Four Lessons Americans Ignore from Russian Survivors

We humans have a strange capacity to believe only what we see right before our own eyes, and only if it fits our belief systems. This may be the only way to explain why so many Americans ignore, dismiss and/or refuse to listen to the lessons learned from Russians who survived life under the oppressive Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Having lived under the socialist police state before escaping or fleeing to America or to other Western countries, they can see America descending into the same type of totalitarian police state with far more clarity than most Americans can. They understand how quickly and easily the freedom we take for granted may disappear. The First, Second, Fourth, Fifth and Tenth Amendments to the Constitution, for example, have been gradually marginalized, not to mention key tenets of the Constitution itself. Given this context, here are four lessons from Russian survivors that I've found noteworthy:

Lesson One: The people have strength in numbers. Resistance is not futile per this excerpt from Nobel Prize winner Aleksandr L Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, 1973:

"During an arrest, you think since you are not guilty, how can they arrest you? Why should you run away? And how can you resist right then? After all, you’ll only make your situation worse; you will make it more difficult for them to sort out the mistake.

"They won't believe it until they feel a military boot on their necks." Yuri Bezmenov

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 goodbye 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! We did not love freedom enough. Every man always has handy a dozen glib little reasons why he is right not to sacrifice himself."

Get the book here, if you dare.

Lesson Two: Turn off the TV. Don't be a useful idiot per Yuri Bezmenov, high-ranking KGB propaganda agent, in this excerpt from video interview, 1985:

"...[KGB goal is] to change the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that despite the abundance of information no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interest of defending themselves, their community and their country. It's a great brainwashing process...exposure to true, factual information does not matter anymore...When the Marxist-Leninists come to power, these professors, civil rights activists and other leftists will become disillusioned [at the harsh implementation] and will become dissidents. They will be lined up against a wall and shot. They will not believe it until they feel a military boot on their necks."

See complete interview here at RPU since Google has just removed it after millions of views.

Lesson Three: Most of human history has been lived under rule by brute force. The USA was intended to be different but has gradually become more and more brutish. Don't sit idly by while our freedoms are whittled away, per this quote by Ayn Rand from We the Living, 1936:
"We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force."

Get the book here. 
 
Lesson Four: Our natural right to self-defense was included in the Bill of Rights primarily for the purpose of defense against a tyrannical government. (They disarm you with a smile.) Mass murder by the millions has happened all over the world for centuries and there's no reason it cannot happen in America. Consider that David Rockefeller idolizes Chairman Mao for murdering millions upon millions of people - he simply thought it a necessary task to implement the Communist plan. Obama mentor Bill Ayres expects to kill 25 million Americans if they resist the Communist takeover of the country. In this excerpt from the Russian newspaper Pravda, Stanislav Mishin warns, "Americans never give up your guns":

"One of the first things they (Reds) did was to disarm the population. From that point, mass repression, mass arrests, mass deportations, mass murder, mass starvation were all a safe game for the powers that were...Do not be fooled by a belief that progressives, leftists hate guns. Oh, no, they do not. What they hate is guns in the hands of those who are not marching in lock step of their ideology. They hate guns in the hands of those who think for themselves and do not obey without question."

See complete editorial here

When we're getting warned, scolded and reminded about the value of freedom from the Russian state newspaper Pravda then it's clear we've left the likes of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine far behind and begun the descent into the very police state America was founded to banish forever. As Yuri Bezmenov stated, if the United States becomes just another socialist, totalitarian state then there won't be any place left for anyone to flee.




Follow @PaulEntin