Leaving Egypt Ministries, Obadiah D. Morris

“The wicked watcheth the righteous, and seeketh to slay him” (Psalm 37:32).

My first attempt at Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s most famous work, The Gulag Archipelago, was a failure—as has apparently been the case with many others who approached it and found it not just too daunting in length, but also abounding with a reality that was too depressing to endure. It was in the year 2020 that I first attempted it, and the global psychological operation that was well underway at that time—Operation Covid 19 that has now morphed into a general technocratic effort by the statists—made it too heavy to take on. This was an operation that was testing even hardened anarchists who were preparing for such an event in the post-9/11 world in ways they thought they could avoid being touched by; some jumped ship and started claiming with the tyrants that state tyranny is the only possible way of dealing with a pandemic. In hindsight, its many insights may have proven useful to navigating a psychological tyranny that was being thrust upon the world at that time and leading up to the efforts today for the technocratic state to expand and hit us with more operations of that nature. Nevertheless, I had been discouraged at the time.

As I read Gulag today, I will attempt to make some notes on it as I go, broken up roughly by chapter or topic. I may return to this one and edit it as relevant comments arise further into the book on one of the first subjects he covers: arrest. I will make these notes here for our own edification for the future, as the past atrocities which consumed the lives of tens of millions of men are far from over in our time, as the current state of unrepentance that our people are in make it highly likely that we will repeat in this century the political evils of history that came to a peak under the communist regimes of the twentieth century.

One might even argue we face a far greater threat today. As much as the communists may have been bent on murder and genocide of certain groups of people, perhaps much of deaths under the communists were incidental to the general socialist program; collectivization inevitably meant that men would starve under famines, that a police state would have to be raised up to enforce the system, and that men would be sent to labor camps and lined up against the wall who wouldn’t fall in line with the regime and its ambition to substitute central planners for God’s natural order. Today, we’re up against a global regime of tyrants who are expressly bent on depopulation and perhaps won’t stop until whole populations become extinct, and which furthermore has the modern tools of technology to accomplish it.

At rate, we should by no means think we’re in the clear today, as many American exceptionalists are still deluded into thinking. Indeed, it was that Solzhenitsyn thought these evils to still loom over mankind that he authorized the abridged version of his 1,800+ page tome, in order to ideally make it more digestible for a people who he knew were still in urgent need of learning these lessons. As he wrote in the foreword to the abridgement,

“There is always a fallacious belief: ‘It would not be the same here; here such things are impossible.’ Alas, all the evil of the 20th century is possible everywhere on earth.”

The effort to shorten his three-volume work on the Gulag system was not just to make it more accessible to the impatient reader, but to get out a word that was still needed for a people who are still barking down this same road of destruction, which God warned would be the ruin of anyone who walks on it. His original work was abridged, he added, “in order to facilitate its reading for those who do not have much time in this hectic century of ours.”

Hopefully, we can learn a few things from this work born out of direct experience and keep them in mind for the future of statism that we’re still up against in America and the rest of the world today, which is the way things always go for a people who trust in human government for their salvation.

I am most interested here in seeing how it was possible for such terrorism to be perpetrated against a people who are always numerically superior to the numerically inferior rulers who carry out their legal crimes. The most obvious supplement for a minority ruling elite — one that they don’t even have to implement — is the safe bet that the masses, though greater in physical number, are mentally and spiritually deficient against a campaign by a minority elite to subjugate and eliminate them. Another is the general unwillingness of men to intervene in injustice perpetrated against their neighbors. State rulers can always count on the ideological support of the masses or at least their passivity in short of any flag-waving enthusiasts, who are abundant in American society anyway. After all, it is the sins of outright idolatry and slothfulness to seek God’s Kingdom that makes systems of human government possible in the first place.

Tactics of tyranny 

What we shall seek to learn here are the tactics or methods typically employed by any State gone full-blown tyrannical and finally growing into a total state, which is always the path that any political system is tending at any time anyway. They are the same in any age, and will be repeated again in ours. If we know them, perhaps we can avoid finding ourselves victims of them to some degree, though the rulers are well-practiced in casting a wide net, and few of our neighbors anymore even care to come to each other’s aid, which is why we have given up our liberty to begin with and passed off our personal responsibility of justice, law, and protection to human civil government to administer it for us — which has been a judgment unto us.

