Even one as wise as Solzhenitsyn must be surprised at how much the American people seem poised to embrace communism in 2020 or 2022.
AND how much they're poised to resist it, even those as old as my own old farty a$$! If I have to, I'll get in some kind of shape to be of use, that's for sure.
Any thinking person or person who read some of his works would truly understand the Communist system and the millions who perished under it’s banner. I read the Gulag trilogy years ago and it changed my life. The man was a real genius though I understand, an Antisemite perhaps in the Tolstoyan sense?
In any event anybody who has studied the CCCP knows the horrific truth and Alexsandr open it up for all to see.
the publication of The Gulag Archipelago was instrumental to the fall of the USSR.
I don't think so. He's been dead since 2008 after all.
We are exiting from communism in a most unfortunate and awkward way. It would have been difficult to design a path out of communism worse than the one that has been followed. Our government declared that it is conducting some kind of great reforms. In reality, no real reforms were begun and no one at any point has declared a coherent programme. The name of “reform” simply covers what is latently a process of the theft of the national heritage.
In different places over the years I have had to prove that socialism, which to many western thinkers is a sort of kingdom of justice, was in fact full of coercion, of bureaucratic greed and corruption and avarice, and consistent within itself that socialism cannot be implemented without the aid of coercion. Communist propaganda would sometimes include statements such as “we include almost all the commandments of the Gospel in our ideology”. The difference is that the Gospel asks all this to be achieved through love, through self-limitation, but socialism only uses coercion. This is one point.
Untouched by the breath of God, unrestricted by human conscience, both capitalism and socialism are repulsive.
- Interview with Joseph Pearce, Sr. (2003); http://www.catholiceducation.org/en/culture/art/an-interview-with-alexander-solzhenitsyn.html
“Human rights’ are a fine thing, but how can we make ourselves sure that our rights do not expand at the expense of the rights of others. A society with unlimited rights is incapable of standing to adversity. If we do not wish to be ruled by a coercive authority, then each of us must rein himself in...A stable society is achieved not by balancing opposing forces but by conscious self-limitation: by the principle that we are always duty-bound to defer to the sense of moral justice.”
Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, Rebuilding Russia: Reflections and Tentative Proposals