(cont'd from yesterday's post)
Laura Nicolae, Harvard student and daughter of Romanian immigrants, tells her family's story:
"In 1988, my twenty-six-year-old father jumped off a train in the middle of Hungary with nothing but the clothes on his back. For the next two years, he fled an oppressive Romanian Communist regime that would kill him if they ever laid hands on him again.
"My father ran from a government that beat, tortured, and brainwashed its citizens.
"Today, my parents are doctors in quiet, suburban Kansas. Both of their daughters go to Harvard. They are the lucky ones . . . Roughly 100 million people died at the hands of the ideology my parents escaped. They cannot tell their story. We owe it to them to recognize that this ideology is not a fad, and their deaths are not a joke.
"For many students, casually endorsing communism is a cool, edgy way to gripe about the world . . . my classmates will graduate with the impression that communism represents a light-hearted critique of the status quo, rather than an empirically violent philosophy that destroyed millions of lives."
Laura Nicolae, Harvard student and daughter of Romanian immigrants, tells her family's story:
"In 1988, my twenty-six-year-old father jumped off a train in the middle of Hungary with nothing but the clothes on his back. For the next two years, he fled an oppressive Romanian Communist regime that would kill him if they ever laid hands on him again.
"My father ran from a government that beat, tortured, and brainwashed its citizens.
"Today, my parents are doctors in quiet, suburban Kansas. Both of their daughters go to Harvard. They are the lucky ones . . . Roughly 100 million people died at the hands of the ideology my parents escaped. They cannot tell their story. We owe it to them to recognize that this ideology is not a fad, and their deaths are not a joke.
"For many students, casually endorsing communism is a cool, edgy way to gripe about the world . . . my classmates will graduate with the impression that communism represents a light-hearted critique of the status quo, rather than an empirically violent philosophy that destroyed millions of lives."
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