09:58 - Hičens
So happy to be serfsThose who willingly accepted this subjection were previously free, thanks not to themselves but to forebears who first won and then repeatedly preserved their liberty from threats within and without.
Then this generation came, and undid the work of a thousand years in a few weeks. Worse, in a way—they gave away something they had a duty to pass on undamaged to their children. They did not even raise a word of protest. And they did not trade in their birthrights because dragoons cut them down in the fields, or foreign soldiers lounged in the streets with machine pistols, or secret police threatened them with death or labour camps. They did it because they could not be bothered to think or argue or object.