Word: comprehended
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Sharing with Solzhenitsyn a despair over the millions who perished in totalitarian hands (including all but three members of my once numerous family), I nevertheless believe that he has failed to comprehend that often democracy is at best a shifting state between the tyranny it overthrew and the tyranny it might become. Even though freedom, tolerance and other qualities might be termed democracy's adjusted faults, these are by far to be preferred to the rigid correctitude of totalitarianism. Like a writer's work, freedom exists only when it is constantly interpreted - even misinterpreted...
...elderly local official who, too unsophisticated to comprehend the twists and turns of the Cultural Revolution, is executed by a group of Red Guards. Unable to perceive that he has become a victim of irrationality and self-righteousness, he clings like some Chinese Billy Budd to the one bit of certainty he knows. At the moment of his unjust death, he shouts, "Long live the Communist Party! Long live Chairman Mao!" Another less innocent victim is Jen Hsiu-lan, a proud, fanatical woman revolutionary who loses out in one of the revolution's murky factional twists. Rather than submit...
Among his more provocative propositions: that man created God in his own image; that a man cannot comprehend God's transcendent love unless he has fully experienced the carnal love of a woman; that God is a cosmic jokester, with man as his butt and the earth as his torture chamber; that nothingness is the bedrock meaning of existence...
...must agree with Lance Morrow's observation that the American adolescent trying to comprehend the phenomenon from television comes away with a shallow understanding...
...children have toured Dachau. They saw the ovens and stood in the showers, but they didn't begin to comprehend what happened until they watched Holocaust. The drama was worthwhile...