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PierzStyx

When They Come For Your Guns . . . You Will Turn Them Over

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[QUOTE=Pericles;4564836]I think that some are missing the point. Your visitors are going to leave with either (A) the number and type of guns they seek (B) you (C) both (A) and (B).

And those who, like you and me, dear reader, go there to die, must get there solely and compulsorily via arrest.

Arrest! Need it be said that it is a breaking point in your life, a bolt of lightning which has scored a direct hit on you? That it is an unassimilable spiritual earthquake not every person can cope with, as a result of which people often slip into insanity?

The Universe has as many different centers as there are living beings in it. Each of us is a center of the Universe, and that Universe is shattered when they hiss at you: [I]"You are under arrest."[/I]

If you are arrested, can anything else remain unshattered by this cataclysm?

But the darkened mind is incapable of embracing these displacements in our universe, and both the most sophisticated and the veriest simpleton among us, drawing on all life's experience, can gasp out only: "Me? What for?"

The majority sit quietly and dare to hope. Since you aren't guilty, then how can they arrest you? [I]It's a mistake![/I] They are already dragging you along by the collar, and you still keep on exclaiming to yourself: "It's a mistake! [I]They'll set things straight and let me out![/I]" Others are being arrested en masse, and that's a bothersome fact, but in those other cases there is always some dark area: "Maybe [I]he[/I] was guilty . . . ?" But as for you, you are obviously innocent! You still believe that the [I]Organs[/I] are humanly logical institutions: they will set things straight and let you out.

Why, then, should you run away? And how can you resist right then? After all, you'll only make your situation worse; you'll make it more difficult for them to sort out the mistake. And it isn't just that you don't put up any resistance; you even walk down the stairs on tiptoe, as you were ordered to do, so your neighbors won't hear.

At what exact point, then, should one resist? When one's belt is taken away? When one is ordered to face into a corner? When one crosses the threshold of one's home? An arrest consists of a series of incidental irrelevancies, of a multitude of things that do not matter, and there seems to be no point in arguing about any one of them individually — especially at a time when the thoughts of the person arrested are wrapped tightly about the big question: "What for?" — and yet all these incidental irrelevancies taken together implacably constitute the arrest.

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.





“I dedicate this to all those who did not live to tell it. And may they please forgive me for not having seen it all nor remembered it all, for not having divined all of it - from The Gulag Archipelago”
― [URL="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/10420.Aleksandr_I_Solzhenitsyn"]Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn[/URL][/QUOTE]
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Comments

  1. GARNET's Avatar
    what guns?? I don't have no stinking guns =)) actually i really really don't but im thinking about it =)
  2. GARNET's Avatar
    and.. living in the country with out buildings and such... i am wondering about a hidden safe room.. a few spiders wouldn't bother me lol