I had an impromptu and long conversation yesterday near the ice cream section of one of our local grocery stores with a long time Wrangell resident named Ivan. I have known of Ivan for over 20 years now at least in a general way/ He was probably Wrangell's original semi-professional photographer back before digital cameras made photography so much more accessible and easy for the amateur. Ivan produced photos with film cameras and still has postcards and prints available for sale in town and has photo credits in many books about the Wrangell area.
Other than his photography, the only other things I knew about him were that he fled his home nation of Czechoslovakia sometime decades ago literally ahead of Soviet bullets and that he worked at the lumber mill in Wrangell back in the timber heyday as a saw sharpener. That was about it, I knew him well enough to say hello on the occasions that we encountered each other. He is in his late 70s as is his wife and they both still speak in strongly accented English.
My conversation with Ivan started when I saw him in the grocery store and told him that I enjoyed some of the memes he sends out to a contact list by email. One of our mutual friends forwards them to me. These memes are typically politically oriented and are conservative. Ivan is usually wearing a Trump hat when I see him in town and on this day was wearing a camoflauge Trump 2020 hat. Regardless of what anyone thinks of the President or someone who supports him, I admire and worry a little about elderly people who are brave enough to openly express their favorable opinions about this President. Unfortunately, we are living in a time in which opponents to people like Ivan are becoming increasingly violent and unafraid to assault anyone expressing an opinion they don't like. Ivan himself experienced this a couple years ago in the other grocery store when a person he considered a friend from their years as coworkers at the mill approached him while he was wearing a Make America Great Again hat and told him that if he ever saw him wearing that hat again he would punch him in the face and take it off of his head. The person making this threat is about 20 years younger and much larger than Ivan.
Anyway, my expression of agreement with some of his emails led to our nearly 45 minute conversation there in the frozen food section of the store. Ivan is from Prague which is now part of the Czech Republic but at the time he lived there was Czechoslovakia. Ivan experienced the gradual conversion of his country to communism. He described the political machinations that led to the complete takeover of the Czech government in gradual incremental steps until a final political maneuver resulted in a completely communist government, a Communist Paradise as he said the Party described it in their propaganda. Ivan described the typical situations we are familiar with: the constant shortages of food and other necessities, the lines for what commodities were available, the secret police, the looming and domineering paranoia of neighbors, friends and even family members. He described the health care system which did provide free health care for everyone but required the bribing of bureaucrats to get any kind of real aid.
Ivan didn't like this life and wanted to be free and became interested in America. He wanted to learn English but the only English that the party would allow the citizens to experience was one American newsletter published by the American Communist Party called The Worker. Ivan learned how to read and write English but could not speak it as he had no one to speak it with. Eventually he reached out to the publishers of The Worker to find Americans with whom he could correspond. These "pen pals" helped him learn more about what America was truly like which was much much different than what his country's communist party told them. In one correspondence someone sent him something critical of the Soviet leader-Khrushchev This worried him as he didn't know if the secret police were setting him up or if it was really from someone in America. Did he keep it? Destroy it? Or turn it in to the police? He turned it in to the police who made it seem like no big deal and seemed to be forgotten about until several days later when the secret police came to his house, arrested him and took him to their station. They wanted him to become an informer for them, an informer on his neighbors and friends. He did not but knew that this made him a person forever under suspicion. Ivan said teachers encouraged students to report on their parents so as a child in school he was told by his parents to never talk about anything that happened in their home while he was at school.
Ivan and his wife fled Czechoslovakia in 1968 when he was 24 when the Soviets invaded the country to crush an increasingly popular movement towards democracy. Ivan was nearly run over by a Soviet tank and had rounds from AK 47s zip past him as they fled. They were able to board a train intended for foreign tourists to get out of the country and made it to neighboring Austria and from there to the U.S.
Ivan is worried for our country now. He said he feels like his life has gone in a circle and he is reliving his younger life as he sees the same things happening here that happened in his home nation. The media manipulation and propaganda, the violent Democrat supported thugs in the form of Antifa and BLM, the increasing censorship, the increasing suppression of other opinions, the attempts to meddle in elections, these are all things he has literally lived through once. He appreciates what we have here in this nation far more than far too many who were born and raised here. He doesn't take for granted what we truly have here and what we stand for, he knows that if our country were to fall to these thinly veiled communist policies and proposals that the rest of the world will follow. He is afraid that too few of us will realize what is really happening here before it is too late and we all wake up one day to realize that we now live in an authoritarian regime. He is a man who fled to America to escape communism who is now afraid that America is falling to communism. These are the reasons why he supports the President.
It is why I do as well.