Some people like to look back into history and imagine that they would have been one of its heroes had they lived in those times, that they would have stuck their necks out there like the teenagers of the White Rose resistance and sought to thwart the expansion of statism (who were later executed by guillotine for their work). They look back wondering how it was ever possible that the Nazis or the communists succeeded. How could they have accomplished such tyrannies against a population of people who were greater than them?

It is not hard to see how the crimes of the Bolsheviks or Nazis were possible. When you read about the state tyranny in the twentieth century, one thing you might be struck with is just how much Americans today not only lack what it takes to band together and resist it, so to speak, but just how much they will go along with and actively support it too, despite thinking they’re some tough-guy rebels at the same time who can’t be ruled and will go reaching for their muskets as soon as the boots come to a neighborhood near them (they already have been).

All the popular ideas among the statist idolaters in the American population today are all the same slavish ideas and errors that brought the Russian people down under the communists, thinking it would never happen to them. These fallacies, which anyone will see are common in the average American, are many: “If you don’t want to go in a cage then don’t break the law” – “Only criminals get arrested” – “If you impede on a law enforcement investigation you deserve to be under a jail” – “I don’t mind a surveillance state because I have nothing to hide” – “Protestors are terrorists” – “Just fight it later in court” – “If you’re innocent then they’ll let you go” – “If you’re falsely arrested then you can sue them later.”

Timing of the raids

The first thing Solzhenitsyn points out is the night-time tactic. Arriving late at night, or early in the morning, to catch a person off guard. These are common tactics of the militarized American police. This is what happened to Duncan Lemp, for instance, when they slayed him in his bed in an early morning SWAT raid, at 4:40am that day, before he ever had any time to react. This is one way Satan’s agents overcome their numerical inferiority, by ganging up on one man in the night who is not prepared for the boots to come upon him.

“In a night arrest, the state security men have a superiority and numbers. There are many of them, armed, against one person who hasn’t even finished buttoning his trousers. During the arrest and search it is highly improbable that a crowd of potential supporters will gather at the entrance” (p. 5). 

The lesson here is that when things get to this point—one might argue it has already arrived—and they have fully launched their war against us, one person from the family, neighborhood, or community will need to be on night watch to sound the alarm for others to rally in the aid of their neighbors. They will need to be prepared to scream, blow horns or whistles, or otherwise sound the alarm when they see the boots arrive, so that men can wake up and prepare themselves.

Stranger danger 

He makes other noteworthy comments on arrest, which he says had become a whole science and body of social theory for these wicked men. For one, they wouldn’t always use officers to conduct it; the landlord or the mailman could be used to entice one to open their doors and come outside (p. 7). Be aware, then, of the false delivery drivers of the future, and do not have any packages sent your way anyway, so you know that there is no excuse for white vans to be coming down your driveway pretending to be third-party mail carriers. Do not confront them if they show up; leave them be. The days of going outside and waving and chatting up strangers will be over. All men who you don’t know, and even those who you thought you did, become suspicious.

“You are arrested by a religious pilgrim, whom you have put up for the night for the sake of Christ. You’re arrested by a meterman who has come to read your electric meter. You are arrested by a bicyclist who has run into you on the street, by a railway conductor, a taxi driver, a savings bank teller, the manager of a movie theater” (p. 8). 

He also mentions the use of other strangers to distract your attention in public or to lead you away from family or your work, where you might have something to grab or someone to help you, or just to otherwise steal your attention away from what you needed to focus on more importantly. One might recall the arrest of Ross Ulbricht, who was purposely distracted by a fake fight between two agents, who needed to draw him away from his computer so that they could capture it open and have the evidence needed to use against him.

