🇨🇿 From Czechoslovakia to Canada: A Warning Reborn

She was a young woman in Czechoslovakia when the secret police still prowled the streets.

She remembers the small things that made a big difference: how people lowered their voices before saying anything political, how neighbours looked away rather than risk being seen together, how every newspaper carried the same headlines approved by the Party.

Her father used to say, “Don’t ever tell the truth out loud. Truth is dangerous.”

That was the air she breathed — a world where people learned to smile and stay silent.

When she finally came to Canada, she wept the first time she walked into a grocery store. The shelves were full. People argued openly about government policy in line at the post office. A police officer smiled and helped her with directions instead of demanding identification.

She would later say, “I felt as if I had stepped into light after living my whole life underground.”

For years, she told everyone that Canada was proof that freedom worked — that an ordinary person could speak, work, and worship without fear. She raised her children to be proud Canadians, not to live in fear of government or ideology.

Then, something began to change.

Around 2015, she started hearing familiar words again — “misinformation,” “hate speech,” “public order.” The same phrases used by the Communist Party back home to control what people could say and think. Government officials began labelling ordinary citizens as “extremists” for disagreeing. Neighbours stopped speaking about politics. Media stories all carried the same tone, as if written by one invisible hand.

She wrote later:
“Since 2015, I could hear the same phrases, could witness the same methods used by our Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. I am absolutely certain that Canada is marching towards a totalitarian state.”

She listed what she was seeing — the same tactics that once destroyed her country:

Polarization: citizens turned against each other — workers against employers, women against men, races against races.

Censorship: laws to restrict speech online, people afraid to speak freely.

Propaganda: state-funded media echoing government narratives while dissenting voices are mocked or silenced.

Economic control: small businesses squeezed by bureaucracy, taxes, and regulations until only the compliant survive.

Moral inversion: the erosion of personal responsibility and family strength, replaced by dependence on the state.

It wasn’t sudden. It was slow — just like before. The “soft hand” of the state replacing persuasion with pressure, and finally, with punishment.
Her friends told her she was exaggerating. “This is Canada,” they said.

She smiled sadly. She had heard that before, too — in Prague, in 1968, when Soviet tanks rolled in and people said, “It can’t happen here.”

Now she spends her retirement years writing letters, attending meetings, and warning young Canadians not to take their rights for granted. She doesn’t hate her new country — she loves it too much to stay quiet.

She tells everyone who will listen:
“Freedom is fragile. You lose it first in your heart — when you become afraid to speak. Then you lose it in law.”

For her, this isn’t theory or politics. It’s memory.
The same pattern she once fled is taking root in the land that once gave her refuge.

And she refuses to be silent a second time.