"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! We did not love freedom enough. Every man always has handy a dozen glib little reasons why he is right not to sacrifice himself."
- Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
That book will soon be forbidden. It’s amazing to read that book,,, and realize how much of the their thinking is precisely shared by Obama and the democrat party of today.
But their big mistake is that we aren’t simple russian peasants of the early 1900s. We are armed to the teeth. And we still somewhat remember the ideas of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, etc.
I fear they will not stop their revolution, because they truly do not understand us. They do not understand what is “too far”.
We have a line,, and they show no signs of stopping. It should sadden anyone with children. And it should fill you with a terrible resolve that WE deal with it when they cross the line, and not leave it to our children.
As do some FReepers in this thread who have resigned themselves to suffer under an oppressive Government.
Thank you from the bottom of my heart, for posting these words of Alexander Solzhenitsyn... You are obviously well read, intelligent, and a patriot.
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers. The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present -- and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
- Eisenhower, 1961