them, destroying the local inhabitants’ religion in the process, and forcing them to accept the conquering religion of Islam. Christians organized their own crusades in response, to regain the territories occupied by Muslims.

Many borders have been erased or redrawn as the result of greed, war, war reparations, communism, colonialism, Nazism, Islamic conquests, tribal wars, and other politically and economically driven search for land, natural resources, drinking and irrigation water, navigable water, oil, diamonds, and precious metals.

In the 21^st century, the technocracy and the global elitists have pushed the social engineering much further, by planning to erase all national borders and destroying sovereignty in order to allow free massive migration of peoples around the globe, and by redistributing wealth from the haves to the have nots, regardless of effort.

The British found out that borders are important and chose to vote for Brexit, the exit from the mammoth technocratic experiment called European Union, a state-like federation controlled by Germany.

Angela Merkel invaded her own people with Islamist “refugees,” men of military age who have left their wives, mothers, elderly, and children behind to fight their tribal wars in Syria, while they slashed and burned across Europe, in order to eventually conquer thousands of years of Christian civilization through demographics and the politics of multiculturalism.

Nations want borders, people want to identify with their ancestors, their history, their families, their language, and their native ancestral lands where their heroes lay buried, where archeological remnants of their glorious past can be found, catalogued, and displayed in museums, a collective shrine to our human civilization. 

People are drawn to those with a common bond that establishes where they came from and exemplifies the long and arduous history of survival against all odds. Most people are fascinated by their own genealogical roots and spend time and resources to find out where they came from. Others hyphenate their names to identify with the continent where their ancestors came from.

The desire to belong to your own kind is exemplified by the tragedy that took place 76 years ago at the border between today’s Russia and Romania. On April 1, 1941, on the day of the Holy Easter, a large column of villagers, who were fed up with the Soviet utopian exploitation, attempted to cross into Romania. They were massacred not far from the Romanian border, men, women, children, and grandparents, by machine guns and swords of the Soviet cavalry at Fintina Alba.

On a snowy day, Petru Grigor, Director of Historical and Cultural Research of Cernauti, talked about Romania’s martyrs and their bloody massacre. In the background is the memorial erected to remember those innocents who died in their quest for freedom, away from Soviet-imposed border that destroyed and separated Romanian villages and families of Bucovina. http://trinitastv.ro/stiri-video/ecouri-ale-tragediei-de-la-fantana-alba-si-lunca-80291

The Soviets had installed a new border in June 1940 between USSR and Romania, cutting large chunks of Romanian territory and annexing it to the Soviet Union.

The Red Army had occupied Basarabia, northern Bucovina, and Hertza in the military campaign of June 28-July 4, 1940, an area of almost 20,000 square miles with a population of 3.8 million people. Ready to occupy it with a full-scale invasion, the Soviets gave Romania an ultimatum on June 26 but the Romanian Army, in order to avoid military conflict, agreed to withdraw from the territories. Germany knew of the Soviet interest and remained silent. France, guarantor of Romania’s borders, fell. This emboldened the Soviets to issue the ultimatum of surrender.

Thus a large part of Moldova became, on August 2, 1940, part of the Moldova Soviet Socialist Republic, encompassing most of Basarabia, and part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, now the breakaway Transnistrian state.

The Hertza region and other regions inhabited by Slavic majorities in northern Bucovina, northern and southern Basarabia, became part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

Those who objected to the Soviet occupation were politically persecuted, arrested, deported to labor camps where few survived, and executed.

In January and February 1941 massacres took place at Lunca in the region Cernauti, and in spring 1941 at Fintina Alba, in Poiana Varnitei (Varnita canton). About two km from the border, Romanians, who wanted to return to their motherland and their ancestral lands, were murdered by Soviet soldiers.

Villagers had written letters, asking the new Cernauti authorities to allow them to return to their country. In March 1941, the villagers of Storojinet also petitioned to return to Romania, but the requests were denied, and the villagers returned home.

