Life is Terrible but Death is Worse. Or is It?

“Another ancient cause of war, race, also presents itself. The attackers are Arabs, the refuges are Negroes. How long have those two been going at it, with the blacks almost always getting the worst of it? In the Sudan, even today, that worst includes black slavery. Of course, as is also true throughout history, the alternative to slavery is death. An old Russian proverb comes to mind: Life is terrible, but death is worse."

― William S. Lind, On War

That proverb brings to mind an old Russian:

“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 Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

What Solzhenitsyn is essentially describing is 4G war--which also happens to be the focus of Lind's attention--a David vs. Goliath warfare of the "weak" yet highly motivated against the behemoth State, designed and trained to fight similar behemoths but usually vexed unto withdrawal and ultimate defeat by technically inferior insurgency forces. Even when they win, they lose, the Goliaths. On the moral level. In time. And time favors the patient with nothing to lose.

Question raised:  Is a life of slavery better than a death fighting for your freedom (against all hope)? I'd say no, from the comfort of my not having to chose either at this very moment. And this breeds yet another question. If you throw down on tyranny, at what point do you do so? At the first hint of it? When you hear boots in the stairwell? Too soon and you're cut down for nothing; probably denounced and vilified as a crazed & violent radical by those who will later rot in the gulags you died trying to defy. Too late and you may not be able to overcome your prolonged inaction at the decisive moment.

Tricky business, finding the sweet spot, and may we never have to, in our lifetime. Although, the way things are going, I wouldn't be terribly surprised if we do, because we've rolled over to an insignificantly small —1, maybe 2% of the population—but determined group of advocates for carnival-mirror world. Deviant world. This is the stuff of dictatorships not democracy, and as it goes with dictatorships, its power is miles wide but inches deep. The barrage of rampant nannyism, faux-rape, garriage, social "justice" and transeverything weakens the will. Indiscriminate immigration weakens nations and cultures, ensuring social friction and resultant violence for generations, inflating the police state like a towering cumulonimbus in August. Debt-money and the abolition of cash destroy economies, transferring wealth from the many to the few, turning trade into a controlled privilege. PC speech codes and the throttling of actual, true information (once charitably known as "News") creates a harried, misinformed, timid populace. You don't need to be a student of History (although it wouldn't hurt) to see where this is headed.

War.

And because we didn't love freedom enough, because we had no awareness of the real situation, because we let the stupid, the shrill and the insane shape the culture and the law, we will have deserved everything that happens afterward.