Sorry about length.
"The bill also expands our previous efforts in Civics, to add a requirement for the High School Government Class, that students receive instruction on the evils of Communism and Totalitarian Ideologies.
We have a number of people, in Florida, particularly Southern Florida, who've escaped Totalitarian Regimes, who've escaped Communist Dictatorships, to be able to come to America.
We want all students to understand the difference. Why would someone flee across shark infested waters, say leaving from Cuba, to come to Southern Florida?
Why would somebody leave a place like Vietnam? Why would people leave these countries and risk their life to be able to come here?
It's important that students understand that. Now as part of this bill, Florida will create a portrait and patriotism library, so students can learn about real patriots who came to this country, after seeing the horrors of these Communist Regimes."
- Ron DeSantis
Well, I'll admit now that he 'said it.
But I can't say I'm 'greatly 'bothered, by him saying it.
"Repression and New Economic Zones After the Vietnam War — The reunification of Vietnam was accompanied by widespread political repression."
Boat People Flee Vietnam
"After the fall of Saigon in 1975, more than a million people left Vietnam, about 5 percent of South Vietnam’s population, most of them by boat. Many were Chinese Vietnamese. Some didn’t make it to their final destinations. Some died. Most settled in the United States, which accepted political refugees but turned back economic refugees. Many of those who didn't make it were detained at camps in Hong Kong or the Philippines.
For this privilege of leaving Vietnam Chinese had to pay the Vietnamese government about US$2,000 a head in gold. At the time these fees were Vietnam's main source of hard currency. At that time the Chinese owned many businesses in Vietnam and there was a lot of hostility towards Chinese in Vietnam. China and Vietnam have long history of animosity. Many Chinese were thrown out of Vietnam at the time China and Vietnam fought a border war in 1979. In the early 1970s there were about a half million ethnic Chinese in Vietnam. In the early 1980s there were practically none. Vietnam made US$2 billion from the forced migration. [Source: William Ellis, National Geographic, November 1979]
Many of refugees crowded onto unseaworthy boats. Large ships with over 2,500 passengers were organized by Vietnamese racketeers. Smaller ships were purchased by people who pooled their money. Life savings were paid for a place on a boat. Families split up. Fat people were sometimes denied a spot because they took up as much room as two smaller people that paid as much.
People died of thirst, hunger, exposure. Some people who got very sick were pushed over the edge. Some boats had engines that conked out at sea. Some of the boats lost more than half their passengers to exposure, drowning, starvation and attacks from pirates.
About 90 percent of the boats didn't make it. Those who made it to Hong Kong, Thailand or Malaysia were often turned back, driven from shore or towed back to sea. In Hong Kong authorities tried to prevent the ships from landing. One ship was moored in Hong Kong harbor for 20 weeks until someone cut the anchor. When the boat drifted into shore hundreds of people jumped overboard and fled to the hills where they were later rounded up and placed in a camp."
“The price? I couldn’t begin to give you the numbers,” says Carlos Ponce, the director of the Latin American and Caribbean division of the human-rights group Freedom House. “I can tell you that 2 million Cubans live outside Cuba, I can tell you that in the last 10 years, there have been nearly 18,000 political detainees.
“How many in jail since 1959? How many executed? How many lost at sea? I can’t even guess.”
There are organizations that try to track those numbers. But extracting information from a secretive totalitarian regime that likely doesn’t even know the answers itself is a nearly impossible task and likely to remain so, even if there are significant changes in the way the the Cuban government does business following
Fidel Castro’s death last month.
“Even after the Soviet Union fell, when some of its archives opened up for a time, all we really learned was the extent of the cover-up, all the measures the Soviets took to cover up their crimes,” says Marion Smith, executive director of the
Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, which studies the human-rights histories of communist regimes.
“But we never got a precise number of victims, or their names. The Soviets didn’t want to keep precise records — they had learned their lesson from the Nazis, who did keep precise records, which were used to indict Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg.”
"Thousands of Cubans have died in front of Castro’s infamous ‘paredón’ (the wall). There was no discrimination, as far as sending people to the firing squad was concerned. Young and old, black and white, rich and poor were sent to ‘el paredón’.
Many of those who helped Castro gain power, like Comandantes Ernesto Sori Marin and William Morgan, an American, were among the thousands who were shot."
. . .
From Ron DeSantis point of view, he 'is endorsing teaching the objective facts, it just 'follows, that the objective facts lead to the 'conclusion of the repression, death, lack of freedom, in Dictatorships.
'Before 3:10, he mentions how many students are 'unfamiliar with what civic rights they have, responsibilities in society. States the need for certain key principles and facts to be taught.
I see nothing wrong.
