Excuse me for my pessimism but a short while ago I was reading and digging deep about the infamous Gulag-system in the Soviet Union roughly from 1920-1960. And

Excuse me for my pessimism but a short while ago I was reading and digging deep about the infamous Gulag-system in the Soviet Union roughly from 1920-1960. And after endless unimaginable suffering, excess of violence which just roamed free in those "zones" spanning over decades after it fizzled out when Stalin finally died - some little insight about human nature dawned upon me after striding through untold personal accounts: Those things begin and also end. So, yeah it roughly began in 2001 with the attack on civil liberties (Patriot-Act) and it will continue as there is no real opposition to it, the vast majority simply don't care, and after 30-40 years, one or two generations it will end. [0]The prospect of arrest and trial weighed heavy even on the highest-ranking Party member. Following their arrest, aware of the fate that awaited them, many immediately asked to sign their ‘confession’. Others, unable to comprehend what was happening, remained loyal to the Party, believing that it would eventually realise its mistake and reinstate them. ‘They were all tired men. The higher you got in the hierarchy, the more tired they were. I have nowhere seen such exhausted men as among the higher strata of Soviet politicians, among the Old Bolshevik guard. It was not only the effect of overwork, nervous strain and apprehension. It was the past that was telling on them, the years of conspiracy, prison and exile; the years of the famine and the Civil War; and sticking to the rules of a game that demanded that at every moment a man’s whole life should be at stake. They were indeed ‘dead men on furlough’, as Lenin had called them. Nothing could frighten them any more, nothing surprise them. They had given all they had. History had squeezed them out to the last drop, had burnt them out to the last spiritual calorie; yet they were still glowing in cold devotion, like phosphorescent corpses.’ Arthur Koestler, Arrow in the Blue, 1945, (quoted by: Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment, 1990). [0]https://archive.org/details/danzig-baldaev-drawings-from-the-gulag-2005/ https://archive.org/details/danzig-baldaev-drawings-from-the...