“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
Thank you!! That is intense and telling! I think we all need to memorize that and share it with friends and family. I'm saving the quote for future reference.
We can learn a lot from the Russian experience. There was an excellent article in Pravda the other day urging Americans not to abandon the Second Amendment. It gave as an example the experience of Moscow during the Revolution. There were a considerable number of retired and armed military in the city, and the Communists promised they would be sparred if they did not fight. They stayed on the sidelines and after the fighting was over they were systematically liquidated.