Here is your answer from the grave:
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What wouldthings have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at nightto make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and hadto say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as forexample in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city,people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling in terror at everybang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but hadunderstood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in thedownstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers,or whatever else was at hand? [...] The Organs would very quickly havesuffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all ofStalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!” The Gulag Archipelago, A. Solzhenitsyn. Chapter 1 “Arrest”, fn. 5
Thanks for that reminder, Mick. I wonder if The Gulag Archipelago has been banned in schools yet?
Good citation, Mick. Applicable and concise.
Still, I take more strength from numbers. If somebody popped one of the secret police (or Civilian National Security Force ... a rose by any other name ...) then a dozen more will swarm the place. But if there is a crowd of 50 armed citizens saying “no” then the answer is no.
In a related note ... if a dozen guys carrying machine guns and wearing identical clothes, helmets, boots, flak vests, etc., surround your house and kick in the door, how thin is the line between “SWAT team” and “government storm troopers” anyway? Probably just a matter of semantics, I guess. Maybe I just miss Officer O’Malley on the beat and his “community” policing concept.