“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, polkers, or whatever else was at hand? After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you’d be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur — what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked. 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!
- Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
Outward oriented IEDs at the door.
Solzhenitsyn
He had it correct. Thanks for the quote. I hope our people have learned from history.
Excellent. Most people just don’t get it. When the progressives make their move after they collapse the system, they will operate the exact same way Lenin/Stalin or Hitler or Mussolini did. The true test of American resolve will be coming within a few short years.
We aren't anywhere close to the point that we need to worry about Stalinist commissars making midnight roundups, but the Second Amendment is an excellent deterrent to make potential dictators recognize the impossibility of such ideas so they never proceed from vain thoughts to real plans.
As for why Pravda is printing these things, as ReformationFan wrote, and several others said in different ways, “Some times it takes people who have actually experienced life under tyranny to truly understand how valuable real freedom genuinely is.” Putin and the Russians and the Chinese are not our friends, but they **DO** understand the danger of Islamofascism and the impossibility of making socialism work. They've learned those lessons from hard experiences.
I'm afraid we in the West going to have to learn those lessons the hard way instead of the easy way.
We kid ourselves if we think these problems are new, or that our enemies sometimes understand our cultural problems better than we do. I spent a significant part of this morning reading translated Nazi propaganda so I could respond effectively to a very good point brought up on a different thread by a Jewish Freeper who I respect a lot. A lot of the Nazi propaganda directed to Germans regarded "Bolshevism" as a decadent ideology that posed no serious long-term threat, but regarded "Americanism" (i.e., freedom, along with its excesses and lack of self-discipline) as the only serious competitor to Nazi ideology for the hearts and minds of the world. Attacking American immorality and lack of discipline is not new; many of those propaganda pieces attacking Roosevelt-style economics and American movies and music could be written by many conservatives today.
The problem, of course, is that the Nazis correctly diagnosed the problems of American liberalism but didn't understand that freedom, not fascism, is the solution.