" I have read many accounts of people who inhabit in authoritarian government activity , and most did n’t notice until authoritarianism was already in full lilt . The first to leave are those who are give aid . "
Due to the state of, well, everything in the world right now, the topics of authoritarian governments are on everybody’s mind. Recently, Reddit userFree_Dimension1459asked, “People who escaped authoritarian governments, when did you KNOW it was the right time for you to leave your country?”
Sadly, there were A LOT of replies. Here are some of the most compelling:
1.“I remember asking my mom why she left the Philippines in the ’70s. She explained the Ferdinand Marcos regime and how he declared martial law. She said when that was announced, she knew she had to leave. She had been working towards moving anyway, but she said that was her cue to hurry it up.”
2.“I’m from Myanmar (formerly Burma). Most of us young people left the country when they enacted the conscription law. Now you can’t leave the country unless you’ve done military service — which essentially means until you die. There’s a civil war going on, and they need more meat for the meat grinder.”
3.“I left Russia back in 2006. Everything was great back then (freedom of internet, foreign tourists, international brands, etc.), but I had a weird feeling it wouldn’t last long. I cannot explain it. I visited my parents for a month in 2019, and it felt like the beginning of the end. Then came Covid, and the war.”
4.“I left the US in 2006. With the Patriot Act and several other infringements of citizens' rights, I felt it was the right time to leave.”
5.“My grandad left Poland after he was thrown in a concentration camp and escaped. He was very clever and bilingual in German. He made it to the UK. He was 16 in 1939.”
6.“The police started harassing people on the streets after a protest in Belarus. Some of them were killed, some injured. Thousands were imprisoned and tortured. It is still happening. When everything happened, I just took the first morning flight and left for another country.”
7.“When I went to the market and found nothing at all but bones. When I had a gun pointed in my face and was robbed for the umpteenth time. When one of my neighbors got shot, and I heard his relatives screaming. When kids died around me in protests. When we got tear gassed and shot at by the National Guard. When the dictator was dancing salsa in a mandatory national transmission while he celebrated the death of protesters. I left Venezuela in 2016 and it still fucking hurts.”
8.“I used to know a woman who was from Haiti. She said the right time to leave was in 1980 when the Tonton Macoute came for her husband, who was a political dissident. That was the last time she and the kids saw him.”
9.“My grandfather, the bravest man I have ever known, fled Germany shortly before the Nuremberg Laws were passed in 1935. He had been a lawyer and had arranged everyone’s passports, hidden some gold away, and established a place for them to flee. The judiciary was already under the control of the regime. He took his wife and five children and crossed France into Belgium. By 1936, he was applying for asylum to multiple countries, including the US (where he knew people in the embassy). He was summarily denied.”
10.“We left Turkey after the 2016 coup. I think we did the right thing, but now we have another authoritarian government to deal with in the US.”
11.“My grandmother left Hungary when the hospital she worked at took a direct hit around the October Revolution. It was amazing what she and her family survived for love of country before that moment.”
12.“My great grandma fled the USSR during the pogroms and settled in Germany. The day Hitler was elected, she and her husband starting packing and made a break for the US.”
13.“My great-grandparents took their six kids and fled Scotland during the second Highland Clearance. They lost their land at bayonet point. My great-grandfather went from being an educated doctor in the Highlands to being a janitor here in the US because the British were determined to starve out the Scottish clans just like they did with the Irish.”
14.“When Putin invaded Crimea, I accepted a job offer to move out of Russia. People around me didn’t care much, and I realized that Putin knew he could do anything he wanted there because people wouldn’t protest. I thought he would turn the country into a full-on dictatorship, and I was right.”
15.“My mother and her parents left Bosnia in 1991 when the Iron Curtain fell and Yugoslavia started falling. They saw the whole conflict and genocides coming.”
16.“When Putin and Medvedev swapped positions as president and prime minister in 2012, my wife and I looked at each other and were like, ‘yep, it’s time to go.’ Best decision ever.”
17.And finally, a reminder to stay vigilant now more than ever: “I have read many accounts of people who lived in authoritarian governments, and most didn’t notice until authoritarianism was already in full swing.”
H/Tr/AskReddit
Some replies have been edit for length and pellucidity .
