Marian Tupy: I Saw Communism with My Own Eyes | Stories of Us

I think that one of the big mistakes we did after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the end of communism is to stop teaching young people about the dangers of socialism. My name is Marian Tupi and this is my story. I'm a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and I'm the founder and editor of humanprogress.org. I was born in communist Czechoslovakia, back then called the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. Czechoslovakia was a socialist dictatorship. We didn't have economic freedom or capitalism and we didn't have political freedom or democracy. After the Second World War, when the Nazis were kicked out of Czechoslovakia, they were replaced by the Red Army of the Soviet Union. Czechoslovakia between the wars was a democratic and rather well-developed country. So my grandparents always remembered the 1930s before the war as a time when Czechoslovakia was rather prosperous and a nice place to live. I think the biggest aspiration of somebody who is growing up behind the Iron Curtain was to get out. The reason why we had the Iron Curtain, the reason why we had border posts and border guards with machine guns and barbed wire was to keep us in from leaving. Even though there was tremendous amount of information control by the communists, some information about life in the West still got to us. And so we understood that life in the West was much better. I remember from the days of communism how difficult it was to obtain a car or a washing machine or anything. And of course, the shortages of food and clothing. When I was about 10 years old, I was walking down this market street from my grandmother's place listening to loudspeakers read out the latest statistics, how we have produced this much food and this much clothing and how productivity in the country was huge and how we are beating the West and how we were living in the luckiest country in the world. And I noticed that all the shops on this market street were empty. I was living in this Orwellian nightmare whereby the reality of what I was seeing with my eyes and the propaganda that I was hearing from the regime were completely different. The government wanted to have a total control over your person, but also your thoughts. So if you wanted to be a rebel, you went to church because the church was the focal point of anti-communist agitation behind the Iron Curtain. Greed is a part of human nature. It is part of who we are. Communist apparatchiks were certainly very greedy. They had better houses. They had better hospitals. Their children were sent to better school. They accumulated more wealth than the rest of the population. In some ways, you can think about communist society as a feudal society where there is a small percentage of people at the top, the Politburo, the top echelons of the Communist Party who have all the rights, who have a lot of freedoms. But those rights and freedoms are denied to people at the bottom. Socialist healthcare system was run on greed and corruption. Doctors wouldn't even look at you unless they were bribed. The first question isn't what's wrong with this person, but who this person is. Who is he or she connected to? So this is how the system ran. It ran on greed. It ran on corruption. Communism was based on lying, stealing, cheating, backstabbing. In order to survive in a communist regime, you had to become a moral monster. Communism really started falling apart in the late 1980s. Gorbachev introduces perestroika and glasnost in the Soviet Union, but things begin to change in Eastern Europe as well. In mid-November 1989, people take to the streets of Czechoslovakia. Some are beaten by government goons, but the protests don't stop. They accelerate. And suddenly the whole country is in town squares demanding a change in government. I came from a very political family, and so I went to join those protests, even though I was only 13 years old. Far too many people took to the streets. There was a danger of a general strike whereby the country would simply stop working and thereby crash the economy. And so the communists very quickly acceded to giving up their monopoly on political power. The whole country was in turmoil, but there was a lot of feeling of optimism about the future. Everybody knew by that point that what we wanted was liberal democracy and free market capitalism. So we knew that we were embarking on a brand new chapter in the history of the country. Me and my family decided that since we were now free to travel, we would go to Vienna in Austria right across the Iron Curtain for Christmas. And so we drove in our little Škoda car. Everything in Czechoslovakia was grey, falling apart, broken down, underdeveloped. People were angry, never smiled. And here we were in Vienna, 30 miles away from the border, and it was literally like stepping from a black and white movie into a color film. Shops are full, people are happy, people are smiling. Everything is kept up, everything is in color, everything is beautiful. And so it was a fantastic way of seeing, discovering really, what freedom can do. And having experienced that kind of freedom, having seen what liberal democracy and free market capitalism can accomplish, how much happier and richer it makes people. I don't want to lose it again. I don't want to go into a world of socialism. I moved when I was a teenager, first to South Africa and then to Great Britain, and eventually to the United States. And with every step of the way, I got to live in a brand new culture with its own benefits and its own challenges. I continue to question, why is it that some countries are rich, why some countries are poor? I hope that countries can learn from each other's mistakes and not repeat them. Well, after finishing my PhD, I got a job offer from the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C. So I came to the United States on a working visa, and then eventually I got a green card and I became a citizen in 2014. Becoming an American was surprisingly emotional because, of course, you have to recite an oath. If you believe in the meaning of words, saying things like, I promise to bear arms to protect the United States, I forswear allegiances to foreign princes and potentates, and things like that, was actually quite a powerful experience. It is extremely liberating to be able to, for the first time in your life, say things publicly that you also believe privately. Americans are very fortunate that they were born into a country that is free and prosperous. For those of us who didn't have freedom and had to experience this for the first time, we can compare it to a life of oppression, a life of poverty. And we are here to tell you, native-born Americans, that you have something special, that the American experiment has worked out. It is not perfect. The American system, based on political and economic freedom, is worth protecting. I know it's hard. I know that it takes courage, it takes thinking, it takes planning. But we have to do it, because if we don't protect freedom, if we lose it, then the future for all of us will be much, much worse. We need to continue to educate young people in the importance of freedom. As a newly-minted American, I am willing to participate in that fight. But I need allies. Why don't you join me, and together, we can keep America free. Thank you for watching this video. To keep PregeU videos free, please consider making a tax-deductible donation.