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henrymakow.com – April 12, 2021

People with nothing to live for; people with no loyalty to their country or their fellow Americans are ready to rat out everyone they know who dares to live a healthy and peaceful life.

by Mike Stone – (henrymakow.com)

One of the most striking things about Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s book “The Gulag Archipelago” is how readily the Russian people turned on each other; ratting out their neighbors and friends to the “authorities” for victimless offences in which no one was harmed.

These tattle-tales gained nothing financially from their actions, yet they did it anyway. They had only one common motivation: a malicious desire to see their neighbors arrested and punished.

Solzhenitsyn writes of a plumber who was ratted out by his next door neighbor, because he didn’t listen to a recitation of letters to Stalin being read over his radio, and a semi-literate stove maker turned in by his neighbors for writing his name on a discarded newspaper. “Arrests rolled through the streets and apartment houses Iike an epidemic.”

The people who were arrested weren’t given a simple fine or a slap-on-the-wrist type of punishment either. The plumber was sentenced to eight years in prison and the stove maker got ten years. Others weren’t so lucky. They were imprisoned for decades, subjected to unspeakable torture, and eventually murdered.

Without their neighbors and “friends” turning them in, many of those people would never have been arrested. What drives a person to notify the police of a family living next door to them, living peacefully and committing no harm, knowing how harshly they will be punished?

 

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