Prelude to the "Final Battle"
Aug 12, 2016 13:31:10 #
From http://heedingthetimes.net/reviews/alexander-solzhenitsyn.html :
"A Hard Message
Thirty years ago, Solzhenitsyn addressed a crowd at Harvard on “A World Split Apart.” The title referred to the split between two world powers, but he meant much more than the conflict between Communism and the democratic West.
He began by reflecting on Harvard’s motto “Veritas” (Ttruth), which easily eludes us, and that in any case often is unpleasant and even bitter.
The thrust of his message to the elite Harvard audience was that the seeds of the disaster that has befallen the Russian people are also present in the free West. Solzhenitsyn said that he discerned a kind of spiritual, moral sickness in the West that has ominous implications for its future. Here is a summary of the warning signs listed in his Harvard speech.
A decline in Courage. This may be the “most striking feature” of the West, which has lost its civil courage. Such loss is most noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite. Although there are still many courageous individuals, they have no real influence on public life. History has shown that decline in courage is often the beginning of the end.
Well-Being. The modern Western states were created to cater to the popular desire for happiness, which has resulted in the welfare state. Every citizen is given maximum freedom and material goods. What has been overlooked is that the desire for ever more goods and a still better life gives rise to worry and frustration. Furthermore, when generations are accustomed to seeing their happiness in the good life understood in materialistic terms, why should they risk their life in the defence of common values? (“Better Red than dead.”) An extreme emphasis on safety and well being in today’s welfare state “has begun to reveal its pernicious mask.”
Legalistic Life. Western society is organized around the letter of the law. But this has given rise to applying the law in a manipulative way so that the moral rule is trumped by the desire to win at any cost without any self-restraint. A regime, such as communism, without any legal rules is a terrible one, but a society with no other standard than a legal one is also unworthy of man. It will be impossible to stand through the trials of our threatening age with only the support of a legalistic structure, for it will give rise to “an atmosphere of moral mediocrity, paralyzing man’s noblest impulses.”
The Direction of Freedom. Freedom is now seen and experienced as freedom for good as well as for evil deeds. Statesmen who want to accomplish something important will be confronted with many traps. The emphasis on individual rights has undermined administrative power, but what now needs to be emphasized is not human rights but human obligations.
Destructive freedom has made society defenceless against human decadence and criminality. While this speech was given in 1978, Solzhenitsyn showed real foresight in saying that when a government starts to fight terrorism in earnest, it is accused of violating the terrorists’ civil rights. This tilt of freedom in the direction of evil results from the humanistic belief that there is no evil inherent to human nature. Instead, evil is seen to arise from wrong social systems, which must be corrected.
The Direction of the Press. Here too the emphasis is on the letter of the law, but there is no moral responsibility for deformation or disproportion. Every day the public is exposed to hasty, immature, superficial and misleading judgments. Thus we see terrorists treated as heroes, secret matters pertaining to a nation’s security publicized, or the privacy of well-known people intruded with the false slogan: veryone is entitled to know everything.”
“Enormous freedom exists for the press, but not for the readership because newspapers mostly give enough stress and emphasis to those opinions which do not too openly contradict their own and the general trend.”
A Fashion of Thinking. Without formal censorship in the West, there has nevertheless developed a trend in which certain fashionable ideas always predominate in the media and literature. “This gives birth to strong mass prejudices, blindness, which is most dangerous in our dynamic era.” This self-deluding interpretation of the contemporary world becomes a petrified armor around people’s minds.” (Although Solzhenitsyn did not use the term, here he is obviously referring to what is now called “political correctness.”)
Socialism. Although the West has experienced unprecedented economic development and prosperity, many living in the West are dissatisfied with their own society. Some of them have turned to socialism, but it is a false and dangerous current. The Soviet mathematician Shafarevich has written a brilliant book, The Socialist Phenomenon, showing that socialism in any type and shade “leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death.”
Shortsightedness. Many in the West believe that we cannot apply moral criteria to politics. But such a position implies that we mix good and evil, right and wrong, and that we pave the way for the triumph of absolute Evil in the world. The truth is that only moral criteria can help the West against communism’s well-planned strategy. Without such criteria, confusion will remain, and we will not even recognize the enemy for what it is.
This explains the ignorance about the real meaning of the Vietnam War and the betrayal of Far Eastern nations that caused untold suffering and death to millions. American pacifists thought that they had won, but their contribution was to immobilize the nation’s courage. It was the same ignorance that thought the Soviet Union was an ally against Nazi Germany. In fact, Western democracies helped to nurture the Soviet Union with a large number of admirers in the West as a “fifth column.”
