Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Witness

Rod,

Thanks for posting this, including the link to his June 1978 speech at Harvard. When I heard the news on the radio last night, I thought to myself, "I sure hope Rod Dreher discusses this man and his message." Great job!!

What Hobsbawm's position comes down to, the interviewer suggested, "is saying that had the radiant tomorrow actually been created, the loss of fifteen, twenty million people might have been justified?" Hobsbawm: "Yes."
-------------------------------------------------------------

As I have said before, for a utopian no actions can be construed as a crime if those actions are committed in the service of creating a perfect society.

Wow, I just read Solzhenitzyn's 1978 speech at Harvard. Thanks for the link, Rod. But in your excerpt above, I think you should have included the following paragraph, which seems awfully significant. I'm including it here from all you CC readers:

"However, in early democracies, as in American democracy at the time of its birth, all individual human rights were granted because man is God's creature. That is, freedom was given to the individual conditionally, in the assumption of his constant religious responsibility. Such was the heritage of the preceding thousand years. Two hundred or even fifty years ago, it would have seemed quite impossible, in America, that an individual could be granted boundless freedom simply for the satisfaction of his instincts or whims. Subsequently, however, all such limitations were discarded everywhere in the West; a total liberation occurred from the moral heritage of Christian centuries with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice. State systems were becoming increasingly and totally materialistic. The West ended up by truly enforcing human rights, sometimes even excessively, but man's sense of responsibility to God and society grew dimmer and dimmer. In the past decades, the legalistically selfish aspect of Western approach and thinking has reached its final dimension and the world wound up in a harsh spiritual crisis and a political impasse. All the glorified technological achievements of Progress, including the conquest of outer space, do not redeem the Twentieth century's moral poverty which no one could imagine even as late as in the Nineteenth Century."

This chart on "Century of Death" from a 2005/6 National Geographic cemented it for me,

http://static.flickr.com/39/82177035_10794c1506.jpg

(H/T cdrsalamander.blogspot.com/2006/01/ 20th-century-deathcount.html)

and of course the Ratzinger discourses on the Dictatorship of Relativism -- there is nothing more heinously tyrannical than to make the value of present existence "relative" to a figment of the imagination of future events, yet to be (or not, since in all likelihood when humans resort to their own means to attain their proper end neglecting Divine assistance, uncertainty tending to chaos is more probable)

And yet what size blot on the global shame scale does the United States citizenry's support of freedom of choice represent? The pink ink required to depict the 46 million-persons-sized data point(*) for babies killed legally in utero on American soil since 1973 would overwhelm all the others left of scale in modern times -

Who is the enemy?

. . W.E . . A.R.E . . !

And who the victims?

. . p.r.e.b.o.r.n . . A.m.e.r.i.c.a.n.s . . !
______________
Footnote: * estimate total number of abortions see
Finer LB and Henshaw SK, Estimates of U.S. Abortion Incidence in 2001 and 2002, Alan Guttmacher Institute, 2005
www.guttmacher.org / pubs/2005/05/18/ ab_incidence.pdf