In fact, there are many well-documented accounts of successful, non-violent resistance to oppression. There was much non-violent resistance to the Nazis in WWII. Then we have the shining examples of Gandhi (whose spearheaded a movement leading to India’s independence), Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement; and the work of Cesar Chavez. More recently, former Soviet Republics such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Lithuania, led the way to independence – and the dismantling of the former Soviet Union – largely through non-violent means.

Why aren’t these non-violent examples taught with the same rigor as the endless litany of war that comprises so much history “education”? (that’s what I remember from my school days – history as a catalogue of war!) To my mind, it stems from ignorance, failure of the imagination, or just plain refusal to see….

Assuming that the dissidents in the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany did have firearms, and used them to resist arrest, how long would they have been able to do so?

People who resist arrest using firearms usually die sooner, or have to surrender sooner or later.

The best chance of avoiding arrest in a totalitarian state is to avoid and evade the police, not confront them, and if possible skip across the border into a free(er) country, assuming that there is one nearby.