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Jim's Quote of the Day:
"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 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!" - Alexander Solzhenitsyn,
The Gulag Archipelago (Chapter 1, "Arrest")