Posted on 07/09/2015 4:52:40 AM PDT by marshmallow
“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 Solzhenitsyn
“Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.” Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Philosophy, is kind to tyrants and their victims.
bump
“How is that people who have been crushed by the sheer weight of slavery and cast to the bottom of the pit can nevertheless find the strength to rise up and free themselves, first in spirit and then in body; while those who soar unhampered over the peaks of freedom suddenly lose the taste for freedom, lose the will to defend it, and, hopelessly confused and lost, almost begin to crave slavery”. Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
“...But when you’ve robbed a man of everything, he’s no longer in your power.”...”
Or as Bob Dylan put it “When you ain’t got nothin’, you got nothin’ to lose”.
Solzhenitsyn would have been a FReeper. Also, Reagan was right when he named the Soviet Union the Evil Empire, but that’s still to narrow a definition. Just as America is more an idea than a physical place, the Soviet Union is a concept in which the elites use whatever political expediency to accrue to themselves power and the wealth that comes with it. It’s a kakocracy.
Socialism to Communism - Subversion Explained by Yuri Bezminov
http://youtu.be/W2RNXxBX-WM
later
Solzhenitsyn ping.
I am not sure that is what happened in the case of the Russian people. Two years ago I would pass this statement up as a reasonable idealization of the events of 1990's in Russia. But the aggression in Ukraine and rise of the popular neo-Soviet, even Stalinist sentiment showed that the Russian nation has shrunk to insignificance in Russia, and the new Soviet man is as in charge now as he was since the Bolshevik revolution; that man sees no value in freedom and sees his historical duty in destroying the freedom of others.
Putin and putinism will be destroyed; but the potential of what remains of Russia to "rise up and free itself", I think, has been spent.
He is what men are made of.
“Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”
Amen.
Live not by lies!
And the chapter on how arrests were done, and the most common verbal response from those they informed were under arrest:
"Me? What for?"
As he said...what for, indeed?
Good idea.. I somehow get the impression there will be lots of time for reading, one of my favorite hobbies. I will get both of his books for my collection.
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