If you have detente or parity (i.e. both sides can defend themselves), the choice you often have in those cases is, will you, your spouse, and your children choose to become slaves for all time. All it takes is obedient consent, will you fight for your family or choose to die instead. The societal mechanics involved don't allow a third option. Slave or Fight/Die, that is the choice.
Basically, first they come for <someone who they say has done horrible things>... then they come for <your neighbors> ... and finally they came for you and there was no one to speak against them on your behalf.
You clearly have never heard of Sophie's choice, otherwise you wouldn't have said what you did.
Its a common setup with coercion, and used by corrupt entities to coerce behavior that ultimately causes suffering. People that suffer or who are put into an unstable psychogical state are more malleable and vulnerable to certain psychological attacks and tactics designed to indoctrinate. Look up the term struggle session, and what that entails.
Saying you have a choice is extremely naively and misguided. It lacks a true understanding of how the world actually works with regards to coercion.
Here's a form of Sophie's choice. An evil person/group has captured you and is holding you and your three siblings (brother and two sisters) captive. He gives you the choice of choosing one of your siblings who will not be killed, and he will kill the rest. They are present when he says this, and he emphasizes that failure to make a choice by the time specified means he kills them all. What is your choice, you always have a choice.
Regardless of what you choose, any survivors will hate you until their dying day because you killed the others, by choice. Failing to choose one, means you chose to have all of them die, and they realize you didn't love them enough to choose; in their final moments.
Do you really always have a choice? Is a coerced choice a choice?
These are important questions which you seem to not have thought through at all. They are normally covered in an intro to philosophy course, though coercion is not touched on normally until later coursework.
Some entities are perfectly fine with killing you, chopping you up and selling your organs, or using you as slave labor, or re-educating your ideology.
Choice is an illusion, in many cases, anyone saying otherwise as a generalization is naive; misguided, and uneducated, and a danger to anyone that would potentially believe it because they are inspiring a false/limiting belief in those people that would/could persist over their lifetime or beyond (a greater evil). It negatively impacts the fitness of all future descendants as an ideological contagion, until the resulting forces of natural selection and lack of adaptability ends their line (extinction).
If you inspire a false belief, you are responsible for all the suffering and negative outcomes that arise as a result of teaching that belief to others, both directly and indirectly. This is true even if you have no intent, or knowledge of what you do; because you should have known and done research, especially after someone brought it to your attention.