In the times of the future, we will need to be hyper-vigilant about all those who we interact with. The days of chatting with strangers in public will be over, as much as we may find it unfortunate that socialism leads (ironically for its theorists) to anti-social behavior among the people. Moreover, we cannot part with our family members in public either; we will stay arm in arm with our spouses in the store or wherever we go; no more splitting up. 

Reducing movement 

Travel, too, will have to be cut to a minimum overall. Public arrests are preferred to home arrests for some targets, where again, one may be able to hunker down and defend themselves or make a call for their neighbors to come to their aid. Especially air travel, which is already controlled by the federal government today. As he says, “Oh, you citizens who love to travel! Do not forget that in every station there are a GPU branch and several prison cells” (p. 7). 

We might already call the numerous legal charges and business closures that many caught during the “stay at home” orders of the Operation Covid 19 psyop. Or the people who found themselves being abused by police on public transportation for violating “social distancing” rules. 

The ideological weakness 

Perhaps the greatest weakness among Americans today is how much their statist ideology, which they hold as part of their great departure from God’s word, has turned them into apologists for state violence, even in the most heinous and obvious cases of wrongdoing.

Men today simply aren’t prepared for what States have intended for men, because they have been licking the jackboot for so long that they think it is only intended for their neighbors. They have not learned that if they wanted to be free, they must seek to make their neighbor free. Instead, their idea of freedom has been to live at their neighbors’ expense and raise up boots to stand on their necks.

One of the most vulnerable men to state tyranny will then be its very supporters, who are most exposed to being caught and killed because they thought it couldn’t happen to them. They will be the most likely to be caught off guard by it when it comes, because they have spent their lives believing in lies that police officers are not only “public servants” who exist for their safety, but also in the childish lie that they are “the good guys” and only catch “the bad guys.”

“For several decades political arrests were distinguished in our country precisely by the fact that people were arrested who were guilty of nothing and were therefore unprepared to put up any resistance whatsoever” (p. 9).

This is a standard American man today, who says, “Don’t try and put up a fight during a traffic stop; you’ll have your day in court.” Or, “They won’t shoot you if you just comply.”

Men should not think that because they are innocent—no one is safe in a police state—that there is no good reason for kidnapping or killing them. Solzhenitsyn tells a story of how a woman came into the police station to help see to it that a baby would be fed who had been abandoned after her neighbor had been arrested, and in order to fulfill quotas on a slow day, they snatched her (p. 9).

The lesson here is obvious: you want no contact period with Satan’s agents when things are bad, not even in the now-foolish thinking that you need to find a way to help an abandoned newborn. Time to take in the orphans of war yourself.

When men don’t think their heads are on the chopping block, but only that of their neighbors, they will soon find that their own evil thoughts toward their neighbor — an utter lack of concern for their liberty — will be returned to them. 

Though the standard view among men today is that resistance is both futile and even illegal, and that you deserve to be executed if you so much as appear to “resist arrest,” Solzhenitsyn constantly raises the view that it was an utter lack of resistance among the people that made such a system possible, that allowed the demonic statists to grab so many men with ease, even though they outnumbered the devil’s government.

“Even in the fever of epidemic arrest, when people leaving for work said farewell to their families every day, because they could not be certain they would return at night, even then almost no one tried to run away and only in rare cases did people commit suicide. And that was exactly what was required. A submissive sheep is a find for a wolf” (p. 9). 

When men do not think they have done anything wrong, and when they have in fact not done anything wrong, they become pacified to the evils expanding around them and believe that if only they shut their eyes to them and turn their heads the other way, that they will go away. As Solzhenitsyn notes,

“Universal innocence also gave rise to the universal failure to act. Maybe they won’t take you? Maybe it’ll all be a blow over?” (p. 9).

This pacified thinking is prominent throughout all of American culture. Statists tell us all the time how, “If you don’t want to go to jail then just don’t break any laws.” Or how, “If you have nothing to hide than don’t worry about it.” They show their complete lack of understanding of the indiscriminate tyranny of the State, especially when it has gone completely off the rails. Since statists in America operate on a widespread assumption that anyone who is arrested is a criminal, they sit around and allow the Security State to grow up around them, thinking that it will never catch up to them and that the only people it touches are “bad guys.”

