i posted this on the history board as well, but i think it will get more "reads" here.

"How we burned in the prison camps later thinking: What would things have been like if every police operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive? If during periods of mass arrests 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 to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever was at hand? The organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt."

--Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Prize winner and author of The Gulag Archipelago, who spent 11 years in Soviet concentration camps.

i highly recommend the book(s) - not exactly "light summer reading", three books in all.

Those who will not fight for their freedom, DON'T DESERVE IT!!

Great quote......we had best all read it and REMEMBER!!!!  By the way Solzhenitsyn was ignored by the US press after he observed that what was going on in the US was looking a lot like what happened in Russia.  

"The Price of Freedom is Eternal Vigilance"
-(Don't remember)

[b]The Gulag Archipelago[/b] was a great read, I had the pleasure of reading most of it in the 9th grade.  That's why communism isn't inherintly evil, but in action it becomes uncontrollable.  "Welcome to Communism.  If you like us, please benefit from our graciousness - if not, off to the Gulag with you!"  Karl Marx and even Vladimir Lenin probably turned over in their respective graves when they saw what Socialism and Communism did to the 'motherland'.

Just think of it this way.  As many socialist programs that the gov't is trying to impose on us, we blindly let them slip by thinking their good - the early 20th century Russian proletariat didn't have smoke to see through (just blunt Czar imposition) and rose up in arms against the threat.  Pretty ball-sy folks, I've always admired the Russians.

Jewbroni~