(All Carlos Osweda threads are reposted without alteration. Proceed with caution, candor ahead.)
THREAD
@realDonaldTrump compare YOUR supporters to Biden’s.
Let me list all the “full stop” statements Biden supporters have made recently.
“Only Nazis ask you to define Nazism.”
“Only racists say they’re not racist.”
“White people are born racist and can’t ever change.”
“Only women bleed.”
“Not all women have vaginas.”
“If you aren’t attracted to women with penises, it means you’re transphobic.”
“Success is white supremacist.”
“Any black person who works with Trump to improve the lives of black people is a sellout.”
(That’s the only non-racist term I can use.)
“There’s no such thing as gender.”
“We must believe all science.”
“People should never be imprisoned.”
I HAVE TO STOP.
Writing leftist full-stop statements is making my IQ drop like a stone.
The most abnormal country I ever visited was Yugoslavia in 1980.
I was on a train, the legendary ordeal of the Austria-Greece run.
You were not allowed to get off the train unless you had a visa.
I had to get off after my travel pouch was stolen while I slept in a compartment.
I was next to the door. Sometime during the night, someone in the corridor sprayed me with knockout gas.
Then they sliced open my shirt and stole my pouch.
Passport, Eurail pass, traveler’s checks, wallet.
The train had cops with AK-47s.
They all had those horrible communist peaked caps with the enormous “cover,” as it’s called.
But these were summer uniforms, so the covers were white.
And the cops wore them tipped really far back on their heads.
So they looked like Catholic saints pointing AK-47s at me.
Nobody spoke English, but a passenger spoke German, and so did one of my traveling companions, so were explained what happened.
A cop-saint wrote out a report, and I had to get off in Belgrade to go to the American consulate.
Yugoslavians were the most surly people I’d ever encountered.
Nobody would help us. They just barked and hurried away.
Every single person had totally ill-fitting clothes. Either way too small or way too big.
All the men were unshaven, and the women had street-walker makeup.
There was only one size, style, and color of shoe for the whole country.
A kind of dark pumpkin shade, with bulbous toes and three-inch heels.
Like cartoon shoes. Even the women wore them.
Finally my friend said, “I’m going to act like a Yugoslavian.”
He stepped in front of a passing man and grunted loudly, pointing to the address on the police report.
The guy answered in American English.
He worked at the consulate.
So we went to the consulate, and the consul himself saw us.
He said he couldn’t help me, because I had no way to identify myself.
“Okay,” I said. “Then I’m going to die. Thanks!”
I got up to leave, and he huffily stopped me.
He had all my traveling companions sign affidavits that I really was who I said I was, and he sent me down the street to get a passport photo taken.
The photographer was a 15-year-old girl with a Mathew Brady camera from about 1850.
I had to sit motionless as she exposed the glass-plate negative for about 20 seconds.
Got my photos and went back to the consulate, where the consul gave me a letter in Cyrillic.
He made the new passport himself using a regular typewriter.
American passports at the time had the lettering done in segmented letters in green ink, so this looked like a crappy forgery.
Then he glued in my photo with white glue that glopped out from under all four edges, and he stamped the photo on my face so I was unrecognizable.
He gave me the address of a campground and told me that I had to go to the secret police–UDBA–headquarters the next day to get an exist visa.
Then he sent me on my way.
My traveling companions gave me some money so I could pay for the taxi.
They shook my hand and went on to Greece.
I never saw any of them again, though several have tried to contact me.
I’ll tell you at the end why I’ve always refused their calls.
At the post office, I called my parents and got them to wire me enough money for tickets back home.
Then I caught a taxi and went to the campground.
It was closed!
But the night watchman was a young guy with the widest shoulders I’ve ever seen.
He spoke perfect English and said I could stay in the three-foot-high grass.
We sat in his little booth and talked well into the night.
Mostly we talked about literature.
We’d read all the same books.
Finally he had to make his rounds, he gave me a pack of cigarettes and bade me goodnight.
They were Yugoslavian cigarettes that tasted exactly the way scented toilet paper smells.
I didn’t sleep a wink, convinced that tomorrow, my life would end.
The night watchman called me a taxi, and when the driver saw the address, he refused to take me.
He and the night watchman had a long argument.
Finally the taxi driver disgustedly threw open the back door so I could get in.
The night watchman stood and watched me until I was out of sight.
About three blocks from the UDBA headquarters, there were no pedestrians.
The taxi driver stopped, pointed down the street, and clearly told me to get out.
When I tried to pay him, he refused, and then he made a U-turn and floored it.
He didn’t want a dead man’s money.
I started walking.
The building was huge, and there were saint-cops sitting all over the front steps.
They stopped talking to watch me approach.
I picked out the least psychotic-looking one and handed him my letter from the consul.
He went inside.
A few minutes later, three men in suits came out.
