To die on your feet or on your knees

Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, from The Gulag Archipelago (Volume I):

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! 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.

An important point: populations ultimately wind up, wittingly or otherwise, aiding and abetting their own enslavement, through ignorance, moral fatigue and sheer lethargy. In contemporary America, it seems obvious that there is no political equilibrium - the normals not only do not cancel out the destroyers, but are losing ground, perhaps more from ignorance in how to proceed than anything else. We are increasingly cut off from the dissemination of truth due to the deep state/uni-party collective and its media shills, so much so that those who vigilantly defend truth, transparency, fairness and plain sanity are quickly isolated as extremists. Agents of law enforcement are now seen to be agents of illegal (but unpunished) repression and intimidation. The most flagrantly guilty go free as innocents are entrapped, rounded up and imprisoned. The sword of justice has become a sword of conquest. And all of this is happening on the watch of an ice-cream-eating, brain-damaged buffoon. Yes, of course he is a puppet, but even a puppet should provide at least a thin veneer of authority. The fact that Biden is the front for the gravediggers of freedom merely adds insult to injury. They think that little of us.

As one of my commenters once said, what a stupid time to be alive. And an ugly time, too.

Update  More in a similar vein from Michael Walsh.