Posted on 07/09/2015 4:52:40 AM PDT by marshmallow
The Russian author thought it was no coincidence that Soviet Russia shared certain common problems with the West, for he saw socialism and liberalism as kindred ideologies
With tensions between America and Russia running high, it is worth reconsidering a figure who once cast a long shadow across both lands: Nobel Prize-winning author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. As a writer, Solzhenitsyn acquired renown through works such as One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovitch and Gulag Archipelago, whereby he not only exposed the follies, pretensions, and crimes of Marxist-Leninism but also testified to the power infused into the human spirit by its Maker. As a dissident, Solzhenitsyn proved such a nuisance to Soviet authorities that they deported him in 1974, leading him to take up residence in Montpelier, Vermont. At first regarded as a hero by Americans, he eventually found his popularity waning, thanks in part to his controversial 1978 commencement address at Harvard University.
Instead of heaping upon America the praise which might have been expected at the time from a dyed-in-the-wool anti-Communist, Solzhenitsyn used his Harvard platform to warn that he had observed phenomena in the United States disturbingly reminiscent of Soviet life:
Without any censorship, in the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges. Legally your researchers are free, but they are conditioned by the fashion of the day. There is no open violence such as in the East; however, a selection dictated by fashion and the need to match mass standards frequently prevents independent-minded people from giving their contribution to public life.
“The press has become the greatest power within the Western countries,” he......
(Excerpt) Read more at catholicworldreport.com ...
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
“Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.” Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Philosophy, is kind to tyrants and their victims.
bump
“How is that people who have been crushed by the sheer weight of slavery and cast to the bottom of the pit can nevertheless find the strength to rise up and free themselves, first in spirit and then in body; while those who soar unhampered over the peaks of freedom suddenly lose the taste for freedom, lose the will to defend it, and, hopelessly confused and lost, almost begin to crave slavery”. Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
“...But when you’ve robbed a man of everything, he’s no longer in your power.”...”
Or as Bob Dylan put it “When you ain’t got nothin’, you got nothin’ to lose”.
Solzhenitsyn would have been a FReeper. Also, Reagan was right when he named the Soviet Union the Evil Empire, but that’s still to narrow a definition. Just as America is more an idea than a physical place, the Soviet Union is a concept in which the elites use whatever political expediency to accrue to themselves power and the wealth that comes with it. It’s a kakocracy.
Socialism to Communism - Subversion Explained by Yuri Bezminov
http://youtu.be/W2RNXxBX-WM
later
Solzhenitsyn ping.
I am not sure that is what happened in the case of the Russian people. Two years ago I would pass this statement up as a reasonable idealization of the events of 1990's in Russia. But the aggression in Ukraine and rise of the popular neo-Soviet, even Stalinist sentiment showed that the Russian nation has shrunk to insignificance in Russia, and the new Soviet man is as in charge now as he was since the Bolshevik revolution; that man sees no value in freedom and sees his historical duty in destroying the freedom of others.
Putin and putinism will be destroyed; but the potential of what remains of Russia to "rise up and free itself", I think, has been spent.
He is what men are made of.
“Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”
Amen.
Live not by lies!
And the chapter on how arrests were done, and the most common verbal response from those they informed were under arrest:
"Me? What for?"
As he said...what for, indeed?
Good idea.. I somehow get the impression there will be lots of time for reading, one of my favorite hobbies. I will get both of his books for my collection.
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