Reflections on Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard Address

Quillette ^ | October 24, 2020 | Sergiu Klainerman

[spirited irish]

There was a program behind the long march through the institutions of the West. One aspect had to do with the slow deconstruction of Reality, meaning the eternally existing, unchanging, God Who spoke creation into existence, and created mankind in His spiritual image.. This God in Three Persons is the Author of Truth, and Moral Law, the transcendent source of temporal law and rights.

The other aspect was described by Bakunin, Karl Marx's comrade in arms. Bakunin said that for the revolution for the destruction of the Christian West, we will unleash the Devil in mankind. This course of action meant making sin (vice) into Constitutional rights. Pornography---the terrible enslaver of men and even women today, is an example of the deliberate, diabolically conceived enslavement of Americans. Addiction to pornography and other vices makes Americans malleable slaves.

[Nateman]

Has any Civilization been born from anarchy without religion? We saw how horrible Civilization can be when religion is forcibly removed in the Soviet Union. A common sense of right and wrong enforced by the will of God is the social glue that holds Civilizations together.

[rlmorel]

Thank you for posting this.

It is, in a way, unfortunate that it is so long and dense, but...to those of who have been paying attention and looking at the roots of many of the issues we have...not so long, and not so dense.

I have books I have read that were transformational for me, in both a political and personal sense. The most powerful of these was “Witness” by Whittaker Chambers. Another was “Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand. A third was Thomas Sowell’s “The Vision of The Anointed” as well as his “Basic Economics-A Citizen’s Guide to The Economy”.

But right up at the top, nearly equal to “Witness” is “The Gulag Archipelago”. It was horrible to read, a dystopian past that has a dystopian present (as an explanation for current events) and a dystopian future (an object warning) inherent in it.

For me, it was nearly impossible to read it and think “That could never happen here” yet...to come to the realization that, it could.

Great article.

[boxlunch]

Yes, we now have men and women without souls, Christianity was the rod of steel in their inner being that gave them courage, because when you are a believer, you dont fear death the way others do, and your love and desire to please God is what keeps you under control and self discipline, not heavy and ever more oppressive laws of an atheist state.

And without belief in God, we are completely vulnerable to the lies of Satan, which are manifest constantly by Satan’s mouthpiece, the media.

[cgbg]

I feel really old to have to admit this, but I was actually there for the address.

[Mr Radical]

Thanks for the reminder.
bookmark.

[rlmorel]

You are lucky. I would love to have been there to see him in person.

He is one of the people who, if I were able to, would like to personally shake his hand and say a heartfelt “Thank You” for writing that powerful book.

[cymbeline]

For the heck of it take a look at Emerson’s Harvard Divinity School address. If I were on my computer I’d put in a link to it.

[cymbeline]

Correction:

In an earlier post I meant “The American Scholar”.

[DUMBGRUNT]

A reader!

My son a reading machine, has been pushing this book on me for some time, PDF then hardcover. Because of the copious footnotes, I prefer the paper version.

I’m recycling this comment from another thread.

Like a piece to a large puzzle, this is some of the underlying form and a few of its mechanisms.

A bit out of favor here on FR:
MANUFACTURING CONSENT
by Herman and Chomsky

The first paragraph of the introduction:

THIS BOOK CENTERS IN WHAT WE CALL A “PROPAGANDA MODEL,”
An analytical framework that attempts to explain the performance of the U.S. media in terms of the basic institutional structures and relationships within which they operate. It is our view that, among their other functions, the media serve, and propagandize on behalf of, the powerful societal interests that control and finance them. The representatives of these interests have important agendas and principles that they want to advance, and they are well-positioned to shape and constrain media policy. This is normally not accomplished by crude intervention, but by the selection of right-thinking personnel and by the editors’ and working journalists’ internalization of priorities and definitions of newsworthiness that conform to the institution’s policy.

FREE and you are giving nothing to Noam Chomsky.
Just read the introduction and preface.

https://focalizalaatencion.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/herman-chomsky-2002-manufacturingconsent.pdf

Parallel to what is happening here and now.
Reading of the Glen Greenwald event, it became clear to me, this it.
You may like it.

[aquila48]

“In his address, Solzhenitsyn says that Western societies place a strong emphasis on freedom and rights. In the US, in particular, these rights are staunchly defended by the Constitution and implemented by a legalistic process, based on specific rules, which studiously avoids making non-legal moral judgements. At the same time, he observes, there has been a notable decline in individual obligations, or personal responsibility.”