They made the fateful decision to leave on the rumor that the Soviet authorities would allow them to cross the border unharmed, and they would be able to rejoin the Romanian families left behind.

The villagers of Patrautii de Jos, Patrautii de Sus, and Suceveni went to church, prayed for a while, raised a white flag to show that their intentions were peaceful, and over 1,500 people joined a long procession, marching to turn in their requests to be allowed to return to their motherland, Romania.

Many others joined this column in the center of Hilbocia, more than 5,000 souls. A Soviet policeman urged them to return to their homes as their applications were not even accepted, much less considered. Deciding that they would rather die free than live under the Soviet boot, the group resolved to cross the border illegally. As Petru Grigor told the story, the villagers were met by Soviet border guards with machine guns, who mowed the column down in an inferno of bullets and death. “God cried that day.”

An investigation made in 1943 Bucovina, with the help of eye witnesses, discovered the names of 26 martyrs who died on that fateful day, April 1, 1941, in Fintina Alba. A monument called “troita” was erected on the site by Ukraine in 1991, following its installation to power after the dissolution of USSR.

The journalist Ion Dominte, writing in the newspaper “Bucovina” about the massacre at Fintina Alba, left a historical record of the events. The mass deportations of Romanians that took place in the first year of installation of the Soviet regime in this area came to light. Petru Grigor suggested that archeological digs should take place today, to find out the true number of those who were killed.

Orthodox Church pilgrimages with prayers and wreath-placing ceremonies take place every year “in memoriam” of those who sought freedom at all costs and did not wish to live under the Soviet boot across the border from their national roots.

Immigrants Should Make America Better, Not Worse

Corey Stewart, PWC Chairman
Wikipedia photo

Prince William County Chairman, Corey Stewart, Republican candidate for Governor of Virginia, said during a press conference, “On behalf of the Board of Supervisors of Prince William County, I’m requesting the Trump administration to identify, detain and remove the 7,500 criminal illegal aliens that we have handed over to ICE over the past 10 years.” According to Stewart, the criminal aliens were handed over by local law enforcement to ICE under a program called 287g. “Of the 7,500, 1,000 have been rearrested.”

A mob of protesters stormed the board meeting on Tuesday, carrying signs in Spanish and English that it did not matter where or how you came from, we are all immigrants and we are all Americans. Speakers who advocate open borders argued that those arrested had not committed a crime and should not have been detained. http://wjla.com/news/local/prince-william-county-residents-speak-out-against-immigration-proposal

The fact that illegal aliens crossed into our country without visas and proper documentation is a crime. The last U.S. Census attributed the large population increase in Prince William County mostly to the illegal alien migration to the county.

Fredy Burgos, a Republican Party activist, posts regularly on Facebook examples of crimes committed daily by illegal aliens in Prince William County. Despite the protesters’ claims that illegals do not commit crimes, reality and police records speak otherwise.

In addition to illegals, counties in Virginia have to deal with the middle of the night surprise of forced resettlement of refugees in small communities that are ill-prepared to handle the influx of uneducated, illiterate, third world individuals who have no skills, do not speak our language, are often unwilling to learn it, do not understand our culture, do not accept it, do not share our religious values, and do not respect nor recognize our Constitution.

Legal immigrants throughout history have made America better by assimilating into one culture, the American culture. Back then there was no welfare state and no welfare generosity and dependency. But today’s immigrants are often here for economic benefits, welfare, and social security thanks to the leftist Open Borders policy. There is no economic boom to struggling communities who are forced to accept such refugees or close their eyes at the massive influx of illegals. In their media-driven narrative, leftists conveniently leave out the cost of welfare use, education of their children, and criminal justice system costs that counties incur in dealing with illegal aliens and refugees.

