Thoughts of Eggcup

I love writing. I don't know what it is about it; something about getting all my thoughts out on paper. It's so therapeutic. Maybe I'd go mad without it. 
And then I think of the countries in the world, past and present, where people can't or haven't been able to do this simple thing - express what they're thinking, either verbally or on paper. And because they're not allowed to express a thought, sometimes that will stop them from even having that thought.
Where do all these thoughts go when they're trapped and suffocated inside a person with no way of getting out? That terrible lack of freedom. Many people in modern democracies take our freedom for granted. I don't. I appreciate it and I'm grateful for it. I give thanks especially to all of the people between 1939 and 1945 who lost their lives, lost family members, lost their limbs, lost their homes... And I also will never forget the price paid by the Jewish people, when tyranny was allowed a free reign. Totalitarian regimes are always ruthless with any people they perceive to be the enemy. It happened in Spain, too, of course. Indeed, Franco's massacre of the opposition has been likened to a Holocaust.
If people hadn't fought against these various forms of Fascism and if we hadn't defeated Hitler, in particular, many of us could now be living under dictatorships and I wouldn't have walked down through my town this morning for my latte in the carefree way I did, not giving a damn what anyone thought of how I looked, what I wore or what I was thinking.
Instead, we could be in a dictatorship resembling North Korea or a pseudo-democracy like Russia (where no viable opposition is allowed to exist). A country where you express your views at your peril and you behave in a uniform way that you hope draws no attention to you.
I thus get particularly furious when in the Western world Islamists and other lovers of authoritarian regimes take advantage of our hard-won freedom to try and impose their anti-democratic beliefs on us. For example, the current conspiracies to take over some of our schools must be attacked aggressively by our Government. We cannot afford to be complacent.
I have also recently heard expressed the idea that these authoritarian leaders, past and present (specifically, Hitler and Putin), enjoyed or enjoy massive public support. How does anyone know what genuine support Hitler enjoyed in the Third Reich, especially towards the end, when there were several brave murder attempts on him, by his own 'supporters'? And the same goes for Putin.
Look at North Korea - all the population smiling and marching in unison, seemingly in adoration of their beloved leader. Some are brainwashed enough to think they do love him, but many will harbour very different thoughts and have to spend their lives acting when they are in public. What a terrible strain and burden to bear in life.
It's very easy for apologists from free countries where they don't have this dreadful experience to say these leaders enjoy massive public support. The same people never actually want to permanently go and live in these countries that they admire so much.
It is my belief that we must always be on the look-out and not tolerate any attempts to erode the freedoms won for us by the struggle of many in the last century and also now on various fronts, at home and abroad. However ugly it is to think about it, we must remember the evils committed by totalitarian leaders - the brutal tortures and murders of millions of innocent people - so that we can be sure it will never happen again.