“The majority sit quietly and dare to hope. Since you aren’t guilty, then how can they arrest you? It’s a mistake! They are already dragging you along by the collar, and you still keep on exclaiming to yourself: ‘It’s a mistake! They’ll set things straight and let me out!’ Others are being arrested en masse, and that’s a bothersome fact, but in those other cases there is always some dark area: ‘Maybe he was guilty?’ But as for you, you are obviously innocent! You still believe that the Organs are humanly logical institutions: they will set things straight and let you out” (p. 10). 

Plucking us out individually 

Another thing mentioned is that there weren’t always mass arrests at one time, which has a similar way of keeping anyone from rallying against them or even resisting them, thinking that the tyranny-state is not really at their door yet. Rather, the statists start scooping up our neighbors one by one, so as to keep resistance to a minimum. Though they are lesser in number than us, they will concentrate their efforts in a smaller area at times, so as to make themselves relatively stronger in one area, for the time being, as opposed to being spread thin in many places. 

“The unhurried, step-by-step visits, first to one apartment, then to another, tomorrow to a third and fourth, provide an opportunity for the security operations personnel to be deployed with the maximum efficiency and to imprison many more citizens of a given town than the police force itself numbers” (pp. 5-6). 

Causing a scene 

This is where it’s necessary to employ strength in numbers and begin looking after our neighbors, so that they cannot be plucked out one by one. We must make it more difficult for these tyrants to carry out their evil operations with ease, as they are able to on a sheepish people who won’t stand up for their neighbors. The problem with American society is that it is full of bootlickers who agree with the demonic statists that “interfering with law enforcement” is a punishable crime, full of people who think “resisting arrest” means that one deserves to be summarily executed on the street where they lay. Solzhenitsyn calls for employing group-tactics to, at bare minimum, make a fuss about the arrests and not let their wicked jobs come so easily. 

“You aren’t gagged. You really can and you really ought to cry out—to cry out that you are being arrested! That villains in disguise are trapping people! That arrests are being made on the strength of false denunciations! That millions are being subjected to silent reprisals! If many such outcries had been heard all over the city in the course of a day, would not our fellow citizens perhaps have begun to bristle? And would arrests perhaps no longer have been so easy?” (p. 11). 

As much as conservative bootlickers condemn the tactics of “leftist” protestors today who gather around Satan’s law enforcement agents and make noise as they look for men to kidnap, such tactics have worked before, considering that, to some degree, the ruling elite always need to save themselves from being exposed as evil as they go on about their evil-doing, lest men start to wake up to the realities of it. Indeed, though most of them are wicked-hearted and would apologize for any tyranny in the name of “law and order,” surely some of the rampant idolatry among conservatives has been possible because they still have not seen enough of these evils with their own eyes and simply imagine “law enforcement duties” to be some special category where violence against a man is permissible. Solzhenitsyn tells the story of a lady who the Cheka tried to arrest in 1927, at a time “when submissiveness had not yet softened our brains” (p. 11). She latched on to a metal bar connected to a lamppost, started to scream, and refused to go easily. As for the men trying to arrest her: “The quick young men immediately became flustered. They can’t work in the public eye. They got into their car and fled” (p. 12).

Short of a crowd to rally for us, it is already a wise idea to film police officers in any encounter and even live stream it to your social media accounts if you can. These men kill people on the side of the road and may think twice if they knew they were being watched. I have personally witnessed a very demonized and violent state trooper change his demeanor on me before after shouting to a friend to “film him!” as he ordered me out of my vehicle over a very petty traffic infraction. This man had evil intentions with me, and gave up once he knew he was on camera. 

Dwelling searches

Another thing one might wish to know is that nothing is safe from being searched by these men. As we see today, SWAT teams are willing to spend hours inside one’s home, ransacking the place, using axes to tear into walls, and even leaving families sitting outside in the freezing cold while turning their houses upside down. This was the same case under the Soviets, too. 