Looking at just one program, SNAP (food stamps), of the refugees who arrived in 2015, 92.5 percent received food stamps and, of those admitted in 2011, a whopping 60 percent are still receiving SNAP today. Take a trip in northern Virginia to Walmart on the days that SNAP benefits are distributed, and you will see a mass of illegal humanity, speaking languages other than English and wearing burkas and other ethnic costumes. https://www.acf.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/orr/arc_15_final_508.pdf

Our great-grandfathers had arrived here for the opportunity to make a better life for themselves and their families or future families. They had to go through Ellis Island, weeks of quarantine for infectious diseases, and some were even turned away because we wanted to keep the American public safe. And those immigrants, who cleared Ellis Island, worked very hard, built railroads, ports, tunnels, bridges, dams, roads, parks, highways, interstates, skyscrapers, and entire cities. As my good and patriotic Virginian friend had suggested, there should be “no immigration without verification and assimilation.”

Repealing the Open Borders mentality is essential. Becoming a U.S. citizen is a privilege, not a given right. Immigrants should benefit America in some way by bringing in skills and trades that are helpful in strengthening America. Immigrants must be an asset to our country, not a liability. Nobody should become a burden by drawing from our welfare system and from our social security funds built up by American workers who contributed with every paycheck into these funds. Taking social security funds without contributing to them is theft from the American people.

Given all the violent Islamist attacks on American citizens in the last years, we cannot afford to trust blindly, we must verify immigrants’ ulterior motives. “Can they prove that they are who they say they are? Can they prove that they are not criminal? What is their intent in becoming an American?”

Even though leftists claim that the demand to assimilate is “fascistic,” assimilation is necessary for numerous reasons:

1.       Do the potential immigrants’ world views match the views of our founding documents?

2.       Do potential immigrants intend to become Americans, or are they just drawing financial benefits, taking advantage of our American compassionate nature and generosity?

3.       Will they protect and defend the Constitution and support American independence and sovereignty?

4.       As Dr. Savage says, will they support our “language, borders, and culture?”

5.       Are they interested in subverting America’s power, authority, and institutions with the intent of dividing our great nation?

6.       Do they understand what it takes to be an American?

7.       Do they want to be productive citizens?

We stand with legal immigrants who came before us and with those millions who are still awaiting the disposition of their backlogged files, immigrants who want to come to the United States legally, but live too far away. To now skip them and instead allow law breakers, border jumpers, and fence climbers to become American citizens is a slap in the face of every formerly legal resident alien who became naturalized American citizens after waiting years and years, meandering through legal hoops, learning history and civics, passing citizenship readiness tests, proving that they have what it takes to become an American, a privilege earned, not a right.

America welcomes legal immigrants with open arms and generosity but, if there is ever any doubt, after proper and thorough vetting, then, as my Virginian friend had suggested, “when in doubt, leave them out,” they don’t have what it takes to become an American.

 

Albani's Escape from Communism and His Free Life in America (Part II)

“A year later I went back to the country and stole my wife. Nobody knew I was coming.”

Albani had no idea what happened to the unassembled submarine he had abandoned when he escaped to France and never returned. He had sent drawings to each factory to manufacture the parts. The authorities had no idea what he was going to make with all these separate sections; some of them were conical, like a piece of pipe, with flanges and bolts; they looked like something designed by an idiot who did not know how to do a flange because his flanges were inside instead of outside.

Once he escaped, Albani hatched a plan to bring his wife to Paris. “I made a trick car because I wanted to steal more people, not just my wife. But my best friend escaped too and my plan now focused solely on her. I modified the car in such a way as to fit her in.”

How did he get away with stealing her without papers and hiding her in a car across so many borders? Albani answered with pride and aplomb: “I’m an engineer.”

There is a modified Volkswagen in the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C., in which people have been hidden and taken across Checkpoint Charlie between East and West Berlin. The two sides were separated by the heavily guarded Berlin Wall of Shame built by East German communists who wanted to keep their oppressed subjects inside the “socially just and egalitarian communist paradise” they built for their citizens. It was such a miserable “paradise” that people were willing to chance being shot and possibly die in order to escape it.

