Free Republic

Today we'll explore the topics of things to live for, to die for, and to kill for; the newtopia percolating on the fringes today, and explore the words of warning from Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov, as well as Solzhenitsyn's "Godlessness: The First Step to the Gulag". Yeah... light stuff. Plus+ the week in review including the Obama Admin's "Classy Action" of the week (a three-way tie!), the fascism of Sean Penn, and your calls! Live at 3pmE/2pmTX/NoonP Listen live here. Call-in number: 347-327-9710

"Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic disease of the 20th century and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press. Such as it is, however, the press has become the greatest power within the Western countries, more powerful than the legislative power, the executive, and the judiciary." "If humanism were right in declaring that man is born only to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to die, his task on earth evidently must be of a more spiritual nature. It cannot be unrestrained enjoyment of everyday life. It...

SOLZHENITSYN…HE TRIED TO WARN US By: Pastor Bill Randles ”“Wisdom cries out loud in the streets, she raises her voice in the squares…" Proverbs 1:20 Harvard’s motto is “Veritas”. Many of you have already found out, and others will find out in the course of their lives, that truth eludes us if we do not concentrate our attention totally on its pursuit. But even while it eludes us, the illusion of knowing it still lingers and leads to many misunderstandings. (From Solzhenitsyn’s 1978 Harvard address “A World Split Apart”) Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a Nobel Prize winning author, Soviet dissident and a...

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a Soviet Russian, anti Communist Christian dissident who was either imprisoned in the infamous Gulags or persecuted from about 1945 until 1975 for calling Joe Stalin "Mr. Whiskers" and other extremely unpatriotic criticisms of the Russian Socialist Republic. Solzhenitsyn lived not only to be exonerated after surviving so many horrors, he waxed very prophetic by warning the West - over thirty years ago - how we were following the exact path of Marxism which had overtaken Russia and plunged it into the darkest most demonic era in its history.Aleksandr S., however brilliant, may not have grasped the...

They were right. Starting at the moment of his famous address at Harvard in 1978 (see http://snipurl.com/harvardspeech), Solzhenitsyn became, in effect, mute. Why? Because the cultural elite of the West is just as unhappy to hear itself criticized as the political elite of the Soviet Nomenklatura. How dare Solzehenitsyn fail to recognize that the American intellectual establishment was not in possession of Truth! How dare he point out that in our arrogance, we of the West were as blind to our own doom as the Communists? Let me quote just one passage from Solzhenitsyn's speech: "A decline in courage may...

There's been a ton of buzz on the web for the last day or so -- beginning with this Daily Kos diary -- suggesting that John McCain patterned his story about a Vietamese captor drawing a cross in the dirt before him on a similar episode from Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn's time in the Soviet gulags. But it turns out that this episode probably never happened to Solzhenitsyn at all, and according to a Solzhenitsyn biographer it appears nowhere in his published writing. Columbia University professor Michael Scammell, the author of Solzhenitsyn: A Biography, says the episode "never happened," and...

Solzhenitsyn's Warning The faculty of Harvard University admired Alexandr Solzhenitsyn for his literary achievements, so they were thrilled that he agreed to deliver the university’s 1978 commencement address. But almost as soon as he began to speak, the professors changed their minds: too late. As I wrote this month in Christianity Today, they realized that Solzhenitsyn was charging them with complicity in the West’s surrender to liberal secularism, the abandonment of its Christian heritage, and of all the moral horrors that followed. For example, describing the Western worldview as “rationalistic humanism,” Solzhenitsyn decried the loss of “our concept of...

In a tribute I wrote earlier, posted at National Review, I noted that it is impossible to capture in one column what Solzhenitsyn meant, experienced, and how he went about translating it to the West.--snip--Reagan, in turn, thanked God for Solzhenitsyn. The great dissident did far more than simply write a great book or two. Solzehnitsyn played a significant role in the American effort to place a stake in the heart of militant, atheistic Soviet communism. And for that and much more, Alexander Solzhenitsyn can now rest in peace, receiving some long overdue rewards, eternally free from the Siberian hell...

Great Lives: News of the death of Russian literary genius Alexander Solzhenitsyn recalls a life that proved truth triumphs over totalitarianism. And it renews focus on why extreme ideology and personality cults fail.Unlike the Parisian cafe intellectuals of postwar Europe endlessly mulling repression of the mind and questioning whether truth existed, the great Russian writer knew there was a such thing as truth and that it was worth fighting for. It's what enabled this survivor of eight years in the USSR's Gulag to destroy the moral force of communism as an idea, as the writer Tom Wolfe noted. "Marxism was...

