Word: solzhenitsyns
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...Solzhenitsyn has been falsely accused of calling for a holy war against Communism. He is in fact calling for a resolute defense of freedom as our best hope for an honorable peace. We should have learned by now that peace at any price means abject surrender to brutal aggression. In essence Solzhenitsyn's view is no different from President John Kennedy's early declaration about freedom or from that of Winston Churchill...
...Solzhenitsyn is right in his denunciation of the double standard of morality that prevails in the academy. Contrast the silence about the genocide in Cambodia and about repression in Cuba and Viet Nam with the stormy agitation about South Korea or South Africa. Solzhenitsyn is right in decrying our failure of nerve. He is saying that any society that makes mere survival the be-all and end-all of life will sacrifice everything that makes life worth living. He is warning us that whoever values comfort, property or security above freedom when it is threatened will lose not only their...
...child of European fascism, a survivor of Hitler's Holocaust, a student in Stalin's spiritual gulags, ready to reject the freedom I have enjoyed in this nation for 20 years because Solzhenitsyn tells us that here "the defense of individual rights has reached such extremes as to make society as a whole defenseless against certain individuals"? Am I, who have passed half of my life at the mercy of totalitarian authority, really to feel that my personal freedom in this country is now endangered because, as Solzhenitsyn regrets, "a statesman who wants to achieve something important...
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...
...Solzhenitsyn is a type of Isaiah, the angry prophet who arises when mankind is seriously misbehaving to denounce the age and its sins. People like to be scolded, especially when their conscience is bad - as it is in this last quarter of the terrible 20th century. This explains the Solzhenitsyn cult. He is fashionable; he is our Savonarola. I do not believe everything he says about Western society, although it is useful to hear his strictures; they make us think. Relatively speaking, however, I think America has good qualities, perhaps less operative now than they might be, but inherent, nonetheless...