From August 13, 1961 until November 9, 1989 the Berlin Wall was a stark reminder of the division between the free west and the communist-enslaved east. Before the Berlin Wall was erected, 3.5 million East Germans managed to cross the border between East and West Berlin. After 1961, there were few successful attempts to cross by low flying aircraft, running through the barbed wire, hidden in cars, and other unconventional means.  But many were shot and died trying to escape. The Center for Contemporary History in Potsdam gives the official figure of those who died trying to flee to freedom at 138, from an infant to an 80-year old woman, but researchers at the Checkpoint Charlie Museum estimate the death toll to be significantly higher.

Albani hid his wife inside the modified rear bench. He created a slight space; the floor went down two inches in the Citroen DS by cutting the springs much shorter, taking the cover and reversing it. The space was far from comfortable; it was a fetal position inside the bench. He sized the space by using his friend who knew what he was going to do.

To throw off the sniffing dogs at the border, he used a spray repellant for animals. “Maybe it was Tiger Balm,” he joked.

While in Paris, Albani toyed with the idea of a phony passport for himself and his wife but it was very difficult to alter a French passport. The pictures had small rivets on which Republique française was written in very small font, and you needed a microscope to see them. Counterfeiting such a passport was impossible. A very good friend, a Moroccan Jew with a lot of dark and curly hair like him offered his passport. “But I don’t look like you. But I don’t look like myself either.” He showed Albani his passport. This man was 22 years old and Albani was 28. The saving grace was that the passport had been issued when he was 14 and he did not look like himself either. 

“You don’t have to change the picture! Look at all the countries I went through with this passport.” Indeed, there were 45 visas, from Iran, to Nepal, to France, Sweden, to Germany. “Nobody stopped me; I went all over the world.” And he did, he had lots of entry stamps.  The French passport was good for 16 years, until the age of 30. Albani took his passport.

After posting an ad on a college campus that he was going to Romania with his best friend, a really good driver, and had two seats available in the car, three guys called and asked how Romania was, they wanted to go. It was fashionable to hitchhike. “I chose my married friend who had a week old baby. He risked his life to come with me to get my wife. The other three guys had no idea what we were going to do.”

To make the trip even more dangerous, Albani foolishly bought a BB gun, a high speed, high precision target practice gun as a gift for his sister and put it in his luggage.

It was still dark when they left at 4 a.m. in a completely modified Citroen DS. Their intended route was through Germany, Austria, Hungary, and then Romania. They were driving through Paris, in a roundabout, had just entered it, when two gendarmes, very tough guys, on motorcycles with machine guns on their backs, cut them off, almost hitting a wall. The other cop drove and stopped by the driver’s side and put a gun to his head, literally touching it. They spread eagle the rest of us on the car and on the nearby wall. More gendarmes arrived for backup. They checked the luggage and I.D.

Apologizing for inconveniencing them, the gendarmes explained that four hippie looking guys had broken into a bank 20 minutes earlier and killed the guard. They were looking for those culprits who were armed with machine guns.

“They let us go, very apologetic, you can make a complaint, but someone was killed, and they were driving the same red Citroen DS like you. When they stopped us, I almost peed in my pants.  The whole time, I was thinking about my sister’s BB gun, my modified car, and I just knew we would wind up in jail. My French friend did not know I had the BB gun, I told him later, he said I was crazy. It looked like a real gun.”

Getting closer to the German border, with his friend driving like a maniac, 100 mph, rotating lights appeared in the rear view mirror and they had to stop. But the poor cop on the motorcycle did not see the blocked isle for a bus stop and he hit the concrete side and spun wildly all over the road but recovered. Visibly shaken, he asked for IDs.

The passengers were scared that he was going to arrest them for driving so fast. But he told them to slow down and let them go very graciously without a ticket.

