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30 Aug 08

Erickson, Edward

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Erickson, Edward

Solzhenitsyn- An Introduction
Solzhenitsyn- The Gulag Archipelago
Solzhenitsyn- The Harvard Address
Erickson, Edward

Solzhenitsyn- An Introduction
Solzhenitsyn- The Gulag Archipelago
Solzhenitsyn- The Harvard Address

29 Aug 08

ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN - 4 Lectures

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21 Aug 08

Rightly remembering Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

"With the death of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in early August, the modern world lost one of its most trenchant prophets. In many eulogies and obituaries, Solzheitsyn was identified mainly (or exclusively) as a fierce foe of the Soviet Communist system. Of course, he was that: the publication of the first volume of his massive work, The Gulag Archipelegoâdocumenting the horrors of the Soviet labor campsâled to his expulsion from his homeland in 1974 and to the West's recognition of the suffering of many Soviet citizens. But there was something more important in his writing: a positive, hopeful vision that was often overlooked by readers too preoccupied with politics. It was a vision rooted in a Christian view of human nature and purpose."

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Solzhenitsyn

07 Aug 08

God and Solzhenitsyn

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Solzhenitsyn: A Prophet Honored in His Own Country, but Not in the U.S. Media

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solzhenitsyn

06 Aug 08

Yet More Tributes to Alexander Solzhenitsyn

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05 Aug 08

Russia mourns death of Alexander Solzhenitsyn

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solzhenitsyn

American Rhetoric: Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Harvard Commencement Address (A World Split Apart)

delivered 8 June 1978 on the occasion of Class Day Afternoon Exercises at Harvard University

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But the blindness of superiority
continues in spite of all and upholds the belief that the vast regions
everywhere on our planet should
develop and mature to the level of present day Western systems, which in theory
are the best and in practice the most attractive. There is this belief that all those other worlds are
only being
temporarily prevented (by wicked governments or by heavy crises or by their own
barbarity and incomprehension) from taking the way of Western pluralistic democracy and
from adopting the Western way of life. Countries are judged on the merit of their
progress in this direction.
However, it is a conception which develops out
of Western incomprehension of the essence of other worlds,
out of the mistake of measuring
them all with a Western yardstick. The real picture of our planet's development
is quite different and which about our divided world gave birth to the
theory of convergence between leading Western countries and the Soviet
Union. It is a soothing theory which overlooks the fact that these worlds are
not at all developing into similarity. Neither one can be transformed into the
other without the use of violence. Besides, convergence inevitably means acceptance of the
other side's defects, too, and this is hardly desirable.
33 more annotations...
- A decline in courage may be the most striking
  feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days. The Western world
  has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country,
  each government, each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations.
  Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and
  the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire
  society. Of course, there are many courageous individuals, but they have no determining
  influence on public life.
- Political and intellectual bureaucrats show depression, passivity, and perplexity in their actions and in their
  statements, and even more so in theoretical reflections to explain how
  realistic, reasonable, as well as intellectually and even morally worn it is to
  base state policies on weakness and cowardice. And decline in courage is
  ironically emphasized by occasional explosions of anger and inflexibility on the part of the same
  bureaucrats when dealing with weak governments and with countries not supported
  by anyone, or with currents which cannot offer any resistance. But they
  get tongue-tied and paralyzed when they deal with powerful governments and
  threatening forces, with aggressors and international terrorists.
- Should one point out that from ancient times
  declining courage has been considered the beginning of the end?
- Every citizen has been granted the desired
  freedom and material goods in such quantity and of such quality as to guarantee
  in theory the achievement of happiness -- in the morally inferior sense of the
  word which has come into being during those same decades. In the process,
  however, one psychological detail has been overlooked: the constant desire to
  have still more things and a still better life and the struggle to attain them imprint many Western
  faces with worry and even depression, though it is customary to conceal such feelings.
- The majority of people have been granted
  well-being to an extent their fathers and grandfathers could not even dream
  about. It has become possible to raise young people according to these ideals,
  leaving them to physical splendor, happiness, possession of material goods, money, and leisure, to an almost
  unlimited freedom of enjoyment. So who should now renounce all
  this? Why? And for what should one risk one's precious life in
  defense of common values and particularly in such nebulous cases when the
  security of one's nation must be defended in a distant country? Even biology
  knows that habitual, extreme safety and well-being are not advantageous for a living organism.
- Western society has given itself the
  organization best suited to its purposes based, I would say, one the letter of
  the law. The
  limits of human rights and righteousness are determined by a system of laws; such
  limits are very broad. People in the West have acquired considerable skill in
  interpreting and manipulating law. Any conflict is solved according to the
  letter of the law and this is considered to be the supreme solution. If one is
  right from a legal point of view, nothing more is required. Nobody will mention that one could still not be
  entirely right,
  and urge self-restraint, a willingness to renounce such legal rights, sacrifice
  and selfless risk. It would sound simply absurd. One almost never sees voluntary self-restraint.
  Everybody operates at the extreme
  limit of those legal frames.
  
