It is disheartening to see and hear our national leaders’ desire to turn America into a socialist state. Some are so historically and politically ignorant that they actually praise communist leaders and countries. Below is an article I wrote that was published in Dec. 1983 in Voice of Freedom, a monthly publication devoted the Cause of Religious Freedom and our American way of life. This is a true account from an interview I conducted in 1983.
He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune,–Francis Bacon
If a government official armed with a machine gun came to your house and said, “Your children must leave immediately to come and live at the state school,”–what would you do? Many think it could never happen. Unfortunately, it happens frequently in some communist. countries.
For example, Emilia, a Christian now living in South Florida, was once tending to the afternoon farm chores at their small home on the Isle of Pines, Cuba. Two government officials camped and took away her two small boys. She was told the boys would be provided a quality education at the expense of the government. The parents could even come and visit them anytime they wished.
However, the quality education meant living on two meager meals a day, with one change of clothes a week, military training, and subjection to abuse. The curriculum was communist indoctrination. The boys spent half of their day in such classes and the other half working in the fields. Yes, this was of course free.
Yes, the parents were allow to see the boys whenever “they” [i.e.,the government] wished. But she soon found that they did not want her to come very often. So, she saw her boys less frequently, finding that the procedure to obtain permission was growing more difficult and humiliating. Her heart broke as she watched her boys grow thin, She listened in horror to their whispered stories of life in the school. Soon, the oldest son was transferred to the military base for training and has not been seen since, Emilia hope his bodies not lost in the jungles of Africa. She hopes to find out some day.
I wish this story were imaginary. It is not, In order to further the progress of the Revolution, Castro has organized state schools throughout Cuba, where the government requires children to live and obtain their “education.” By creating these schools, Castro hopes to insure the success of his communist cause. It must certainly must be his effort to weaken the traditional and Christian family.
While no child in a communist land has the rights and safety grand to our children in the West, the oppression of the children of believers seems to be frequent and brutal. Cuba is not the only nation guilty of such an outrage, Each of the communist nations has its favorite methods of dealing with believing parents and their children.
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn devotes many pages in his three volumes of the Gulag Archipelago to the plight of children in the Soviet Union. He reveals that government officials frequently threaten to inflict harm upon the families of believers and dissidents. Those who persist in holding to their convictions or practices are brought before a court, declared to be unfit parents, and stripped of their parental rights for life. The child is taken from them and sent to an atheistic orphanage, a state camp type of school, or even a labor camp for children. The communists feel that Christian indoctrination is subversive and damaging to the socialistic development of the child. It is considered a crime to even take a child under 16 years of age to religious services.
A child that enters into the communist alternatives to the Christian Holme enters a world frequently filled with immorality, abuse, drugs, alcohol, gangs, and violence. This shocking transfer can’t do anything but have a negative effect upon the soul of s sensitive child. Job spoke of those who “pluck the fatherless from the breast” (24:9) . . . . It was a sad day for Emilia when she watched her two boys drive off in the government truck on that dusty road on the Isle of Pines.
THEY TOOK THE BABY AWAY – A poem by Rickey Pittman
They took the baby
Like I heard that they would do,
But in our land of freedom,
It doesn’t happen to you,
It happens very frequently,
To saints in other lands,
The Devil does it easily,
It seems by Communist hands.
Children in a Christian home,
Who go to church and pray,
They will take to an orphan,
Take them far away.
They never will return you know,
Those years were all they had,
Now prayer and God must lead them,
For they’ll never have their dad.
With no Bible now to teach them,
No songs of Jesus’ love,
Just hate and rage and sadness,
And life without a God.
Here we have no penalty,
For teaching Jesus’ way, T
Here there is no persecution,
For teaching kids to pray.
Oh, please, dear God, forgive me,
For coward that I am,
I don’t know if I could take it,
To see children lose their dad,
The price of faith must cost us,
But what cost mine I ask?
And why are these my burden,
These kids that lose their dad.