When Debat Fails Use Totalarianism

"Plotted to kill him (Paul).

Enemies of the Gospel cannot defeat it by free and open debate, so they often resort to force, falsehood, murder, and governmental suppression."

- ESV Study Bible

Study note on Acts 19:23

No Appeal But To Satan

"The OSO enjoyed another important advantage in that its penalty could not be appealed. There was nowhere to appeal to. There was no appeals jurisdiction above it, and no jurisdiction beneath it. It was subordinate only to the Minister of Internal Affairs, to Stalin, and to Satan."

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago. Vol. 1. 

Where Ever There Is Sun, We Will Go

"A human being is weak, weak. In the end, that spring, even the most stubborn of us wanted forgiveness and we're ready to give up a lot for just a little bit more life. An anecdote was current among us: "What is your last word, accused?" I beg you to send me where wherever you please, just as long as it is under the Soviet government and the Sun is there! No one was threatening to deprive us of the Soviet government, of course: just the sun. No one wanted to be sent beyond the Arctic Circle, to scurvy and malnutrition."

- Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago. 

Laws Today To Hang You In Ten Years

"On this basis no single African leader has any assurance that we will not, ten years from now, promulgate a law in accordance with which we will put him on trial for what he does today. Yes. The Chinese, in fact, will promulgate precisely such laws just give them the chance to reach out that far."

- Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago. VOL 1. 

Silencing What Was Seen

"At no time have governments been moralists. They never imprisoned people and executed them for having done something. They imprisoned people and executed them to keep them from doing something.....They improsoned all those POW's, of course, not for treason to the Motherland.... They imprisoned all of them to keep them from telling their fellow villagers about Europe. What the eye doesn't see, the heart does not grieve for."

- Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago. 

Enforced Ignorance

" But what depths of enforced ignorance were achieved by the monstrous lies of the state. Even the most broad-minded of us can embrace only that part of the truth into which our own snout has blundered."

- Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago.  Vol 1, pg 242. 

Rule Of Law Means I Die?

"If I should object to force I will be arrested. If I object to arrest I will be clubbed. If I defend myself against clubbing I will be shot. These procedures are known as The Rule of Law."

Edward Abbey, The Fool's Progress: An Honest Novel

The Opiate Of Intellectuals

"Clinton even used the 1996 State of the Union to proclaim that "the era of big government is over." 

It is worth mentioning that one important element of society never fully embraced the new economic consensus. Much of the western academia remain fixated on communism. Indeed, as the Berlin Wall fell, it became evident that Communists True Believers persisted only on its western side. In the educational establishment, Marxism lingered as the opiate of the intellectuals."

- Stephen Harper. Right Here Right Now. 

Chivalry Of A Bygone Era?

"Early on he (Moltke) tried to convince the Nazis to abide by the Geneva Convention, but Keitel dismissed it as a “notion of chivalry of a bygone era.""

(Field Marshal Helmuth Graf von Moltke, legendary military genius and Christian who plotted with Bonhoeffer for Hitler's Assination)

- Eric Metaxas. Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy.

Orgy Of Executions

"As a result of such things, many more in the army leadership were driven to the conspiracy. At one point officers came to Field Marshal Bock and begged him with tears in their eyes to stop “the orgy of executions” in Borisov. But even Bock was powerless. When he demanded that the SS commander in charge of the massacres be brought to him, the civilian commissioner, Wilhelm Kube, laughed defiantly. Hitler had given the SS free rein, and even a field marshal could do nothing about it. "

It was during this time that Count Peter Yorck von Wartenburg and his cousin von Stauffenberg overcame their fundamental feelings against conspiracy. Both were devoutly Christian and had been raised in the caste of German military aristocracy. What they witnessed was a reversal and mockery of every value they held dear. Stauffenberg would take the lead in the famous July 20, 1944, attempt to kill Hitler, as we shall soon see.

- Eric Metaxas. Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy. 

What Witnesses Have Seen

"Not all the witnesses died. And soon no one will call Stalin's government anything but a government of insanity and treason."

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago. VOL 1. 

Starved In Prison To Avoid The Good Life

"... among the pows of many nationalities only the Soviets lived like this and died like this. None were worse off than the Soviets. Even the Poles, even the Yugoslavs, existed in far more tolerable conditions; and as for the English and the Norwegians, they were inundated by the International Red Cross with parcels from home. They didn't even bother to line up for the German rations. Wherever there were Allied pows camps next door, their prisoners, out of kindness, threw our men handouts over the fence, and our prisoners jumped on these gifts like a pack of dogs on a bone. 

The Russians were carrying the whole war on their shoulders and this was the Russian lot. Why? Gradually, explanations came in from here and there: it turned out that the U.S.S.R. did not recognize as binding Russia's signature to the Hague Convention on war prisoners. That meant that the U.S.S.R. accepted no obligation at all in the treatment of war prisoners and took no steps for the protection of its own soldiers who had been captured...