  I have spent all my life under a Communist regime
  and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a
  terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale than the legal one is not
  quite worthy of man either. A society which is based on the letter of the law
  and never reaches any higher is taking very scarce advantage of the high level
  of human possibilities. The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial
  influence on society. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic
  relations, there is an atmosphere of moral mediocrity, paralyzing
  man's noblest impulses. And it will be simply impossible to stand through
  the trials of this threatening century with only the support of a
  legalistic structure.
- In today's Western society the
  inequality has been revealed [in] freedom for good deeds and freedom for evil deeds. A
  statesman who wants to achieve something important and highly constructive for his country has
  to move cautiously and even timidly. There are thousands of hasty and irresponsible
  critics around him; parliament and the press keep rebuffing him. As he moves
  ahead, he has to prove that each single step of his is well-founded and absolutely
  flawless. Actually, an outstanding and particularly gifted person who has unusual and
  unexpected initiatives in mind hardly gets a chance to assert himself. From the
  very beginning, dozens
  of traps will be set out for him. Thus, mediocrity triumphs with the excuse of
  restrictions imposed by democracy.
- a tilt of freedom in the direction of evil
  has come about
  gradually, but it was evidently born primarily out of a humanistic and benevolent concept
  according to which there is no evil inherent to human nature. The world belongs
  to mankind and all the defects of life are caused by wrong social systems,
  which must be corrected. Strangely enough, though the best social
  conditions have been achieved in the West, there still is criminality and there
  even is considerably more of it than in the pauper and lawless
  Soviet society.
- The press can both simulate public opinion and miseducate it. Thus, we may see
  terrorists described as heroes, or secret matters pertaining to one's nation's defense
  publicly revealed, or we may witness shameless intrusion on the privacy of
  well-known people under the slogan: "Everyone is entitled to know everything."
  But this is a false slogan, characteristic of a false era.
- People also have the
  right not to know and it's a much more valuable one. The right not to have
  their divine souls [stuffed with gossip, nonsense, vain talk.] A person who works
  and leads a meaningful life does not need this excessive burdening flow of
  information.
- Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic
  disease of the 20th century
- the press has become the
  greatest power within the Western countries, more powerful than the legislative
  power,
  the executive, and the judiciary.
- Enormous freedom exists for the press, but not for the readership
  because newspaper[s] mostly develop stress and emphasis to those opinions
  which do not too openly contradict their own and the general trend.
- 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.
- The well-known
  Soviet mathematician
  Shafarevich, a member of the Soviet Academy of Science, has
  written a brilliant book under the title
  
