Until they get to the point where they start executing us in the streets.
And even, it will still be a small response to start.
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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 Solzhenitsyn
That very quote is kinda what solidified my thought process, and frankly the Soviets didn't even have it as good as we have now to at least explain part of their inaction.
After all, history doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme, and what's one of the most common rhymes of impending totalitarianism?
'The people should have done something when the movement was nothing, but now that it's something they won't. They'll continue to do nothing when that movement now something, is stamping down hard on their throat.'
I get where he's coming from but he's underselling the fear that people have of strength. You turn them back for one night, then what? When they come back with twice the number? When they pick you off one at a time trying to leave to buy bread? Seriously, then what?
Most people are crippled by the phrase "then what?" Because nobody wants to say what happens next: you're going to live a very short and bloody life.
You'd hope that you'd put the fear in the enforcers enough that they wouldn't bother. However, their own pride and their own anger at being bested, humiliated, struck out against can lead to aggravated retaliation. Tit for tat, until either one side gives or both are bloodied beyond recovery.
However, spooking the enforcers isn't a complete impossibility. Effective local organization plus the realization that an assault isn't worth the cost can lead to a favorable outcome for the defenders.
There are effective no-go zones in every Western country, enclaves of the ungovernable, for whom authority doesn't dare tread, except in the most egregious of scenarios. They're always united by a sense of community, and a sense that the greater authority doesn't apply to them.
We very well may be finding more people adhering to that philosophy as it becomes ever clearer how self-serving our representative class has become among the populace.
The point is if everyone did it they wouldn't have twice the number to come back with. The state never has numbers on their side.
Yeah but you need a community that will back you up instead of throw you to the wolves and as you may have noticed everyone is completely atomized in the modern era.
Solzhenitsyn was invited to speak to Harvard and was promptly ignored. In a way, it supports Yockey's and Dougan's idea that the Russians are better heirs to western civilization.
The only people who deserve civilization are those who fight for it.
If every generation had their trial to earn their place among stability, we wouldn't have nearly as many issues as we do.
Entitlement is the sweetest poison anyone can offer.
Solzhenitsyn eventually returned to Russia in his last years, he left America and went home. I don't think western philosophy really appreciates the deep draw and meaning of -Home- people are indelibly attached to it.
So did Andrei Sakharov after many years of exile, he went back to Russia too; he went home.
They both died in Russia. The very place that persecuted them and drove them out /but it was home and their souls belonged there.
True story.
Anyone is a better heir to Western civilization, as the total mess in Western Europe and America cannot be called 'civilization' in any meaningful sense.