When the Goons Show Up On Your Doorstep...

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Sun, 19 Apr 2009 23:50:19 GMT  <== Politics ==> 

Paul Bonneau at The Libertarian Enterprise - a good-to-remember Solzhenitsyn quote in these days when goons might appear on your doorstep. Mr. Bonneau reminds us that no matter how many laws they make, and no matter how well-outfitted are the swat teams, we still have free will, and we can still decide how to respond to those goons. Hopefully, we'll remember Solzhenitsyn before it's too late.

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 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!

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Comments (2):

How true...

Submitted by klhrevolution on Mon, 20 Apr 2009 00:49:07 GMT

Now here is a decent message that does not seem to make the grade in the underground media circuit though it should. Good one!

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Thanks for the reminder

Submitted by Arto Bendiken on Wed, 22 Apr 2009 19:43:31 GMT

I've just ordered The Gulag Archipelago (albeit the abridged 500-page edition), as it seems every single treatise on the Soviet Union finds opportunities to quote Solzhenitsyn. So, time to read the original...

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