  Socialism; it is a profound
  analysis showing that socialism of any type and shade leads to a total
  destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death.
  Shafarevich's book was published in France -- Shafarevich's book was published in France almost two years ago and so far no
  one has been found to refute it. It will shortly be published in the
  United States.
- I could not recommend your society in its present
  state as an ideal for the transformation of ours. Through intense suffering our
  country has now achieved a spiritual development of such intensity that the
  Western system in its present state of spiritual exhaustion does not look
  attractive.
- A fact which cannot be disputed is the weakening
  of human beings in the West while in the East they are becoming firmer and
  stronger -- 60 years for our people and 30 years for the people of Eastern
  Europe. During that time we have been through a spiritual training far in
  advance of Western experience. Life's complexity and mortal weight have produced
  stronger, deeper, and more interesting characters than those generally
  [produced] by
  standardized Western well-being.
- the human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those
  offered by today's mass living habits, introduced by the revolting invasion of
  publicity, by TV stupor, and by intolerable music.
- There are meaningful warnings which history gives
  a threatened or perishing society. Such are, for instance, the decadence of art,
  or a lack of great statesmen. There are open and evident warnings, too. The
  center of your democracy and of your culture is left without electric power for
  a few hours only, and all of a sudden crowds of American citizens start looting
  and creating havoc. The smooth surface film must be very thin, then, the social
  system quite unstable and unhealthy.
- Very well known representatives of your society,
  such as George Kennan, say: We cannot apply moral criteria to politics. Thus, we
  mix good and evil, right and wrong, and make space for the absolute triumph of
  absolute Evil in the world. On the contrary, only moral criteria can help the
  West against communism's well planned world strategy. There are no other
  criteria. Practical or occasional considerations of any kind will inevitably be
  swept away by strategy. After a certain level of the problem has been reached,
  legalistic thinking induces paralysis; it prevents one from seeing the size and
  meaning of events.
- In spite of the abundance of information, or
  maybe because of it, the West has difficulties in understanding reality such as
  it is.
- members of the U.S. anti-war movement wound
  up being involved in the betrayal of Far Eastern nations, in a genocide and in
  the suffering today imposed on 30 million people there. Do those convinced
  pacifists hear the moans coming from there? Do they understand their
  responsibility today? Or do they prefer not to hear?
- The American Intelligentsia
  lost its nerve and as a consequence thereof danger has come much closer to the
  United States.
- At present, some Western voices
  already have spoken of obtaining protection from a third power against
  aggression in the next world conflict, if there is one. In this case the shield
  would be China. But I would not wish such an outcome to any country in the
  world. First of all, it is again a doomed alliance with Evil; also, it would
  grant the United States a respite, but when at a later date China with its
  billion people would turn around armed with American weapons, America itself
  would fall prey to a genocide similar to the in Cambodia in our
  days.
- And yet -- no weapons, no matter how powerful,
  can help the West until it overcomes its loss of willpower. In a state of
  psychological weakness, weapons become a burden for the capitulating side. To
  defend oneself, one must also be ready to die; there is little such readiness in
  a society raised in the cult of material well-being.
- How did the West decline from its triumphal march to its present
  sickness?
- The West kept advancing socially in accordance
  with its proclaimed intentions, with the help of brilliant technological
  progress. And all of a sudden it found itself in its present state of weakness.
- This means that the mistake must be at the root,
  at the very basis of human thinking in the past centuries. I refer to the
  prevailing Western view of the world which was first born during the Renaissance
  and found its political expression from the period of the Enlightenment. It
  became the basis for government and social science and could be defined as
  rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy: the proclaimed and enforced
  autonomy of man from any higher force above him. It could also be called
  anthropocentricity, with man seen as the center of everything that exists.
- This new way of thinking, which had imposed on us its guidance, did not admit
  the existence of intrinsic evil in man nor did it see any higher task than the
  attainment of happiness on earth. It based modern Western civilization on the
  dangerous trend to worship man and his material needs. Everything beyond
  physical well-being and accumulation of material goods, all other human
  requirements and characteristics of a subtler and higher nature, were left
  outside the area of attention of state and social systems, as if human life did
  not have any superior sense. That provided access for evil, of which in our days
  there is a free and constant flow.
- However, in early democracies, as in the American
  democracy at the time of its birth, all individual human rights were granted
  because man is God's creature. That is, freedom was given to the individual
  conditionally, in the assumption of his constant religious responsibility. Such
  was the heritage of the preceding thousand years. Two hundred or even fifty
  years ago, it would have seemed quite impossible, in America, that an individual
  could be granted boundless freedom simply for the satisfaction of his instincts
  or whims. Subsequently, however, all such limitations were discarded everywhere
  in the West; a total liberation occurred from the moral heritage of Christian
  centuries with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice. State systems were
  -- State systems were becoming increasingly and totally materialistic. The West ended up by truly
  enforcing human rights, sometimes even excessively, but man's sense of
  responsibility to God and society grew dimmer and dimmer. In the past decades,
  the legalistically selfish aspect of Western approach and thinking has reached
  its final dimension and the world wound up in a harsh spiritual crisis and a
  political impasse. All the glorified technological achievements of Progress,
  including the conquest of outer space, do not redeem the 20th century's
  moral poverty which no one could imagine even as late as in the 19th
  Century.
- In our Eastern
  countries, communism has suffered a complete ideological defeat; it is zero and
  less than zero. But Western intellectuals still look at it with interest and
  with empathy, and this is precisely what makes it so immensely difficult for the
  West to withstand the East.
- On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have
  enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete
  Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility. We have
  placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to find out that we
  were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life.
- If the world has not come to its end, it has
  approached a major turn in history, equal in importance to the turn from the
  Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It will exact from us a spiritual upsurge: We
  shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life where our
  physical nature will not be cursed as in the Middle Ages, but, even more
  importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon as in the Modern era.
  
  This ascension will be similar to climbing onto
  the next anthropologic stage. No one on earth has any other way left but --
  upward.