Alexander Solzhenitsyn Takes On The Progressives

The Federalist ^ | 31 Jan, 2021 | Louis Markos

[MtnClimber]

A new essay collection, 'Solzhenitsyn and American Culture: The Russian Soul in the West,' illuminates how the vaunted Russian writer's warnings about secularism and progressivism are as prescient and insightful as ever.

If there is one thing that 2020 has taught me, it is that the real political and cultural divide in our country is not between Republicans and Democrats, or even conservatives and liberals, but between traditionalists and progressives.

At the core of progressivism is not the optimistic American belief that things are improving and that our children can live better lives than we did, but the belief that man is a perfectible product of evolutionary forces. Rather than being made in God’s image and then fallen, progressives believe we must throw off the shackles and prejudices of the past in order to move forward to build utopia.

The traditionalist is not against growth and change, but he recognizes, as Edmund Burke did in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, the danger of trying to remake society and man in the image of a new ideology that radically redefines such words as truth, justice, and equality. The progressive has no qualms about running roughshod over the established beliefs, institutions, and mores of a nation if he can only achieve his goals. At its most extreme, progressivism can justify to itself any present-day atrocity as long as it claims to be helping usher in a future brave new world of absolute egalitarianism.

The genealogy of progressivism runs from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s naïve belief in the noble savage to the bloody social engineering of the French Revolution to the deterministic dialectical materialism of Karl Marx, out of which arose the horrors inflicted on their own people by Lenin and Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong and Pol Pot, Fidel Castro and Kim Jong-Il.

[MtnClimber]

The progressives have not learned from history, they are busy erasing it. Those of us who still remember history clearly see the mistakes the progressives are about to repeat.

[Travis McGee]

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[gattaca]

bmp

[PGalt]

^ ^

[PGalt]

“they don’t know...and they don’t know that they don’t know” - Mark RIP Scott - Detroit radio yakker; Marine.

[PGalt]

liked Aleks

[lurk]

Every American should read Solzhenitsyn. Every American Christian should read Wurmbrand.

[Stravinsky]

The right hasn’t learned from Solzhenitsyn either.

[Bearshouse]

From the essay..

“It is wrong to think of utopias as harmless dreams,” he warns. “Combined with the idea of progress, utopian thought is a dream that motivates action. It establishes a goal so lofty that it cannot be reached. The more ideal it becomes, the greater the stubbornness with which it is pursued. There comes a time when blood is spilled. Oceans of blood.”

Thanks for posting, I had to read twice to take it all in.

[MtnClimber]

I could not do the article justice in the 300 word limit for excerpts. I am glad someone else read it! Here is one part that I thought was very accurate:

Such is the power of Marx’s progressive ideology that Rubin discounts his personal experience. If such self-deception in the name of ideology sounds unbelievable, just think of the American politicians and media people who, during the summer of 2020, watched businesses being looted and burned but could only see peaceful protests in the name of racial justice and economic equity. They are those who not only live and propagate the lie, but who come to believe it themselves.

[Buttons12]

One chapter in history is especially illuminating: what the Turks did to the Armenians.
First they took the guns, then they conscripted the men and then they went after the women, children and elderly.
Turks got the order right. First step in making people defenseless is to disarm them.
We’ll be at that point within a year.

[Daffynition]

We only ran into he and his wife once, during the 20 yrs he lived in Cavendish, VT. They wanted to remain private, and that was respected by the natives.