The German border guards pored over Albani’s French passport but let him go. The stop at the Austrian border was short. But then they got to Hungary, a strict communist country. There was barbed wire everywhere, control towers, guns, lights; it was frightening, dozens and dozens of cops armed to their teeth.

In no time their luggage was spread in the grass, and everything was taken out of the car; they were looking for contraband, cassette recorders, western goods, Kent cigarettes, cosmetics, foreign currency. But they found nothing.

“We got to the Romanian border, guards were lazy, moving around very slowly, but checked the papers very carefully. We spoke only French. I was in the car, inching our way in line. A cop, military guy, with a gun from 1916, probably our age or younger, was looking at our smart car, never saw a Citroen before.  He checked the car out; I opened the hood, the trunk, etc. He tested the seats, but the springs in the rear benches were much shorter which made the bench quite stiff. Why is the back bench so hard, he asked?”

He pulled the bench; they were in such a rush to leave, Albani forgot to bolt the bench back in place. He pulled the bench and saw the cover, some dirt, glue, straw, a penny; all set up to look like a bench would look. He could have pulled the cover easily and revealed the hidden space, but, once again, they got lucky, he never did.

On the way to Cluj, they stopped in a village to eat Romanian meat balls called “mititei.” It was Sunday, everyone was out drinking, the smell of grilling meat was overpowering; a guy came by and, in his drunken stupor, called them bastard capitalists and threw a rock through the rear door window and shattered it.

The local policeman was horrified and forced him to pay for the window. The cop was very apologetic to the foreign visitors. The poor drunk looked like he could hardly afford to pay for his booze much less replace the broken window.  They declined and left in a hurry.

They replaced the window with a piece of plastic which took a really long time to find in the miserable “socialist paradise,” where it was hard to even find a piece of plastic on the black market at ten times the price.

The trio found two girls infatuated with “foreigners” and they offered them free overnight accommodations in their homes; if caught, this generous offer would have landed them all in jail. They visited the old city and churches in Cluj and then went to Feleac. They had to cross a ditch, Albani asked the driver to raise the hydraulic suspension of the Citroen in order to avoid being stuck but he declined. He was sure the Citroen could handle it. Once in the ditch, the cap of the low-hanging gas tank sheared off and the gas drained everywhere.

The girls helped push the car onto the highway, but the gas tank was now empty. “We could not fix it, what do you do, go to a garage and say, hey, I have a modified compartment with a gas tank hanging too low, would you fix our sheared gas cap? You have a gas tank under the driver’s seat? Boom.”

 

They went into the city, knowing that copper pipe was impossible to find. At that time, nothing could be found in Romania unless it was bought on the black market. But Albani bought two plastic tanks in a warehouse by bribing one worker willing to sell it to him.

“I had to become Romanian again because you could not wheel and deal in a warehouse as a foreigner.” To appear Romanian, he had to cut his hippie hair into a “fashionable” crew cut and ditch the western clothes because they were too easily identifiable, the quality was “too good.”

It was illegal in Romania at the time to have long hair. If the police caught you, they shaved your head. An actor was trapped once in a daily occurring raid in Bucharest; he was playing a hippie role in a movie and needed long hair for the duration of filming. Cops shaved his head and he had to finish the movie with a wig.  

Accidentally pulling out foreign money out of his pocket instead of Romanian lei, Albani explained to the barber that he had just returned from Germany and that’s why he had French francs. For owning foreign currency, Albani could have gotten a year in jail, it was the minimum punishment. Again, luck was on his side. Barbers and hairdressers were information collectors for the secret police, they were compensated informants and everyone knew that. He paid quickly and disappeared.

