So I had no idea, in 1982, what this really meant. But we had a speaker in High School. Our whole school from 7-12 was about 220 kids. So it was not some massive group of kids. We got some incredible experiences that would have been lost in bigger schools.
But we met Alexander Solzhenitsyn who came and spoke at our school. He lived in Vermont. Meeting him didn't mean a ton at the time... he was an assembly speaker. And I listened and it was something that seemed to make sense. But he was a speaker. And we had to go to assembly. So was not something I, as a kid, thought was life-changing. Was a few years before I knew what I had heard and why it mattered so much.
He did not talk about this quote. But years later, when I read it, the planets aligned. So much made sense.
From "The Gulag Archipelago"... which I didn't read until later... but loved "The Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch" a short story/book based on the Gulag tome.
Take this to heart. Read it. Read it 10 times. Share it. Live it. This is from a man who knows what freedoms-lost really means.
"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 goodbye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrest, 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 that 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? After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you’d be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. What about the Black Maria sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur – what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked. The Organs [Soviet state institutions] 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!"
Read the Gulag Archipelago. Understand that some folks have this in mind for America. And that it can be prevented. Simply by adhering to the above quote. They censor that quote on social media. They call that quote fake. That quote is real. It is heartfelt. It will prevent totalitarianism. If the Jewish People in German had recognized this.... If the Chinese had recognized this... if the Cambodians... Cubans... North Koreans... had followed these rules.
Subservience is permitted. It's allowed. By the subservient. If you don't submit, it doesn't happen. There are not enough oppressors to subjugate you if you don't allow yourself to submit. They run out of secret police long before freedom-loving people run out of citizens. Unless you capitulate.
Sirhr
But we met Alexander Solzhenitsyn who came and spoke at our school. He lived in Vermont. Meeting him didn't mean a ton at the time... he was an assembly speaker. And I listened and it was something that seemed to make sense. But he was a speaker. And we had to go to assembly. So was not something I, as a kid, thought was life-changing. Was a few years before I knew what I had heard and why it mattered so much.
He did not talk about this quote. But years later, when I read it, the planets aligned. So much made sense.
From "The Gulag Archipelago"... which I didn't read until later... but loved "The Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch" a short story/book based on the Gulag tome.
Take this to heart. Read it. Read it 10 times. Share it. Live it. This is from a man who knows what freedoms-lost really means.
"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 goodbye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrest, 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 that 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? After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you’d be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. What about the Black Maria sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur – what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked. The Organs [Soviet state institutions] 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!"
Read the Gulag Archipelago. Understand that some folks have this in mind for America. And that it can be prevented. Simply by adhering to the above quote. They censor that quote on social media. They call that quote fake. That quote is real. It is heartfelt. It will prevent totalitarianism. If the Jewish People in German had recognized this.... If the Chinese had recognized this... if the Cambodians... Cubans... North Koreans... had followed these rules.
Subservience is permitted. It's allowed. By the subservient. If you don't submit, it doesn't happen. There are not enough oppressors to subjugate you if you don't allow yourself to submit. They run out of secret police long before freedom-loving people run out of citizens. Unless you capitulate.
Sirhr
