An Iron Curtain is Descending

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Thu, 01 Feb 2007 19:01:52 GMT  <== Politics ==> 

Pariah at Countrpunch - before moving permanently to Canada, Pariah had a difficult time getting out of Amerika to visit there. [claire]

At the beginning of the Cold War, Winston Churchill made his famous comment about an iron curtain descending across Europe. Like many others, I experienced this iron curtain. I faced incessant exit and entry police interrogations in places like East Berlin and at the Soviet borders. In those days, such long waits to get OUT of a country, as well as to get in, were limited to the "Communist" block primarily. Thank goodness, we'd think, this could not happen in America. Now that virtually all travel barriers have fallen throughout Europe--including Eastern Europe, and with travel in and out of China or Vietnam far easier than before, it is around the U.S. that the iron curtain seems to be descending. As in the Soviet or Chinese blocks before (or more recently in Cuba), the elites could travel, but the various dissidents, deviants and ordinary folk could not. This sad fact is becoming increasingly the case for many U, S, citizens today. So far, very few liberals or libertarians have taken note of this chilling trend to limit travel for huge numbers of Americans. Unless protests against these measures grow quickly, it will be too late to stop or even slow them down. America, like Russia and China before it, will become a prison for many of its people.

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