Replies

I pray for our courage if and when the day comes Raptor. All the weaponry in the world doesn't convey courage to those who bear them. Nor do they give willingness to kill and die. Winchesters and Ka-Bar's are merely tools. The real weapons are in our hearts.

I'd like to share an excerpt from Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archepelago. It's footnote 5, from Chapter One of Volume One.

"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 if he would return alive and had to say goodbye 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 in terror at every bang of the downstairs door, and every step on the staircase, but had understood that that they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush with half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers and whatever 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 that Black Maria sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffer – 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! If…if… We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation. We spent ourselves in one unrestrained outburst in 1917, and then we hurried to submit. We submitted with pleasure! (Arthur Ransome describes a workers meeting in Yaroslavl in 1921. Delegates were sent to the workers from the Central Committee in Moscow to confer on the substance of the argument about trade unions. The representative of the opposition, Y. Larin, explained to the trade workers that their trade union must be their defense against the administration, that they possessed rights which they had won and upon which no one else had any right to infringe. The workers however were completely indifferent, simply not comprehending whom they still needed to be defended against and why they still needed any rights. When the spokesman rebuked them for their laziness and for getting out of hand, and demanded sacrifices from them – overtime work without pay, reductions in food, military discipline in the factory administration – this aroused great elation and applause.) We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward."

A few paragraphs later he wrote..."Every man has handy a dozen glib little reasons why he is right not to sacrifice himself."