Solzhenitsyn said,
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!....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 I. Solzhenitsyn , The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956
How much do YOU love freedom?
A former soldier in the Red Army, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn spent 8 years in a Soviet concentration camp after criticizing Joseph Stalin in a letter to a friend. It was Solzhenitsyn who later wrote the Gulag Archipelago which exposed how Stalin’s rule caused millions to vanish and be placed in scattered concentration camps.
If you need more courage to value, live for, and fight for freedom, let me encourage you to read the final chapter (Ch. 20) of Diamonds and Dominators.
To do that, just 1) click here or on the Read tab of this website, 2) scroll down a couple of pages to the book's table of contents, and 3) click on Chapter 20: How to Feel Free in a World of Slavery.
For freedom, Joe
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