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I do not advocate violence, but I do often think back to this quote: "And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every
by tastyface 11mo ago
I do not advocate violence, but I do often think back to this quote:
"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."
--Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago
- galangalalgol 11mo agoIf I thought violence would fix this I would certainly advocate for it, I am not a pacifist, or anything approaching one. But all the historical examples I have looked at indicate that a domestic authoritarian takeover in a polarized society cannot be violently overthrown without the overthrowers becoming roughly as autocratic if not more so. Trump is not that popular by the standard pf authoritarian takeovers. General strikes and mass nonviolent protests worked better in these situations. Though the number of times it worked is disturbingly low.