Here is a little bit of history that I think, hope, and pray Americans will learn from if and when the time ever comes.
The citizens of St. Petersburg cowered behind their doors when the black vans pulled up at their apartment houses night after night to arrest their neighbours. If only the decent Russians had fought back, Solzhenitsyn says, if only they had ambushed some of these secret police thugs in the hallways of their apartments with knives and pickaxes and hammers, if only they had spiked the tires of the police vans while the thugs were in the apartments dragging out their victims, they could easily have overwhelmed Yagoda's forces and forced an end to the mass arrests. But they didn't fight back, and the arrests and liquidations continued. And so, Solzhenitsyn concludes, because of their cowardice and their selfishness the Russians deserved what the communists did to them.
