We will not go to the camps.

We will not go to the camps.

We will not comply.

We will not be silent.

When have the book burners ever been the good guys?

When have the book burners who coerce people into medical experiments …. without informed consent …. who make a minority wear an indication of their unworthiness …. who put people in camps …. ever been the good guys?

If you ever wondered what you would do if your country started down the path towards Nazism …. now you know.

“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 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! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”

― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn , The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

― Martin Niemöller (A prominent Lutheran pastor who was an outspoken public foe of Adolf Hitler and who spent the last seven years of Nazi rule in concentration camps.)

In the end, it’s the things you didn’t do you’ll regret most.

About the Author

>