A brief quote from The Gulag Archipelago

Posted on by

Just putting this here:

“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.”
–Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The Gulag Archipelago (1973)

About Eeyore

Canadian artist and counter-jihad and freedom of speech activist as well as devout Schrödinger's catholic

4 Replies to “A brief quote from The Gulag Archipelago”

  2. I think that Solzhenitsyn just explained the thinking behind the Second Amendment: imagine if the entire proposals for mass arrests was met by a lack of enthusiasm on the part of those tasked with effecting them, given the knowledge that getting shot would be a frequent occurrence.

    It wouldn’t even have gotten started.

    • 100%

      Ultimately, people’s choices are based on perceived costs of an action, even over real costs.

      So it wouldn’t take that many people defending themselves to affect the mentality of those doing the kidnappings.

  3. As my American friends say, the 2nd Amendment guarantees the First.

    Canadian politicians willl deny our constitutional rights with impunity. They have no reason to fear us. Without real consequences, they have no incentive to leave me or you alone, content to live our own lives. The fact is they can’t leave us alone because they have a totalitarian mentality.

    Their anti constitutional actions apparently have no consequences. We are totally at their mercy.