When was the last time you used cash?
You read comments stating there's nothing to do about the oligarchy's plans (via the government), but isn't this just laziness talking?
The same laziness that brought us to this point.
Today we still have the luxury of using cash, so are we?
Indians used non-violent resistance against British rule, are you resisting your government's plans by using cash?
Do you keep your money as a number in a large bank's computer system?
We don't know what hardcore oppression is yet.
Once the government gets its digital grid in place, it won't need to do much to isolate dissidents.
Disconnecting them from the economy (no buy or sell) would leave them destitute.
Lazy minds can't envision the future, which is the past.
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 down-
stairs 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?
After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no
good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you'd be cracking the
skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria sitting out there on the
street with one lonely chauffeur - what if it had been driven off or its tires
spiked? 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 spent ourselves in one unrestrained
outburst in 1917, and then we hurried to submit. We submitted with pleasure!
... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956 (ch 1, p. 13)
You read comments stating there's nothing to do about the oligarchy's plans (via the government), but isn't this just laziness talking?
The same laziness that brought us to this point.
Today we still have the luxury of using cash, so are we?
Indians used non-violent resistance against British rule, are you resisting your government's plans by using cash?
Do you keep your money as a number in a large bank's computer system?
We don't know what hardcore oppression is yet.
Once the government gets its digital grid in place, it won't need to do much to isolate dissidents.
Disconnecting them from the economy (no buy or sell) would leave them destitute.
Lazy minds can't envision the future, which is the past.
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 down-
stairs 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?
After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no
good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you'd be cracking the
skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria sitting out there on the
street with one lonely chauffeur - what if it had been driven off or its tires
spiked? 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 spent ourselves in one unrestrained
outburst in 1917, and then we hurried to submit. We submitted with pleasure!
... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956 (ch 1, p. 13)
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