Posted on 08/06/2018 1:10:52 PM PDT by CondoleezzaProtege
Its a pity. Educated people everywhere should read his books. The man was courageous and insightful.
Also met Solzhenitsyn.
Search on youtube for the movie.
It's very well done.
The freedom we preserved in WWII was handed to a generation where many mistook license for liberty. The freedoms they did have, they were happily handing them over to an ever growing government.
That is probably what he saw.
One other passage that impressed me was about how the person who turned in the “enemy of the state” would likely be with that enemy on the transport to the Gulag!!!
Same here.
We are lucky if two or three out of a thousand know who Mark Twain, Dwight Eisenhower, George Patton, etc were.
Absolutely it was evident.
Except for people in denial.
Abortion. The rapidly ascending homosexual movement.
The high levels of pedophilia, and the broad efforts that worked to cover that up which were still mostly successful at the time.
The adulation given to celebrities and athletes who would have been quite properly in jail if they were employed in any other enterprise.
The ever growing drug problem.
The only people who couldn’t see our moral decay were the people who defiantly refused to see our moral decay even when someone from outside pointed our heads at it and held our eyelids up.
You’re being rather dismissive. Solzhenitsyn wrote about the Gulag Archipelago from experience of ten years in it. Not just being there but recalling the millions of lives wrecked or snuffed out by the evil system that they were caught in.
His books were memorials to all those lives. After Stalin croaked and people were liberated from the labor camps, survivors started a ritual where photos of victims were laid out on a table in someone’s flat; survivors filed in and gazed at them and spoke in low tones like a memorial service. Then they left silently.
If Solzhenitsyn is forgotten both in Russia and here, it’s poverty for both peoples. Yes, I read his works back in the seventies and it was heavy going to be sure. The Russians, Germans, and Japanese all seek to forget their own history and for selfish reasons.
Solzhenitsyn’s 1978 Harvard speech was panned all around because he was warning America, don’t let this happen to you and it will happen if you don’t wake up. Liberty is temporary, not to be taken for granted, and never to be given up without a fight. We should at least heed those who have already been there.
“Cancer Ward” is my favorite.
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