Pulling No Punches - Christine Anderson: If You Want to Know How 1930s Germany Happened; Just Look at the Last 3 Years

"There's a lot of people that think of themselves, or would like to think of themselves, that they would have been in the resistance back then..!!, well.., take a look what you did in the last 3 years, and you have your answer. Most of the people would not have been in the resistance back then, because they, just went right along.., with everything the government asked them to do." ~ Christine Anderson

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“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

"For several decades political arrests were distinguished in our country, precisely by the fact that people were guilty of nothing, and were therefore unprepared to put up any resistance whatsoever. A person who is not inwardly prepared for the use of violence against him is always weaker than the person committing the violence." ~ Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn , The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956 (Page 14)