Thursday 1 December 2011

We didn't love freedom enough.

“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 I. Solzhenitsyn

Learn your history, people, or get ready to repeat it. Human nature hasn't changed one jot since Homer wrote 'The Illiad' and it sure as hell ain't changed since Solzhenitsyn wrote the above.

5 comments:

Smoking Hot said...

Read his books when l was a teen. lt was a warning that no-one took notice of. Now look at us ... the EUSSR. I tried telling people, god knows l did but all that interested them was stoopid tv progs. Now it's X-Factor, Eastenders, Corrie blah blah blah!

But, l don't give up and never will.

Angry Exile said...

You have a knack for finding the quotable, TT. Pinching bits of that for my sidebar.

Anonymous said...

Twenty years ago I thought the cops too sensible for anything like this to ever happen in the UK.

Today it's all too credible as more and more people are being arrested for political crimes.

I read the mother who was ranting on the Croydon tram was not only arrested (FFS!) but in fact remanded in custody !! Say you don't like government immigration policy - go to jail.

I guess we now have sufficient prison space and violent criminals (those who commit crimes with actual victims) are never bailed anymore and given long sentences.

Anonymous said...

Rather than wait for them to come to you would it be a better proposition to trace the hideouts of TPTB and their enforcers and take the fight to them?, shouldn't be too hard.

Michael Fowke said...

Well, people fear freedom. Erich Fromm wrote a book about it: The Fear of Freedom.