We do not love freedom enough.

“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

A lot has been said about the aims and composition of the Occupy Wall Street movement. People say they're incoherent, they're misguided, they're lazy, and so on. But my fellow Americans- and I am speaking specifically to my fellow Americans here, not just using a cliche- I want you to stop and think about what kind of country you live in, and what kind of country you want to live in. Watch this video:

What do you see? A group of idealistic, possibly naive, potentially misguided young people on a college campus doing what young idealistic people do- gathering together to spread their message. Leave their message out of it. Look at what they're faced with. They aren't armed. They're not even physically intimidating. Many of them are young women. And the police, in unison and presumably on command, begin beating them with batons.

Let me show you another video:

An idealistic young man stands peacefully in front of a crowd of his fellow citizens. He's a veteran of the Marine Corps, and sees protecting his fellow citizens as a sacred duty. So he stands in front. A policeman shoots him in the head with a tear gas grenade, and just in case you thought it was an accident, another policeman throws a flashbang into a crowd that runs to his aid.

This is your country now, America. The police beat peaceful protesters. The police fire chemical weapons at them. The police attack those who tried to aid an injured man. Attacking those aiding the injured isn't just police brutality. It's a war crime- that is to say, even during war, when most bets are off, what that Oakland cop did is still considered a crime. The soldiers of Hitler's armies did not shoot at American medics tending the wounded, but American police in American cities do. War crimes are now being committed in your streets, America, against your fellow citizens.

So my question is, what are you going to do about it? If we were free men, if we were brave men, the police in these videos would now be a la lanterne, as they said in the French Revolution: swinging from the fucking light poles. We are not free men, we are not brave men, and we are abused with impunity.

Solzhenitsyn also once wrote that to understand what the state is, one must be arrested. I want to speak now specifically to the OWS movement: you, better than any of us, should see now what the state is. The state is that which beats you, which gasses you, which maims you and then tries to blind anyone who tries to help you. The state is your mortal enemy. Fight back.

My fellow Americans, we talk a good game about liberty, about government fearing the people and not vice versa, but it's all talk. The police do not fear us. They burst through our doors at will, they beat our idealistic youth, they gas us, they terrorize us. What are we going to do about it? Are we going to stand up and make them fear us? Or will we too one day burn in camps, wishing we had fought back? Either way, as Solzhenitsyn wrote, we will get what we deserve.