“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 goodbye 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 in 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 . . .”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
One of my favorite quotes by this great Russian and great human being. The final answer to those dolts who babble on about guns in the hands of the people being “useless” against the state. If the Obama’s and Bush’s ever try to implement their real plans they will be stopped in their tracks. Their henchmen will be shot down in the street and, sadly, the families of those men will suffer the same fate. It will not take too many such events for the machinery of oppression to grind to a halt. Believe me. I know. I have lived in places where Communist terrorists used just such tactics and they worked only too well. This time it will be decent patriots who are forced to use them.
“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 goodbye to his family?”
Or if they had wondered if their own families would still be alive when they returned.