“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, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956
Thanks for posting from the Gulag. We take freedom for granted. We have been warned by the Soviet experience of 70 years and 200+ years before by Jefferson, Madison and Adams.
Consider the new 100 dollar bills. In a nanosecond without Congress (not that they even matter any more), the 'new currency' becomes by fiat the only currency, the only legal tender, forcing the bad guys - black marketeers and drug dealers - to leave billions on the table, but also attacks any citizen who kept cash for any conceivable emergency. In the ensuing chaos, banks won't be able to offer 'conversion' without serious questions by them and their Treasury, Fed and IRS masters. No need for ATMs when you must use a government monitored credit card for all your needs and which will track the source of all you deposit.