"And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every security operative, when he

[Celerity]

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?

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.”

― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

[dalton99a]

1. We Didn't Love Freedom Enough and Even More, We Had No Awareness of the Real Situation

[Celerity]

3. +100000

[Bozvotros]

2. Sinclair Lewis in 1935 had something to say about this regime

"The Senator was vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his "ideas" almost idiotic, while his celebrated piety was that of a traveling salesman for church furniture, and his yet more celebrated humor the sly cynicism of a country store.
Certainly there was nothing exhilarating in the actual words of his speeches, nor anything convincing in his philosophy. His political platforms were only wings of a windmill.

[Escurumbele]

10. "It Can't Happen Here", Sinclair Lewis- I recommend this book to everyone, it should be mandatory reading in High School

There is also a book "It Can Happen Here: White Power and the Rising Threat of Genocide in the US".

Not believing that it CAN happen here is nothing more than people keeping their guards down, which is a mistake.

A friend from Venezuela was with his wife at a Venezuelan beach. This was before Hugo Chavez became president, it was during his campaign.

They met two Cuban women who lived in Miami but were vacationing in Venezuela, they started talking, and Hugo Chavez became a topic. The Cuban women told my cousin and his wife that Chavez was a Fidel Castro disguised as something else, and that Venezuelans were drinking the Kool-Aid on the guy, and if Chavez became president Venezuela would fall under a communist/dictatorship regime.

What was my cousin's response? "It Can't Happen Here", but it did.

I am very concerned that Democrats and the military have their guards down, the danger being that this wannabe-regime, if they gain more power, will begin replacing the brass at the military with loyal incompetents to get a hold of the military power, it happens in every country where a wannabe-dictator is in the process of becoming a dictator, which by all means is what the USA is living today. If these people do not start doing things to curtail the atrocities that are being committed as we speak, things are going to get out of everyone's hands and "It Will Happen Here" as well.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

4. This passage has been a favourite posting of reich wing gun nuts for years. . . . . nt

[SunSeeker]

5. Yes, the right wingers are now the government they feared. nt

[Oneironaut]

6. They've always wanted to be that way, tbh.

The dream was to be the oppressors. Trump is the personification of the bully they always wanted to be, and, he gave them permission.

[yardwork]

7. THIS.

[Escurumbele]

11. trump is a decoy, he is the perfect "Monkey who can use a pen." but the people behind what is happening are the real

danger, the republicans who have sold their souls.

Yes, trump is good at bulling, but he is not a man with ideas, he is not one who understands how government works, he is the "look behind you, a squirrel!" who will run out his usefulness soon if Democrats let this go too far, but when he does run out of his usefulness he will be thrown to the side like an old piece of cloth, but it may be too late for the USA, and the World.

Its amazing how much damage, how much chaos can be done by an useful idiot.

[erronis]

12. So well said.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

8. Precisely and accurately stated. . . . . nt

[Laurelin]

9. Thanks for posting this

I read the Gulag Archipelago when I was 15, a long long time ago. This part was shocking enough at that age that I never forgot it, and lately somehow it's been on my mind a lot, but I didn't remember it exactly. (I never heard that the right wing nuts liked it. Now it's my turn to think about it.) If any of Putin's thugs make it to my house I'll forget all about pacifism and remember this passage.

[ancianita]

13. Is there a link for this? The feds are blackbagging NM citizens and just disappeared 48 of them.

https://sourcenm.com/2025/03/17/ice-has-disappeared-48-new-mexico-residents-attorneys-say/

[Celerity]

14. here

https://archive.org/details/TheGulagArchipelago-Threevolumes/The-Gulag-Archipelago__vol1__I-II__Solzhenitsyn/

Unabridged original pdf scans - volume 1 (I-II) 671 pages; volume 2 (III-IV) 717 pages; volume 3 (V-VII) 579 pages.

The Gulag Archipelago is Solzhenitsyn's masterwork, a vast canvas of camps, prisons, transit centres and secret police, of informers and spies and interrogators and also of heroism, a Stalinist anti-world at the heart of the Soviet Union where the key to survival lay not in hope but in despair. The work is based on the testimony of some two hundred survivors, and on the recollection of Solzhenitsyn's own eleven years in labour camps and exile. It is both a thoroughly researched document and a feat of literary and imaginative power.

The three-volume book is a narrative relying on eyewitness testimony and primary research material, as well as the author's own experiences as a prisoner in a gulag labor camp. Written between 1958 and 1968, it was published in the West in 1973, thereafter circulating in samizdat (underground publication) form in the Soviet Union until its official publication in 1989.

Structurally, the text is made up of seven sections divided (in most printed editions) into three volumes: parts 1–2, parts 3–4, and parts 5–7. At one level, the Gulag Archipelago traces the history of the system of forced labour camps that existed in the Soviet Union from 1918 to 1956, starting with V.I. Lenin's original decrees shortly after the October Revolution establishing the legal and practical framework for a series of camps where political prisoners and ordinary criminals would be sentenced to forced labour. It describes and discusses the waves of purges, assembling the show trials in context of the development of the greater Gulag system with particular attention to the legal and bureaucratic development.

The legal and historical narrative ends in 1956, the time of Nikita Khrushchev's Secret Speech at the 20th Party Congress of 1956 denouncing Stalin's personality cult, his autocratic power, and the surveillance that pervaded the Stalin era.

[ancianita]

15. Thank you. I can forward this to help those who will use it. Much appreciated.

[Celerity]

16. yw