"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") I have this book but have not gotten around to reading it yet.
Volume 1 should be required reading to graduate from high school. Volume 1 Volume 2 Volume 3 (I've taken a break to read some American history before starting this volume.)
Gotta love these kinds of threads! It makes for a good justification for the right to bear arms, one which I agree with, but simply owning the guns doesn't mean that much against the kind of threat described in the OP. That is, unless one is networked with other like-minded gun owners who are able to communicate intel and action plans with eachother ("alarm") and who are willing and able to gather together ("muster") if need be. https://www.georgiapacking.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=42275
That would be correct, but I've read the quote in the OP and commented on that. Is this thread about the quote, or is it a discussion of the whole book?
You ought to pick up some novels by Sven Hassel: http://www.svenhassel.info/ I saw the Stasi Museum in Leipzig - astounding stuff. A nail head that stuck out ordinarily one that you would not really pay attention to, was actually a button that when pressed opened up a sound proof prison in the men's bathroom. http://www.leipzig.de/int/en/tourist/st ... 2414.shtml sound proof prison : Old Commie Building in Former East Berlin