“Public opinion! I don’t know how sociologists define it, but it seems obvious to me that it can only consist of interacting individual opinions, freely expressed and independent of government or party opinion. So long as there is no independent public opinion in our country, there is no guarantee that the extermination of millions and millions for no good reason will not happen again, that it will not begin any night – perhaps this very night.”*
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*Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago as quoted at https://academyofideas.com/2021/11/mainstream-media-a-threat-to-freedom-and-sanity/
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn ... (11 December 1918 – 3 August 2008) ... was a Russian novelist, philosopher, historian, short story writer, and political prisoner. One of the most famous Soviet dissidents, Solzhenitsyn was an outspoken critic of communism and helped to raise global awareness of political repression in the Soviet Union (USSR), in particular the Gulag system. | From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Solzhenitsyn