“The traditional image of arrest is also what happens afterward, when the poor victim has been taken away. It is an alien, brutal, and crushing force totally dominating the apartment for hours on end, a breaking, ripping open, pulling from the walls, emptying things from wardrobes and desks onto the floor, shaking, dumping out, and ripping apart—piling up mountains of litter on the floor—and the crunch of things being trampled beneath jackboots. And nothing is sacred in a search! During the arrest of the locomotive engineer Inoshin, a tiny coffin stood in his room containing the body of his newly dead child. [They] dumped the child’s body out of the coffin and searched it. They shake sick people out of their sickbeds, and they unwind bandages to search beneath them” (p. 5). 

In the original (non-abridged) first volume of Gulag, Solzhenitsyn notes how these men had searches down to a science too and makes further notes on the great lengths they went to in order to find anything one might be hiding from them.

“[They] went so far as to turn over two tons of manure, eight cubic yards of firewood, or two loads of hay; cleaned the snow from an entire collective-farm vegetable plot, dismantled brick ovens, dug up cesspools, checked out toilet bowls, looked in doghouses, chicken coops, birdhouses, tore apart mattresses, ripped adhesive tape off people’s bodies and even tore out metal teeth in the search for microfilm. Students were advised to begin and to end with a body search (during the course of the search the arrested person might have grabbed up something that had already been examined). They were also advised to return to the site of a search at a different time of day and carry out the search all over again” (Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, vol. 1, p. 7, fn. 4).

The lesson here is to not have anything inside your home that could incriminate to you, or which you think cannot be found hidden behind some boards. In modern days of imagining technology like radar, thermal cameras, or drones, it will be much more difficult to hide men in walls, too. 

Resistance

It has been said before that every man should be capable of violence, though it should not be his natural course. He should be capable of doing what is necessary to defend himself, his family, and his neighbors, if it came down to it. Solzhenitsyn remarks how this lack of capability deep within men, which they should be able to turn on at any time, always gave an advantage to the statist kidnappers. When you don’t anticipate that there are men who are more than willing to use violence against you, especially when your whole statist political philosophy has trained you to believe that government agents are the good guys and only arrest the bad guys, you become vulnerable to these wolves. 

“A person who is not inwardly prepared for the use of violence against him, is always weaker than the person committing the violence” (p. 10). 

Solzhenitsyn suggests that ideally resistance would have begun long before they brought the hammer down, such as in the present point of American society, where full-scale tyranny has not yet been launched by the devil’s government, which is currently biding its time and growing its power every day that men fail to seek God’s Kingdom as the only alternative to authoritarian governments. If not then, people must begin looking after their neighbors as it begins to arrive in their communities, which they also fail to do. Yet if this doesn’t happen, he suggests it should at least take place at one’s last chance before being kidnapped. “Resistance should have begun right there, at the moment of arrest itself” (p. 11). 

In one of the most appalling omissions in the abridged version—perhaps one of the best footnotes of all time—Solzhenitsyn suggests that the sooner a people had acted and resisted, the sooner the whole system would have fallen. Unfortunately in his case and many others, the failure to act before was a regrettable one made in retrospect, lamented from the Gulag country rather than being armed with it before hand.

“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! (Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, vol. 1, p. 13, fn. 5).

Take what you wish from these quotations. I don’t suggest I endorse this advice. I am just the messenger, writing to hopefully give you ideas that you will need to consider in the future. The real method of avoiding state tyranny in the first place was to love our neighbors and seek God’s Kingdom together, and to begin building a strong community right away as our means of getting back on the straight path.

Yet in a statist society, which is already full of people who were weak enough to give way to human rule and who have already proven that they do not love their neighbors as themselves, this is easier said than done. As it stands, Americans who are caught up “praying that our police officers return home safely every night after their hard jobs keeping us safe,” are not prepared for the future that the statists have in store for them. Despite all their fantasies of being a “free country,” perhaps Americans might look back one day, when all is said and done, and concur with Solzhenitsyn here:

“We didn’t love freedom enough…we purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward” (Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, vol. 1, p. 13, fn. 5).