“I had a capped canister of 10 gallons of fuel in the car and that is how we drove all the way to Paris. I found a small tank of two quarts to put it in the engine compartment when crossing the border. It was red, so I had to find black paint. Black paint was not available but I did find some tar for roofs and made the small tank black. We left, it was raining heavily and we had a broken window in the back. Nearing Bucharest, a green secret police jeep followed us, passed us, looked inside, we had French plates, we were driving by the book, we found them two miles later stopped on the right. It happened three times. Later we realized they were picking up hitchhikers from various villages and dropping them off to make extra money and to get a bag of potatoes, onions, or a live chicken.” It was still cheaper to travel this way instead of taking the rickety state bus.

They made it to Bucharest too early in the day and could not find his wife. They drove twice around Bucharest to kill some time and then stopped in a coffee shop. Seated next to them was a former colleague from IPROMET with a good memory of faces. “Albani, I thought you defected to France a year ago.” He pretended to be the Frenchmen he impersonated while his heart was beating hard and beads of sweat were forming on his brow.

Finally, it was dark enough and drove to Marin’s apartment who was to bring his wife to him. Instead of Marin opening the door, an older acquaintance, a full bird colonel in the Secret Police invited them in. Albani froze.

“Come in, have a drink, what are you doing here, why did you come back? He knew everything. I went to college; I came back because I did not like France. I gave him a snow job. I thought momentarily, when survival instinct kicked in, about hitting him on the head with a heavy seltzer bottle nearby.”

When Marin returned, Albani found out that this colonel had been kicked out of his apartment by his estranged wife. He was a very good rugby player from a team that was sponsored by the Secret Police. The biggest rivalry at the time was between the railroad workers union, the secret police, and the military. Each sponsored a team and conferred high ranks on the best players.  “As it turned out, he was not a squealer, he was one of us. He never talked. One year later he died in a car accident. It was pretty sad.”

Marin left to pick up Albani’s wife. She was living in a building that was adjacent to the Secret Police headquarters that was guarding the president. You cannot make this stuff up. The villa had all the communication equipment and, in summer time when the windows were open, you could hear all the radio police chatter.

Fate intervened again – his wife was not home. She knew Albani was coming but was in Brasov with her sick mother.  He had sent her a note on thin paper placed inside a pen with General De Gaulle’s picture on it. He had called and emphasized the word “general” several times.  She eventually understood and read the note inside the pen. Henri, his French driver friend, and Marin went to Brasov and told her to take a few things, and, when the car stopped at the curb, to jump in. They drove back to Bucharest and left for Paris.

Choosing the Yugoslavia, Italy, and France route, they stopped at the border with Yugoslavia and had to cross a ditch filled with a chemical to prevent mad cow disease. Luckily, the ditch was only 2-3 inches deep and did not plug up the breathing hole of the compartment where his wife was hiding. But the chemical fumes were terrible. Maybe Albani’s animal spray deterrent worked or the dogs smelled the chemical in the ditch, they did not react when sniffing the Citroen’s back bench.

At border crossings, there were only two passengers in the car, Henri and Albani. The third Frenchman stayed in Romania for more sightseeing. Driving through each country, Albani’s wife would come out of her hiding.

“I went inside to have the passports stamped and some guy told me in Romanian, even though I had French documents and was dressed in western clothes, driving a Citroen DS, didn’t you pass by one year ago, which was true. I did not react. He said again, looking sideways, you passed by here a year ago. Again, I did not react. He stamped the passport and we left.”

Between Romania and Yugoslavia, there was no sign telling them how far they were from the border and at some point, the border suddenly appeared, two blocks away.  And his wife was sitting in the car, no passport, no nothing.  So they pulled into a field of corn, put her in and crossed the border.

The road eventually ended into a Yugoslavian checkpoint in the mountains, they could not even turn around. They stopped in the small parking lot to put his wife in again. They opened both back doors and acted like he was cleaning the car of trash. Henri went in to buy some candy. There was no time to be scared.  As they inched toward the border, the car started sputtering and died.

