“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”
The only thing scary about this is that every revolution I know of has brought into power a worse tyranny than was there before, save one: our own War for Independence. Our limited government Republic has since been corrupted into a Socialist democracy, but at least it wasn't instant tyranny by those who won the rebellion.
I believe that we got that government because we revered the God of the Bible, but as reverence for Him waned, our government became farther and farther removed from the Constitution. Take that as you will; just don't hate CHristians for saying so, or you wish to strike down the 1A.
Great piece. Heartbreaking though it may be.
ReplyDeleteI will not surrender!
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”
ReplyDelete- Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
The most hardcore liberty-minded ant-statists I've met in my life have been immigrants from former Soviet bloc satellites.
ReplyDeleteThe only thing scary about this is that every revolution I know of has brought into power a worse tyranny than was there before, save one: our own War for Independence. Our limited government Republic has since been corrupted into a Socialist democracy, but at least it wasn't instant tyranny by those who won the rebellion.
ReplyDeleteI believe that we got that government because we revered the God of the Bible, but as reverence for Him waned, our government became farther and farther removed from the Constitution. Take that as you will; just don't hate CHristians for saying so, or you wish to strike down the 1A.