We did not recognize that 1907 convention until 1955. Incidentally, in his diary for 1915, Melgunov  reports rumors that Russia would not let aid go through to its prisoners in Germany and that their living conditions were worse than those of all other Allied prisoners -  simply in order to prevent rumors about the good life of war prisons inducing our soldiers to surrender willingly. There was some sort of continuity of ideas here."

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago. VOL. 1.

Salut Hitler's Sheep

"Meanwhile, Oster and Dohnanyi continued their work under the protection of Admiral Canaris. If ever anyone led a double life, Canaris did. He took morning horseback rides in Berlin’s Tiergarten with Heydrich, the piscine ghoul, and yet was at this very time using his power to undermine Heydrich and the Nazis at every turn. The gangsterism of Hitler sickened him. On a trip to Spain, while riding through the countryside in his open car, he stood and gave the Hitler salute to every herd of sheep he passed. “You never know,” he said, “whether one of the party bigwigs might be in the crowd.”"

- Eric Metaxas. Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy. 

How Many Shot?

"They began to Converse in a whisper, and we tried not to listen. But it was quite impossible not to overhear the newcomers whisper. It was so loud, so disquieting, so tense, and so close to a sub, that we realized it was no ordinary grief that had entered our cell. The newcomer was asking whether many were shot."

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago. VOL 1.

Needing Old Men With Histories Stories

"The old fellow withthe lively eyebrows - and at sixty-three he in no way bore himself like an old man - was Abatoky Ilyich Fastenko. He was a big asset to our Lubyanka cell - both as a keeper of the old Russian prison traditions and as a living history of Russian revolutions. Thanks to all that he remembered, he somehow managed to put in perspective everything that had taken place in the past and everything that was taking place in the present. Such people are valuable not only in a Cell. We badly need them in our society as a whole. 

Right there in our cell we read Fastenko's name in a book about the 1905 Revolution. He had been a Social Democrat for such a long, long time that in the end, it seemed, he had ceased to be one."

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago. VOL 1.

War And Dirty Church Decisions

"Even if Bonhoeffer could have explained that he was in fact working against Hitler, many in the Confessing Church would still have been confused, and others would have been outraged. For a pastor to be involved in a plot whose linchpin was the assassination of the head of state during a time of war, when brothers and sons and fathers were giving their lives for their country, was unthinkable. Bonhoeffer had come to a place where he was in many ways very much alone."

- Eric Metaxas. Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy 

Intended Church Death

"In January 1941 Bonhoeffer traveled to Munich to see Justus Perels, the head lawyer for the Confessing Church. Perels was working hard to lobby the Reich government on its treatment of Confessing Church pastors; so many of them were being drafted and sent into battle that the Confessing Church was being decimated. This was intentional on the part of the Nazis."

- Eric Metaxas. Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy. 

When Good People Run

"But weren't there also some who rose above the party - who were good in a general, human sense?
Broadly speaking, they should not have been there. The Organs avoided employing such people, eliminating them at the recruitment stage. And such people played their hand shrewdly so as to get out of it. Whoever got in by mistake either adjusted to the milieu or else was thrown out, or eased out, or even fell across the rails himself. Still were there no good people left there?"
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago.

I Smiled And It Made Them Angry

" ... the most intense patriotism always flourishes in the rear. ...

How was I to answer them? I was forbidden to order a single word, and I would have had to explain my entire life to each and every one of them. What could I do to make them understand that I was not a spy, a saboteur? That I was their friend? That it was because of them that I was here? I smiled. Looking up at them, I smiled at them from a column of prisoners under escort! But my bared teeth seemed to them the worst kind of mockery, and they shook their fists and bellowed insults at me even more violently than before.

I smiled in pride that I had been arrested not for stealing, nor treason, nor desertion, but because I had discover through my power of reasoning the evil secrets of Stalin. I smiled at the thought that I wanted, and might still be able, to affect some small remedies and changes in our Russian way of life."

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago. VOL 1.

You Are Better Than Stalin As a Marxist

"..... it's all socially constructed, which is really convenient if what to be the author of an entirely social constructed Utopia that you can run. And, then, when the Marxists say, "Well, that wasn't real Marxism", what it really means, and I thought about this for a long time, it's the most arrogant possible statement anyone could ever make. It means, "If I would have been in Stalins position, I would have ushered in the damn utopia instead of the genocidal massacres. Because, I understand the doctrine of Marxism and everything about me is good."

 Well, think again sunshine! You don't undetstand it. You don't undstand it, and you are not that good. 

And, if the power was in your hands, assuming you had the competence, which you don't, you wouldn't have done any better, and even if you had, there would have been someone else waiting right behind you to shoot you the first time you actually tried to do anything good. And that is what happened to all the old guard who ran the damn Revolution.  Stalin rounded them all up and shot them, along with their families and millions of other people. 

So, even if you do happen to be that Avatar of motal purity that you claim implicitly, the probability that you'd act out your goodness in relationshio to those possessed by your ideology is zero."

- Jordan Peterson. But That Wasn't Real Communism, Socialism, or Marxism".  Lecture.  Available on YouTube.