Los of Willpower. The current state of the West is one of psychological weakness marked by a refusal to defend itself. Hence the possibility that the next war will bury Western civilization. How has such a sad sate come about?
Humanism* and its Consequences. Solzhenitsyn asks: “How did the West decline from its triumphal march to its present sickness?” His answer is bound to alienate most if not all of the Western elite, because he traces the problem back to the prevailing view of the Western world as it developed in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. This is the view that humans are supreme, self-sufficient, and therefore are not subject to any authority above themselves. Solzhenitsyn refers to this as “rationalistic humanism” or “humanistic autonomy,” which can also be called “anthropocentricity.”
While the Middle Ages had exhausted itself in repressing man’s physical nature in favour of the spiritual, the Enlightenment took the opposite turn. Then the worship of man and his happiness became the goal by means of unlimited freedom in the use and control of the physical world. As a result man’s sense of responsibility to God has grown dimmer and dimmer, allowing evil to have free reign.
Karl Marx could say, Communism is naturalized humanism.” He was right, and that is why the communist regime in the East “could stand and grow due to the enthusiastic support of an enormous number of Western intellectuals who felt a kinship and refused to see communism’s crimes.”
By placing our hope in political and social reforms, we deprived ourselves of our most precious possession, our spiritual life. Both the communist East and the democratic West are facing a crisis that can only be resolved by turning away form the current, dominant materialistic ideology.
Solzhenitsyn concluded his speech by saying that we have reached a turn in the road that is similar {in impact) to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance:
It will exact from us a spiritual upsurge, we shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life where our physical nature will not be cursed as in the Middle Ages, but, even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon as in the Modern era. This ascension will be similar to climbing onto the next anthropologic stage. No one on earth has any other way left but – upward."
Haven't I been telling you that America is weak, decadent and matriarchal? And deceptive.
However, the author, Harry Antonides, is wrong on one account: About Solzhenitsyn, Antonides said that he "...grossly misjudged the character of Vladimir Putin." In actuality, Solzhenitsyn got the character of Putin and Russia exactly right!!
"A Hard Message
Thirty years ago, Solzhenitsyn addressed a crowd at Harvard on “A World Split Apart.” The title referred to the split between two world powers, but he meant much more than the conflict between Communism and the democratic West.
He began by reflecting on Harvard’s motto “Veritas” (Ttruth), which easily eludes us, and that in any case often is unpleasant and even bitter.
The thrust of his message to the elite Harvard audience was that the seeds of the disaster that has befallen the Russian people are also present in the free West. Solzhenitsyn said that he discerned a kind of spiritual, moral sickness in the West that has ominous implications for its future. Here is a summary of the warning signs listed in his Harvard speech.
A decline in Courage. This may be the “most striking feature” of the West, which has lost its civil courage. Such loss is most noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite. Although there are still many courageous individuals, they have no real influence on public life. History has shown that decline in courage is often the beginning of the end.
Well-Being. The modern Western states were created to cater to the popular desire for happiness, which has resulted in the welfare state. Every citizen is given maximum freedom and material goods. What has been overlooked is that the desire for ever more goods and a still better life gives rise to worry and frustration. Furthermore, when generations are accustomed to seeing their happiness in the good life understood in materialistic terms, why should they risk their life in the defence of common values? (“Better Red than dead.”) An extreme emphasis on safety and well being in today’s welfare state “has begun to reveal its pernicious mask.”
Legalistic Life. Western society is organized around the letter of the law. But this has given rise to applying the law in a manipulative way so that the moral rule is trumped by the desire to win at any cost without any self-restraint. A regime, such as communism, without any legal rules is a terrible one, but a society with no other standard than a legal one is also unworthy of man. It will be impossible to stand through the trials of our threatening age with only the support of a legalistic structure, for it will give rise to “an atmosphere of moral mediocrity, paralyzing man’s noblest impulses.”
The Direction of Freedom. Freedom is now seen and experienced as freedom for good as well as for evil deeds. Statesmen who want to accomplish something important will be confronted with many traps. The emphasis on individual rights has undermined administrative power, but what now needs to be emphasized is not human rights but human obligations.
Destructive freedom has made society defenceless against human decadence and criminality. While this speech was given in 1978, Solzhenitsyn showed real foresight in saying that when a government starts to fight terrorism in earnest, it is accused of violating the terrorists’ civil rights. This tilt of freedom in the direction of evil results from the humanistic belief that there is no evil inherent to human nature. Instead, evil is seen to arise from wrong social systems, which must be corrected.
