Sunday, November 27, 2011

He Did Not Get the Peace Prize ...


... but he was a Nobel Laureate in literature.  He was arrested and imprisoned for comments made in private letters to his friends. 


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 Isayevich Solzhenitsyn 

(Emphasis Added)


2 comments:

  1. Couldn't happen here. Unless, of course, one was eating overly salty chips and then well, they would have it coming to them. Good riddance!

    Had to drive my elderly neighbor an hour to the UVA hospital through the the bad part of town at 2:00 AM Friday/Saturday night. Did I pocket my LCP? Um, no. Gotta make that a habit.

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  2. Open up! Food Police!

    Oh, I forgot. They use No-Knock Ninjas these days, because, of course, you might flush your chips.

    I like most all things Ruger. The LCP looks like a really nice thing to have in one's pocket.

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