By Bela “Bill” Suhayda
Sugar Grove, Ill.
I watched live the start of the invasion of Russian forces into Ukraine the evening of February 23. The scenes brought back somewhat vague childhood recollections for me, and one that to this day, is still etched in my memory. One day, Soviet (Russian) tanks were rolling through our small village of Godisa, Hungary. Nikita Krushchev, the Soviet premier, had sent his military into our country to put down the 1956 Revolution. Our people were fighting against Russian occupation and a tyrannical communist regime that drove both our civil liberties and prosperity into the ground. Our country had become a slave state since the end of World War II. Everything we produced was shipped to the Soviet Union to leave us impoverished and starving.
On this day, I remember helping my mom clear yard waste in the front yard of my grandmother’s home. I heard a loud noise and saw my mom stop working then walked to face the dirt road in front of the house. Two Russian tanks were moving slowly past our neighbor’s front yard and come closer to ours. My mom yelled in defiance at the menacing hulks when they approached. She waved her broom in the air. The first tank stopped in front of us.
The cannon on the turret started rotating towards us until it was pointing directly in our faces. My mom lowered the broom in her left hand and pushed me behind her with her right. It was a feeble attempt to protect me from what she thought may happen next. I felt her hand on my side trembling. Her breathing quivered, yet we did not move from the spot. I couldn’t see past her billowing long skirt, but I knew the cannon of the evil machine was still there and pointed straight at us. Then, what seemed like an eternity for me, the diesel engine of the hulking machine roared and moved slowly down the dusty road.
Two weeks later, my family and I fled Hungary. Two hundred thousand other Hungarians fled the country, as well. We were among the lucky ones who got out alive and unscathed. Many were shot to death by snipers at the Austrian/Hungarian border. I have no numbers for how many were murdered. We were among those fortunate enough to escape. Sixty thousand of us found freedom here in the U.S..
That freedom has been tenuous and shaky in the U.S. in recent years. It is no longer the free country where I arrived.. I was recently notified, by a friend, my posts dealing with the Ukraine crisis have been censored on Facebook. So much for our First Amendment.
“But Facebook is a private corporation,” I hear you say? They can do what they want with their business. Understand, however, Facebook and other media giants do the bidding of government telling Zuckerberg and others to censor conservative speech or face antitrust law break-ups of their corporations. Leftists in this country are working to destroy our Constitution, and with it, the civil liberties Americans have taken for granted for way too long.
Our Big Tech, corporations, school boards, universities, and government have been infiltrated by socialists and communists.
China’s influence in our country has become insidious. The CCP (Chines Communist Park) forces our institutions to kowtow to their dictates to make sure China is always put in a favorable light. I look on in horror at communist influence in our Nation today. Our media obeys the CCP even as the Chinese released a virus that has killed close to one million in our country alone. We are not allowed to speak against China.
What has happened in Ukraine was preventable. Vladimir Putin said he did not want a NATO (North Atlantic Organizationa) country (Ukraine) on its border. A simple compromise of getting a guarantee from Russia not to invade Ukraine with a promise from NATO countries that Ukraine would not join NATO was what was needed to prevent Putin from having any justification for invasion. Why didn’t we get the compromise?
Ask the handlers of Joe Biden.
Since World War ll, NATO was placed into position to protect Europe.
Europe then became complacent and energy dependent on the very country NATO was designed to defend them against….Russia! The oil and natural gas Europe’s economy and lives depend on today comes from Russia. It took Donald Trump to point out to Europe what a ridiculous situation it was that Europe was energy-dependent on the very country NATO was designed to protect them against. Yet it continued.
Trump made the U.S. energy independent. We became a net exporter of oil. Had Trump continued in office, we could have become a supplier of oil to Europe and ended European energy dependence on Russia. But it was Biden who took office, and the first thing Biden did was to shut down our oil production and Keystone. That put us back into energy dependence. Incredibly, we import Russian oil at a rate of 844,000 barrels/day. Thank you Mr. Biden. Biden approved Putin’s Nordstrom pipeline, to put Putin into even a stronger position to dictate what he wanted Europe and even the U.S. to do, or not do. Why does this president work against his people? Putin now could do what he wanted. He wanted Ukraine.
Putin’s dream has been to put the USSR back together again. Ukraine would be the first domino to fall. Putin needed a weak United Stated and a Europe dependent on him to start this war. Europe’s dependence means Europe/NATO doesn’t dare get in his way. A weak U.S and Biden allow for chaos. We should have learned a long time ago when Ronald Reagan destroyed the USSR that we get peace through strength and war through weakness.