Alexander Solzhenitsyn's anti-Sovietism was heroic and influential, but its other side became clearer upon the Union's collapse. The death of the literary colossus and anti-Soviet dissident has, quite rightly, been greeted with an outpouring of praise for his principled and brave unmasking of the horrors of the Soviet regime. His literary achievements, closely connected with his dissident activities, have also justifiably received much attention. But there is another side to Solzhenitsyn – one which most obituaries have mentioned only in passing, if at all. Solzhenitsyn's analysis of Soviet communism was based on the notion that the Bolsheviks imposed a totalitarian...

Solzhenitsyn Laid to Rest at Monastery 07 August 2008 By Matt Siegel / Staff Writer It was as though someone had suddenly removed the stopper from an overturned bottle. As the great man's body, hoisted high by a military procession, made its final turn on the path toward the cemetery, a sea of mourners poured down the church steps like water down a rocky crag. The crowds had to be held back as a salute was fired. They had to be held back as the choir, chanting a hymn about eternal life, hovered over the freshly dug grave. They had...

MILLVILLE - It was something she felt was remarkable at the time, as she and the rest of the congregation filed in behind him in the small church and left the general public standing on the lawn waiting for him to emerge again. When Alexander Solzhenitsyn visited Millville and the St. Nicholas Old Russian Orthodox Church in 1976, his message, delivered in Russian to a crowd of between 50 and 70 congregants, was about culture, pride in religion and maintaining the existence of that which was threatened by the Western world. The Nobel Prize-winning author who provided firsthand accounts of...

Alexander Solzhenitsyn is dead. Peter Rodman is dead. And memory is dying with them. Over the weekend, Solzhenitsyn, the 89-year-old literary titan, and Rodman, the American foreign-policy intellectual, passed away. I knew Rodman and liked him very much. We were partners in a debate at Oxford University last year. He provided the gravitas. A former protege of Henry Kissinger and high-ranking official in two Republican administrations, Rodman was one of the wisest of the wise men of the conservative foreign-policy establishment. Calm, elegant, dryly funny, brilliant, but most of all gentlemanly. He died too young, at 64, of leukemia. Solzhenitsyn...

Despite penning 38 paragraphs for his obituary, the closest AP's Douglas Birch came to mentioning the late Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Christian faith was by remarking how the bearded author and Soviet dissident looked like a religious icon: In a 1978 speech at Harvard University, Solzhenitsyn - who with his beard and dour demeanor resembled a figure from an Orthodox icon - denounced the Western view that liberal democracy was fated to triumph in non-Western civilizations, which he called "worlds" unto themselves. Yet it was in that speech -- "A World Split Apart" -- Baptist theologian Albert Mohler argues, that Solzhenitsyn famously...

In 1949 a publication of the Soviet Academy of Sciences carried an item about a bizarre incident that occurred during excavations near the Kolyma River in the gold-mining region of northeastern Siberia. A subterranean stream was discovered, frozen long ago, containing fish and salamanders tens of thousands of years old. They were so well preserved that the men who discovered the stream broke open the ice and ate them. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who died on Sunday at the age of 89, managed somehow to read that piece.

Having thrown away the United Nations and trampled its Charter under foot, NATO has proclaimed before the world for the coming century an old law, that of the jungle: the strongest is always right. If your high technology permits it, surpass a hundred times in violence the adversary you condemn. And it is in this world that you invite us to live henceforth. Under the eyes of humanity they are destroying a magnificent European country, and the civilized governments applaud it. When the people [of Serbia] in despair leave their shelters and make human chains, at the risk of their...

More than half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older 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 fifty 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...

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning Russian author whose books chronicled the horrors of dictator Josef Stalin's slave labor camps, has died of heart failure, his son said Monday. He was 89.

Text of Address by Alexander Solzhenitsynat Harvard Class Day Afternoon Exercises,Thursday, June 8, 1978I am sincerely happy to be here with you on this occasion and to become personally acquainted with this old and most prestigious University. My congratulations and very best wishes to all of today's graduates. Harvard's motto is "Veritas." Many of you have already found out and others will find out in the course of their lives that truth eludes us if we do not concentrate with total attention on its pursuit. And even while it eludes us, the illusion still lingers of knowing it and...

Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who exposed Stalin's prison system in his novels and spent 20 years in exile, has died near Moscow at the age of 89. The author of The Gulag Archipelago and One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich, who returned to Russia in 1994, died of either a stroke or heart failure..... Russian President Dmitry Medvedev sent his condolences to the writer's family, a Kremlin spokesperson said. French President Nicolas Sarkozy described as "one of the greatest consciences of 20th Century Russia." "His intransigence, his ideals and his long, eventful life make of Solzhenitsyn a storybook...