"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
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Feel free to reply to any comment by clicking the "Reply" button.The case is that most people are good at heart and do not wish to cause others harm. The situation at the time was unbelievable. The situation today is unbelievable. That the government of the most powerful nation in the world has no qualms about lying to and gaslighting its citizens is hardly credible.
If the people of Russia had risen up and beat back Stalin the cry would have been that there was no real threat and they were wrong to have stopped the movement that could have brought them, perhaps not riches but equality. The era of Kings and Czars had to end, according to Marx, and WWl relegated them to symbolic status and introduced democracy. Now, it is the nation state that must disappear in the attempt to bring about that pale and tepid objective of equality that can never be realized. The central planner will always cut himself a bigger take to ensure his comfort.
The USSR lasted 80 years before it collapsed and socialism will always collapse. It is nothing more than a Ponzi scheme and Maragret Thatcher correctly summed up the fact that, "Socialism works until it runs out of other people's money."
FrankZeleniuk
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July 8, 2021
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