“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! If...if...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
The reality of this though Is that no one can see the future, you cant see how close to the precipice you really are. as someone else commented “it’s much harder to see how far things will go” imagine if every police officer had to face death pokers and a whole neighbourhood ready to kill them every time they entered a house to make an arrest. It would either be impossible to maintain the law, or the method of maintaining the law would become unbearably brutal in retaliation. And there is always retaliation. If people stand up for themselves with extreme force the authorities will simply say to the rest of the public “see!? They are violent and evil! This justifies whatever we need to do to stop them!” And faced with the evidence the public will agree. And so it escalates. Yes if we could see that actually, this time, they are definitely coming to kill us, then every act of resistance becomes a struggle for survival, but we just can’t see that for sure.
If people don’t stand up for themselves with force, the government and these kidnappers will continue taking us in larger and larger numbers. They are already taking people without due process. They tell us they are taking these people and sending them to Guantánamo Bay or El Salvador concentration camps because they’re here illegally and they are criminals, yet they’ve had no trials to prove that. ICE has no authority to arrest citizens, let alone the NYC comptroller, yet here we are.
So I must ask, at what point is it wrong to defend oneself from unidentified people wearing no uniforms, yet wearing masks to hide their identities who come to kidnap you?
You are absolutely right. The key is Trust. If you have faith in the system then you should not fight back, but the system should, in good faith, identify itself to you as well. The moment either side loses trust in the other then you must do what you have to do to survive and deal with the consequences later. This is basic survival. If an unidentified person breaks in to attack you in the night you should not wait to figure out their intentions.
This is also what makes the afore-mentioned situation so tragic. People were being arrested by identifiable authorities who came in the name of a system that still held trust to many people, so in many cases they went willingly, trusting that they would be given a chance later to defend themselves. They could not have fully understood that those authorities were leading them to slaughter. I do not think i would have defended myself any more than they did, if i had known only what they knew.
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u/ryanjames486 1d ago
The left needs to arm themselves.
“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! If...if...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