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All citizens, Catholic and non-Catholic, who can assist in an effort to "snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze" (Edmund Burke - "Conciliation" Speech) from so-called "progressive" impositions on their liberties must unite to a new call for enlightenment and understanding of the ideas essential to their liberties.

In the course of his research for "Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile" (Harper Collins), Joseph Pearch traveled to Moscow to interview the writer. The excerpt below is from that interview:

Solzhenitsyn: "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."

Does anyone doubt that mandates, taxation and regulation are means of the "coercion" Solzhenitsyn so eloquently describes?

Further, does anyone doubt that recent attempts by the President to link the teachings of Jesus to his coercive policies, as he did at the National Prayer Breakfast, are not consistent with what Solzhenitsyn described as "Communist propaganda" in the above-quoted interview?

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, polkers, or whatever else was at hand?

Part I The Prison Industry, Ch. 1 "Arrest" (p13, The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Collins 1974)