Personal freedom without personal responsibility is easily our biggest problem!

[spirited irish]

Amen!!!

[rlmorel]

Thank you for that warning about Chomsky, because I despise him root and branch, but at your suggestion, I will read the Introduction and preface.

I started to, but after getting a few pages in realized I don’t have the time right now, has to be later. But I have come to depend on my fellow Freepers to provide me with direction that I may not have plotted on my own-I have become a bit hide-bound, and in matters such as this, I appreciate that.

I used to read prodigiously, but about 15 years ago, my eyes began giving me problems, and I simply cannot read printed word for more than a few minutes before my eyes start burning and everything gets blurry. I have been to doctors and tried everything, but...this appears to be something I have to live with.

I listen to audiobooks now, and if I really like a book, I get an eBook.

One of my top three books that influenced me was Hayek’s “The Road To Serfdom”, and I had a hard copy. Unfortunately, I found that I had marked it up so extensively, when I went back to reference it, I could find nothing.

At that point, I decided to try eBooks like the ones from Amazon, and discovered that marking them up was not only really easy to do, finding those markups and quotes was astonishingly easy.

So now, I buy the audiobook. If it is valuable, I get the eBook, and if I REALLY find it valuable, I buy the hardcopy, which my wife doesn’t like but tolerates it...:)

[texas booster]

BTTT.

Thanks for posting this.

[SuperLuminal]

Outstanding piece!

To this day, non-communist Americans still ridicule the only politician (P.B.) seeking to be the 2000 candidate for President based on the premise that we were engaged (and losing) a Marxist-designed & implemented culture war...

Make no mistake about it, with the communist's endgame now largely complete and virtually unstoppable (at the ballot box), the Fabian & Gramscian Marxists are deeply embedded not only in the Nation's entire education system, but in the GOP itself...

Remember, we now have the communist radicals from the 60's & 70's in political offices all around the Nation successfully pushing the communist/anti-capitalist/hate America agenda...
When you look into the streets today at the communist rioters and criminals, realize that in 15-to-20 years they will be in political positions of power...

One might inclined to say that, with a diagnosis of "terminal", the Nation needs radical/heroic surgery for any hope of survival...

[DUMBGRUNT]

To save time, after the introduction and preface are about half a dozen case studies, they are interesting, no need to read all of them, pick one you are familiar with, and skip to the conclusion(about 10 pages).
Easy peasy!

The last hundred pages are notes, appendix, and the index.

[rlmorel]

Thanks...:) That helps...

[boxlunch]

“Witness“ was one of the best, if saddest and most depressing books i have ever read. I tried to read Gulag but didnt get very far. I know for my mind and soul I need to challenge myself to read these hard books sometimes, but emotionally it is hard when you see our country pretty far down that road already. Without a religious revival and reformation of our education system top to bottom, even if Trump wins its only putting the emergency brakes on the downward hurtle of our country into the chasm.

[rlmorel]

One of the reasons "Witness" was transformational for me is that it made me recognize that the acts of the Left have not changed...it is not new, and so, it makes me realize it is the same enemy we have grappled with since the end of WWII.

But there was something else even more powerful in that book. I have read it six or seven times.

The first time I read "Witness", it came across as a political story.

The second time I read it, I thought it was a good versus evil story, Americans versus Soviets.

The third time I read it, I realized it was a man's search for God, and this was, for me, the money quote from the book:

“It [Communism] is not new. It is, in fact, man's second oldest faith. Its promise was whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: "Ye shall be as gods." It is the great alternative faith of mankind.

Like all great faiths, its force derives from a simple vision. Other ages have had great visions. They have always been different versions of the same vision: the vision of God and man's relationship to God.

The Communist vision is the vision of Man without God.

It is the vision of man's mind displacing God as the creative intelligence of the world. It is the vision of man's liberated mind, by the sole force of its rational intelligence, redirecting man's destiny and reorganizing man's life and the world. It is the vision of man, once more the central figure of the Creation, not because God made man in his image, but because man's mind makes him the most intelligent of the animals.

Copernicus and his successors displaced man as the central fact of the universe by proving that the earth was not the central star of the universe.

Communism restores man to his sovereignty by the simple method of denying God.”