"We submitted with pleasure...We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward." -- Applying Solzhenitsyn's Advice

Pete at WRSA has this. I like it so much I'm reprinting it in its entirety.

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Applying Solzhenitsyn's Advice

Most freedom-minded people are familiar with the following quote from volume 1, page 13, note 5 of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago:

"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? 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!"

But how does one actually prepare for such an unpleasant possibility here in early 21st-century America?

A reader sends the following suggestions, subtitled "Things to Do Inside When the Bossman Tells You It's Too Cold to Work Outside":

1) Put on suitable music for working inside. Don't know about you, but bagpipe music makes me angry. You might want to go there if you want to get motivated.

2) Retrieve the "good" (i.e., preferred by GIs) .30-06 rounds that had been in storage. These are the more common black-tip rounds from WW2, of which tens of millions were made.

3) Check each round for storage degradation by looking for verdigris and other indications of deterioration. Also check each round with a case headspace gauge (available from Dillon and other places). Clean up each round as needed.

4) Put the checked rounds onto M1 clips.

5) Look at the headstamps: you are looking at life in a different era. You are looking at Lake City 1952, 53, etc, plus Salt Lake City from the same vintage. Take a think back to those times and those circumstances, and pull up your balls realizing that what's in your hand is all so corrosive. We don't do that s... anymore, but we can still use that ammo in our Garands and our bolties.

4) Bring the entire process of checking out each round with the case gauge, loading the good-to-go rounds into "inspected" clips, then transferring the en blocs into cardboards and bandoleers to your kitchen counter. No problem for me -- my wife is good with it and more. It's all good spousal talk, and brings things from the cold shop into the warm house.

5) Mark up the bandoleers with a Sharpie as to what's in each one. Four bandoleers make a .30 cal can of good-to-go old-style Garand ammo, from the days when the black tips were preferred to the unavailable and less capable M2 bullet for the Garand.

Today, I test-fired some of that old stuff, since I wouldn't want to post bad advice on resurrecting WW2 black tips. Posting, without testing, would not be fair to either side of the equation.

For our own side: they all went bang.

For the opfor: Do you know about how many other rounds of the good WW2 black-tip ammo are still out there, in good hands? Don't forget either about the millions of rounds of black-tip '06 produced by FN up through at least the Sixties. Word is that those 250-round cans still have that faint ether smell when you open them, which, as you know, is a hallmark of well-preserved, fully-functional ammo.

Bad legislation can only go so far, to the point where bad laws mess with good peoples' lives. Then the bad guys must make their choices and deal with consequences of those choices.

Winter goes on, but spring is coming. During the interim, I'm looking at what I see as presidential decrees of bad times ahead for folks like us. Might as well do something worthwhile with the bad weather.

Look towards your most effective close-range ammo.

I say again -- look towards your best close range ammo.

Get it in the best shape that you can. Be calm in knowing that .30-'06 USGI black-tip ammo is going to go bang and do its job nearly sixty years after it was made.

And never forget the final section of Gulag's note 5:

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.

Solzhenitsyn's mugshot upon release from the Gulag, 1953.


Whatever alibis the Soviet-era Russians and other captive peoples might have had as the Gulag's apparatus churned and grumbled, we kulaks of the Obamanation have no such excuses.

Alea iacta est.