It was the crossing point down to Trieste. The guards were nice, pulled back the car and promised to fix it. “Don’t worry, you don’t have parts here. The road is going down.  It’s a spark plug. They pushed the car onto the Italian side, into the parking lot in Italy, and checked our papers. I took my wife out of the hiding spot later. Apparently, I had forgotten to reconnect the two tanks, the fake and the real one.”

She almost died in the Mont Blanc tunnel; they did not know how long it was and that they had to drive through it for 40 minutes.

“It was night time, the ventilation was not good, the border was right before the tunnel and I could not stop and take her out, so she stayed in for the entire Mont Blanc tunnel. When she came out, she was coughing and choking.”

In France they were all in the car, Henri was driving like a maniac, the car was not insured, as if it mattered at this point. They had insured the car by phone for two days only and were not sure if it was still valid. Stopped for speeding, they had to explain why his wife had a Romanian I.D. card.

Sent to the Paris prefecture to declare her, the police took them to the Secret Police and they just knew that they would be arrested and fined. Instead, the policemen laughed heartily. “We just knew our border guards were stupid, anybody can come through, and they have no idea what they are doing. They can’t catch anybody even if they import a tank.” Asked if she was persecuted in Romania, and after answering yes, the secret police issued her papers to stay in France.

So she made it to Paris and to the free world with a lot of luck and God’s providence. But, they did not live happily ever after - they were married “ten years minus three hours,” as Albani likes to say. They immigrated across the ocean to the land of the free where they both still reside today.

Copyright: ILEANA JOHNSON 2016

 

 

 

 

 

Non-Governmental Organizations' Role in Global Governance

“The fear of capitalism has compelled socialism to widen freedom, and the fear of socialism has compelled capitalism to increase equality. East is West and West is East, and soon the twain will meet.”        – Will and Ariel Durant in Lesson of History

Photo: Wikipedia

The developed world appears to be changing in the same direction, at the same time, at an alarming speed, relatively speaking. What is the common dominator and drive behind this change towards a one world global governance and global citizenship? What is rushing everything towards global socialism? How is this possible when countries have different levels of development, education, economies, government, history, religion, wars, and conflicts?

The wails and demands of “equality” resound in the corridors of power and in the main stream media around the globe. I’ve heard the tired-out claims that “Socialism means genuine social equality,” giving “basic rights to the working class – the right to a job, education, health care, a secure retirement, a decent standard of living, a world without war.” This idyllic and utopian socialism will be attained by “the establishment of workers’ power.”

I have experienced the reality of socialism and it was quite different than the rhetoric. Not only were the workers not equal nor in power, but they were in abject poverty when compared to the working middle class under the much maligned “capitalism.”

Then there is the nagging and very important question – Who or what gives and guarantees all these rights that the socialists want? It can’t be God because socialists are atheists; atheism is their religion. It can’t be government because bureaucrats, who confiscate wealth to distribute it from producers to non-producers, eventually run out of other people’s money and the whole scheme collapses.

The Industrial Revolution is blamed for many ills in society, including the manufactured anthropogenic global warming which spawned an entire environmental industry of climate change worth trillions annually.  Will and Ariel Durant believed that the Industrial Revolution “brought with it democracy, feminism, birth control, socialism, the decline of religion, the loosening of morals…”

Will and Ariel Durant, historians who are considered two of the greatest thinkers of our time, wrote in “The Lessons of History” (1968) that there are three important lessons of biological history:

1.       Life is competition – “Animals eat one another without qualm; civilized men consume one another by due process of law.”

2.       Life is selection – “Inequality is natural and inborn”

By Nature, “we are all born unfree and unequal: subject to our physical and psychological heredity and to the customs and traditions of our group; diversely endowed in health and strength, in mental capacity and qualities of character. Nature loves difference as the necessary material of selection and evolution.”

