How we burned in the prison camps later thinking: What would things have been like if every police operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive? If during periods of mass arrests 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 to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever was at hand? The organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers 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! . . . We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward."
-- Alexander Solzhenitsyn
The first quote hits you hard, as it should. Whose quote is that, if you don't mind me asking?
First quote made me think of a situation during WWII (I think) in which both companies of soldiers, Allied and Axis were on the brink of refusing to fight one another. It was just before Christmas day.
That was WWI, early in the war. Germany was still Christian, and so was Britain.
Its all one quote from Solzhenitsyn.
Neither side had any real idea of why it was at war, and didn’t really want to continue. It took a number of summary court martials and executions to get the war rolling again.
In WWII, ideology had replaced religion in both sides, and that type of thing was no long possible.