progunner1957
Moderator
Alexander Solzhenitsyn is a man who knows a thing or two about freedom, slavery and tyranny, having spent a number of years in the gulag under the rule of Soviet communism. This passage from his work, The Gulag Archipelago is one in which the regrets of the oppressed are expressed.
It gives rise to this question: If this awful day ever dawns in America, will Americans have the courage to do what those in the camps of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag wished they had done?
What do you think? Would we do it? Are we as a people capable of killing to preserve our freedom - as were our forefathers?
"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 in 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 a half dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?
The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transoprt and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!"
-Alexander Solzhenitsyn ("The Gulag Archipelago")
It gives rise to this question: If this awful day ever dawns in America, will Americans have the courage to do what those in the camps of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag wished they had done?
What do you think? Would we do it? Are we as a people capable of killing to preserve our freedom - as were our forefathers?
"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 in 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 a half dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?
The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transoprt and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!"
-Alexander Solzhenitsyn ("The Gulag Archipelago")
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