3.       Life must breed - …”a high birth rate has usually accompanied a culturally low civilization, and a low birth rate a civilization culturally high;” in nature “a nation with a low birth rate shall be periodically chastened by some more virile and fertile group.”

Nature knows how to restore balance in nations through “pestilence, famine, and war,” they added.

Durant called the rapidly emerging one world government of today, the “international government,” which was the result, in his opinion, of industry, banking and finance, and international trade across sovereign borders.

In the current world we have oligarchies in which a tiny minority elite rules. This rule can be imposed by birth (aristocracy), by religion (theocracy), or by vast wealth (democracy).

Observing the role of the United Nations around the world and their environmentalist militancy expressed through sustainable development of Agenda 21, Agenda 2030, and other population control organizations, an elite composed of mostly western billionaires is moving the world towards a one world government with its own global police force, military, banking and finance, commerce, renewables, science, agriculture, land and water use, and industry.

But how were they able to achieve such infiltration in every country in the developed and not-so developed world? The most obvious answer is through indoctrination in schools, emphasizing erasure of borders (flooding the world with refugees and illegal aliens as their right), dumbing down standards of intellectual aspirations, removing true history from the curriculum of various nations, making children feel ashamed of their country’s history and accomplishments, preparing them as early as kindergarten for global citizenship, and removing their allegiance to their parents and to their country and placing it in the hands of the globalist educators/indoctrinators.

In addition to indoctrination in schools and through mass media, other very important vectors of transformation into one world governance include the United Nations, government finance, and politics at all levels. Additionally, cultural decadence, moral and religious degradation, race baiting, political correctness with charges of racism and hate speech, and class enmity/violence coupled with accusations of phony “white privilege” round out the indoctrination into global socialism.

How do the United Nations, government finance, and politicians influence local and state governments to change in the same desired global direction? It is quite simple – through the honey pot of taxpayer grants and competitive financial awards which are administered by Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), currently operating in every country in the world with additional money from special interest groups and billionaires.

These non-profits and lobbying groups are awash with cash which hook those in need of funds, people, towns, and regions around the world, making them dance to the tune of progressivism, equality, social justice, environmental justice, gender justice, racial justice, inching them closer and closer to one world global governance.

The NGOs are hard at work around the world employing volunteers and young people who either cannot find a job in their fields, are on a quest to find themselves, or enjoy traveling and exploring while being paid to further what they perceive to be a noble cause or idea. NGOs are classified as charitable, service, participatory, and empowering.

NGOs are organized around communities, cities, on a national level or on an international level. Other euphemistic names for NGOs are “private voluntary organization,” “civil society,” “independent sector,” “self-help organization,” grassroots organization,” “volunteer sector,” “transnational social movement,” and “non-state actors” (NSAs).

The abbreviated terms used by NGOs are: http://www.ngo.in/types-of-ngos.html

-          BINGO (a business-friendly international NGO)

-          CITS (looking for young talent in research and development)

-          CSO (civil society organization)

-          DONGO (donor organized NGO)

-          ENGO (environmental NGO)

-          GONGO (government-operated NGO)

-          INGO (international NGO)

-          QUANGO (quasi-autonomous NGO)

-          TANGO (technical assistance NGO)

-          MANGO (market advocacy NGO)

-          GSO (grassroots support organization)

-          CHARDS (community health and rural development society)

The World Bank classifies NGOs as advocacy and operational. Advocacy NGOs promote a cause through lobbying, media, and aggressive activism. Operational NGOs create and implement development projects in communities, on national levels, or international levels.

Most of the grants and money distributed through NGOs come with strings attached which require the receivers to adopt the one world government underlying stance and regulations. When strapped for immediate funds, the receivers agree to the terms and are thus hooked for a long time.

NGOs, with their lobbyists, activists, volunteers, and supporters, are the busy workers of the ant colony of global progressivism working for billionaires, for financiers, for government regulatory and bureaucratic organizations, and the United Nations to promote, create, develop, and enforce one world governance.