dChan - Q Origins Project Archive

“At what point, then, should one resist? When one's belt is taken away? When one is ordered to face into a corner? When one crosses the threshold of one's home? An arrest consists of a series of incidental irrelevancies, of a multitude of things that do not matter, and there seems no point in arguing about one of them individually…and yet all these incidental irrelevancies taken together implacably constitute the arrest. ”

“A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its civic courage . . . . Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elite, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society.”

― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

“How do people get to this clandestine Archipelago? Hour by hour planes fly there, ships steer their course there, and trains thunder off to it–but all with nary a mark on them to tell of their destination. And at ticket windows or at travel bureaus for Soviet or foreign tourists the employees would be astounded if you were to ask for a ticket to go there. They know nothing and they've never heard of the Archipelago as a whole or any one of its innumerable islands.

Those who go to the Archipelago to administer it get there via the training schools of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

Those who go there to be guards are conscripted via the military conscription centers.

And those who, like you and me, dear reader, go there to die, must get there solely and compulsorily via arrest.

Arrest! Need it be said that it is a breaking point in your life, a bolt of lightning which has scored a direct hit on you? That it is an unassimilable spiritual earthquake not every person can cope with, as a result of which people often slip into insanity?

The Universe has as many different centers as there are living beings in it. Each of us is a center of the Universe, and that Universe is shattered when they hiss at you: "You are under arrest."

If you are arrested, can anything else remain unshattered by this cataclysm?

But the darkened mind is incapable of embracing these displacements in our universe, and both the most sophisticated and the veriest simpleton among us, drawing on all life's experience,

can gasp out only: "Me? What for?"

And this is a question which, though repeated millions and

millions of times before, has yet to receive an answer.

Arrest is an instantaneous, shattering thrust, expulsion, somersault from one state into another.

We have been happily borne—or perhaps have unhappily

dragged our weary way—down the long and crooked streets of

our lives, past all kinds of walls and fences made of rotting wood,

rammed earth, brick, concrete, iron railings. We have never given

a thought to what lies behind them. We have never tried to penetrate them with our vision or our understanding. But there is

where the Gulag country begins, right next to us, two yards away

from us. In addition, we have failed to notice an enormous number of closely fitted, well-disguised doors and gates in these

fences. All those gates were prepared for us, every last one! And

all of a sudden the fateful gate swings quickly open, and four

white male hands, unaccustomed to physical labor but nonetheless strong and tenacious, grab us by the leg, arm, collar, cap,

ear, and drag us in like a sack, and the gate behind us, the gate to

our past life, is slammed shut once and for all.

That's all there is to it! You are arrested!

And you'll find nothing better to respond with than a lamblike

bleat: "Me? What for?"

That's what arrest is: it's a blinding flash and a blow which

shifts the present instantly into the past and the impossible into

omnipotent actuality.

That's all. And neither for the first hour nor for the first day

will you be able to grasp anything else.”

― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation V-VII