One of them took off my backpack in a VERY smooth, practiced motion, and the other two grabbed my arms and frogmarched me into the building.
Went went down flight after flight of stairs, deep into the bowels of the earth.
Finally we came to a tiny room with a stool, two lights on stands, and a desk with a manual typewriter.
They sat me on the stool and left.
I sat there for almost three hours.
The walls and floor were painted glossy battleship gray.
For easy cleaning.
Finally a heavy older man with glasses and a young male model came in.
The older man drew closed the curtains and behind the desk. He put a printed report in the typewriter and lit a cigarette.
The model turned on the two lights on stands. They were blinding.
He adjusted them to shine in my face.
I couldn’t see anything outside the glare of the lights.
The model lit a cigarette and slowly paced in a circle around me.
He wore hard-soled shoes, so I could hear him circling.
No sound for a long time except tock. Tock. Tock. Tock.
“YOU!” he suddenly shouted. “CARLOS! HOW DID YOU ENTER YUGOSLAVIA WITHOUT A PASSPORT? EH? HOW! EXPLAIN!”
“I had a passport. It was stolen.”
The model spoke in Yugoslavian to the older man.
The older man (I could barely see him now) waved his hand.
“Ne, ne, ne, ne!”
“YOU LIE! YOU SOLD YOUR PASSPORT! YOU SOLD IT TO A CITIZEN OF YUGOSLAVIA! DIDN’T YOU! TELL ME! NOW!”
“No. It was stolen. It was in a pouch around my neck. Somebody cut my shirt open and stole it while I was sleeping.”
“YOU LIE! YOUR NEW PASSPORT IS FAKE! YOU MADE IT!”
This went on for a couple of hours.
Finally they said they believed me. They gave me an exit visa that expired at midnight and told me to get out of the country.
I had to take bus GEH to the train station.
I couldn’t understand, so they wrote it for me.
“What happens if I don’t make it out of the country at midnight?” I asked.
“YOU WILL BE ARRESTED! NOW GO! GO!”
I went.
(An old pal just called. The first high-profile victim of cancel culture. She’s laughing and laughing at the impending doom of the people who canceled her.)
So I went to the bus stop, but the bus never came. I hailed a taxi. The driver spoke no known language, so I had to mime a choo-choo train to tell him where I wanted to go.
At the station, the girl behind the counter spoke perfect English.
I was able to buy tickets all the way to Denmark.
Then I had to wait several hours.
The man in the magazine, cigarette, and candy kiosk had facial hair that grew all the way up to his eyeballs.
Since he couldn’t shave his lower eyelids, he had a mustache below each eye.
The station porter was perfectly spherical.
When he tried to carry peoples’ luggage, they yanked it away from him and shouted what was almost certainly profanity.
Finally the train to Austria came after sunset. I had a whole compartment to myself.
The train was crawling with saint-cops toting AK-47s.
They all looked at my passport visa, checked their wristwatches, and gave me back the passport.
At some point, a young Yugoslavian soldier came in and addressed me in German.
Suddenly I could speak and understand German.
He said he was going to go visit his girlfriend in Austria, but he didn’t have a ticket, so he asked me if he could hide under my row of seats.
Why not, right?
As the clock ticked toward midnight, the saint-cops kept coming in to see if I’d committed suicide yet.
We crossed the Austrian border at 11:53 p.m.
The train immediately pulled into a station, and the Yugoslavian saint cops got off.
After they left, the Yugoslavian soldier emerged from under my seat and thanked me.
“You prefer English, don’t you?” he asked in perfect English.
I said I did.
“Well thank you again. Here.”
He handed me a pack of Yugoslavian toilet-paper cigarettes, stood, and pushed down the window.
As the train picked up speed, he smiled, saluted me, and jumped out the window into the darkness.
I didn’t bother to close the window.
A hell of a lot MORE happened before I got home to Stavanger, Norway, but I just wanted to give you a glimpse of life in the Democrats’ America.
Yugoslavia was considered the modernized communist country with the most freedom.
And the reason I never respond when my traveling companions try to contact me?
While I was having my passport photo taken, the American consul told them that so many Americans were selling their passports and claiming they were stolen that the UDBA would just disappear me.
They’d warned the consul that they were going to crack down hard.
All the people who shook my hand and went on to Greece and nude beaches thought they were sending me to my death.
They didn’t warn me that I was in danger.
At eighteen years old, without even knowing it, I talked myself out of being summarily executed.
In retrospect it was my demeanor. I simply didn’t give off the vibe of someone arrogant and stupid enough to sell his passport in a communist country.
All leftists should experience what I did.
Ain’t nothing like sitting in a tiny room under spotlights being interrogated by one of the most feared, savage, ruthless secret-police organizations Europe has ever seen.
And thanks to Donald John Trump, it won’t happen here.
END
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