“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
I have never had the courage to read Solzhinitsyn because when I read of such pain, anguish, and despair, I physically feel discomfort and waves of anxiety. However, I have read various snippets and excerpts including I believe a whole chapter called "The Arrest". I could not take it. It's the same when I read about North Korea.
But the point made in this paragraph is truly profound. Regardless of what our leaders tell us, always remember that they have only one core value...power. Everything they do can be understood on that basis alone. They care not for principals, law, nor justice. That is why we must protect freedom by never allowing the Government to have total power over us. We have many warnings all around us. While we still can, we need to build institutions of resistance that can do exactly what the man who went through is trying to tell us.