The noose is dangling gently around our necks. Every day, they cinch it tighter. By the time we realize it's strangling us, it will be too late.

Those who – gradually and gleefully – sacrifice their freedoms, their autonomy, their individuality, their livelihoods, and their relationships on the altar of the "common good" have forgotten this is the pattern followed by every totalitarian regime in history.

Everyone wonders how ordinary Germans could have been manipulated to participate or stand dumbstruck while their government was transformed into a genocidal juggernaut. This is how. Read Sebastian Haffner's Defying Hitler memoir to see how this can happen anywhere—including here.

Everyone wonders how Russians could have permitted and even zealously reported fellow citizens for imprisonment and execution under Article 58, the penal code invented to incarcerate anyone who dared express the slightest whisper of noncompliance under Stalin's homicidal state. This is how. Read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's meticulously documented The Gulag Archipelago to witness this progression of authoritarian lunacy.