Dangerous tendencies...

... are seen not only by the immigrants from the former Soviet Union.

I have a friend who is an Application Engineer for one of the major semiconductor companies whose chips I often use in my designs.  He is of German descent.  In fact, I think he was about 11 years old when he came to this country with his parents.  A couple of days ago we were having lunch and talking about the recently uncovered videos of school kids singing songs in praise of Obama.  Those videos were posted on Andrew Breitbart's Big Hollywood blog and also shown on Fox News.  As a side note, most of the videos were removed from Youtube since the story broke.  But you can still see transcripts of them all.  But back to the lunch with my friend.  He told me that he was watching those videos on the news with his mother, who is in her early 70s.  As they were watching, all of a sudden his mother told him that she remembered something similar from the time when she was a little girl, 5 or 6 years old.  She told him that all the kids in her school were lined up and were taught to praise the leader of the country she lived in at that time.  Did I mentioned that my friend's mother is from Germany?  As a little girl she was taught to say "Heil Hitler!"  Now, looking at the video of those kids, she was absolutely terrified.  Now, I have to say that, while my friend is a Republican and pretty much agrees with me politically, his mother is left-of-center and would have been a Democrat if she would get her American Citizenship.  Still, tendencies toward the Nazi and Soviet-like cult of personality terrify her.  As those of us who lived in the former Soviet Union, she too knows all too well what a cult of personality might mean.  I did ask my friend if he prompted his mom to comment on those videos in any way.  He said that no, it was totally unsolicited reaction of his mother.

I wish those Americans who do not have any personal experience with totalitarian regimes, upon seeing reaction to the news of those of us who do, would ask themselves: "What do those people with such experience know that they don't know?"

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