The Direction of the Press. Here too the emphasis is on the letter of the law, but there is no moral responsibility for deformation or disproportion. Every day the public is exposed to hasty, immature, superficial and misleading judgments. Thus we see terrorists treated as heroes, secret matters pertaining to a nation’s security publicized, or the privacy of well-known people intruded with the false slogan: veryone is entitled to know everything.”
“Enormous freedom exists for the press, but not for the readership because newspapers mostly give enough stress and emphasis to those opinions which do not too openly contradict their own and the general trend.”
A Fashion of Thinking. Without formal censorship in the West, there has nevertheless developed a trend in which certain fashionable ideas always predominate in the media and literature. “This gives birth to strong mass prejudices, blindness, which is most dangerous in our dynamic era.” This self-deluding interpretation of the contemporary world becomes a petrified armor around people’s minds.” (Although Solzhenitsyn did not use the term, here he is obviously referring to what is now called “political correctness.”)
Socialism. Although the West has experienced unprecedented economic development and prosperity, many living in the West are dissatisfied with their own society. Some of them have turned to socialism, but it is a false and dangerous current. The Soviet mathematician Shafarevich has written a brilliant book, The Socialist Phenomenon, showing that socialism in any type and shade “leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death.”
Shortsightedness. Many in the West believe that we cannot apply moral criteria to politics. But such a position implies that we mix good and evil, right and wrong, and that we pave the way for the triumph of absolute Evil in the world. The truth is that only moral criteria can help the West against communism’s well-planned strategy. Without such criteria, confusion will remain, and we will not even recognize the enemy for what it is.
This explains the ignorance about the real meaning of the Vietnam War and the betrayal of Far Eastern nations that caused untold suffering and death to millions. American pacifists thought that they had won, but their contribution was to immobilize the nation’s courage. It was the same ignorance that thought the Soviet Union was an ally against Nazi Germany. In fact, Western democracies helped to nurture the Soviet Union with a large number of admirers in the West as a “fifth column.”
Los of Willpower. The current state of the West is one of psychological weakness marked by a refusal to defend itself. Hence the possibility that the next war will bury Western civilization. How has such a sad sate come about?
Humanism* and its Consequences. Solzhenitsyn asks: “How did the West decline from its triumphal march to its present sickness?” His answer is bound to alienate most if not all of the Western elite, because he traces the problem back to the prevailing view of the Western world as it developed in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. This is the view that humans are supreme, self-sufficient, and therefore are not subject to any authority above themselves. Solzhenitsyn refers to this as “rationalistic humanism” or “humanistic autonomy,” which can also be called “anthropocentricity.”
While the Middle Ages had exhausted itself in repressing man’s physical nature in favour of the spiritual, the Enlightenment took the opposite turn. Then the worship of man and his happiness became the goal by means of unlimited freedom in the use and control of the physical world. As a result man’s sense of responsibility to God has grown dimmer and dimmer, allowing evil to have free reign.
Karl Marx could say, Communism is naturalized humanism.” He was right, and that is why the communist regime in the East “could stand and grow due to the enthusiastic support of an enormous number of Western intellectuals who felt a kinship and refused to see communism’s crimes.”
By placing our hope in political and social reforms, we deprived ourselves of our most precious possession, our spiritual life. Both the communist East and the democratic West are facing a crisis that can only be resolved by turning away form the current, dominant materialistic ideology.
Solzhenitsyn concluded his speech by saying that we have reached a turn in the road that is similar {in impact) to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance:
It will exact from us a spiritual upsurge, we shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life where our physical nature will not be cursed as in the Middle Ages, but, even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon as in the Modern era. This ascension will be similar to climbing onto the next anthropologic stage. No one on earth has any other way left but – upward."
Haven't I been telling you that America is weak, decadent and matriarchal? And deceptive.
However, the author, Harry Antonides, is wrong on one account: About Solzhenitsyn, Antonides said that he "...grossly misjudged the character of Vladimir Putin." In actuality, Solzhenitsyn got the character of Putin and Russia exactly right!!
Aug 12, 2016 13:33:08 #
For a link to Solzhenitsyn and Putin:
http://archive.boston.com/news/world/europe/articles/2008/08/05/toward_end_solzhenitsyn_embraced_putins_russia/
http://archive.boston.com/news/world/europe/articles/2008/08/05/toward_end_solzhenitsyn_embraced_putins_russia/
Aug 24, 2016 23:46:59 #
nwtk2007
Loc: Texas
KiraSeer2016 wrote:
Time for the return of Honor. As Worf would say, the Americans HAVE no Honor.
Where has Honor gone?
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