Solzhenitsyn's Warning to the West, Part V

 

More selected passages from Solzhenitsyn’s Warning to the West.  This one is the last, best, and longest.  Taken from his talk on BBC radio on 24 March 1976.  This one truly brings home what came before us and the daunting task in front of us.  Please read this and share it as widely as you are able.

…The years went by.  The decades went by.  In spite of the Iron Curtain, views on what was happening in the West, what people were thinking about, kept coming through to us [in the USSR’s Gulags], mainly thanks to the BBC’s Russian broadcasts, although they were vigorously jammed.  And the more we learned, the more the state of your world perplexed us.

Human nature is full of riddles and contradictions; its very complexity engenders art—and by art I mean the search for something more than simple linear formulations, flat solutions, over simplified explanations.  One of these riddles is: how is it that people who have been crushed by the sheer weight of slavery and cast to the bottom of the pit can nevertheless find the strength to rise up and free themselves, first in spirit and then in body; while those who soar unhampered over the peaks of freedom suddenly lost the taste for freedom, lose the will to defend it, and, hopelessly confused and lost, almost begin to crave slavery?  Or again: why is it that societies which have been benumbed for half a century by lies they have been forced to swallow find within themselves a certain lucidity of heart and soul which enables them to see things in their true perspective and to perceive the real meaning of events; whereas societies with access to every kind of information suddenly plunge into lethargy, into a kind of mass blindness, a kind of voluntary self-deception? [Emphasis added]

This is precisely what we have found to be the correlation between the spiritual development of the East and that of the West.  And, alas, the process of your development is five, if not ten times swifter than ours.  This is what almost robs mankind of any hope of avoiding a global catastrophe.  For years we refused to believe this, thinking that the information which reached us was inadequate.  A few years ago I spoke of this with considerable alarm, in my Nobel lecture.

And yet, until I came to the West myself and spent two years looking around, I could never have imagined the extreme degree to which the West actually desired to blind itself to the world situation, the extreme degree to which the West had already become a world without a will, a world gradually petrifying in the face of the danger confronting it, a world oppressed above all by the need to defend its freedom.

There is a German proverb which runs “Mut verloren—alles verloren”: “When courage is lost, all is lost”.  There is another Latin one, according to which the loss of reason is the true harbinger of destruction.  But what happens to a society in which both these losses—the loss of courage and the loss of reason—intersect?  This is the picture which I found the West presents today.

Of course there is a perfectly simple explanation for this process.  It is not the superficial one, so fashionable in our day, that man himself is irreproachable and everything is to be blamed on a badly organized society, but a purely human one.  Once, it was proclaimed and accepted that above man there was no supreme being, but instead that man was the crowning glory of the universe and the measure of all things, and that man’s needs, desires, and indeed his weaknesses were taken to be the supreme imperatives of the universe.  Consequently, the only good in the world—the only thing that needed to be done—was that which satisfied our feelings.  It was several centuries ago in Europe that this philosophy was born; at the time, its materialistic excesses were explained away by the previous excesses of Catholicism.  But in the course of several centuries this philosophy inexorably flooded the entire Western world, and gave it confidence for its colonial conquests, for the seizure of African and Asian slaves.   And all this side by side with the outward manifestations of Christianity and the flowering of personal freedom.  By the beginning of the twentieth century this philosophy seemed to have reached the height of civilization and reason.  And your country, Britain, which had always been the core, the very the pearl, of the Western world, gave expression with particular brilliance of this philosophy in both its good and its bad aspects.

In 1914, at the beginning of our ill-fated twentieth century, a storm broke over this civilization, a storm the size and range of which no one at that time could grasp.  For four years Europe destroyed herself as never before, and in 1917 a crevasse opened up on the very edge of Europe, a yawning gap enticing the world into an abyss.

The causes for this crevasse are not hard to find: it was the logical result of doctrines that been bandied about in Europe of ages and had enjoyed considerable success.  But this crevasse has something cosmic about it, too, in its unplumbed, unsuspected depths, in its unimaginable capacity for growing wider and wider and swallowing up more and more people.

Forty years earlier Dostoevsky had predicted that socialism would cost Russia 100 million victims.  At the time it seemed an improbable figure.  Let me ask the British press to acquaint its readers with the impartial three-page report of the Russian statistician Professor Ivan Kurganov.  It was published in the West twelve years ago, but, as is so often the case with matters of social significance, we only notice things that are not contradictory to our own feelings.  From Professor Kurganov’s analysis, we learn that if Dostoevsky erred, he erred on the side of understatement.  From 1917 to 1959 socialism cost the Soviet Union 110 million lives!   

When there is a geological upheaval, continents do not topple into the sea immediately.  The first thing that happens is that the fatal initial crevasse must appear someplace.  For a variety of reasons it so happened that this crevasse first opened up in Russia, but it might just as well have been anywhere else.  And Russia, which people considered a backward country, had to leap forward a whole century to overtake all the other countries in the world.  We endured inhuman experiences which the Western world—and this includes Britain—has no real conception of and is frightened even to think about.

It is with a strange feeling that those of us who come from the Soviet Union look upon the West today.  It is as though we were neither neighbors on the same planet nor contemporaries.  And  yet we contemplate the West from what will be your future, or we look back seventy years to see our past suddenly repeating itself today.  And what we see is always the same as it was then: adults deferring to the opinion of their children; the younger generation carried away by shallow, worthless ideas; professors scared of being unfashionable; journalists refusing to take responsibility for the words they squander so easily; universal sympathy for revolutionary extremists; people with serious objections unable or unwilling to voice them; the majority passively obsessed by a feeling of doom; feeble governments; societies whose defensive reactions have become paralyzed; spiritual confusion leading to political upheaval.  What will happen as a result of all this lies ahead of us.  But the time is near, and from bitter memory we can easily predict what these events will be. [Emphasis Added]

Please go back and read that last paragraph aloud to yourself.  Solzhenitsyn said those words to us 45 years ago.

Pray.  Think, people.  Speak the truth.  Your freedom is your gift and your burden.  To earn it, you must carry it and hold it with the utmost care. 

 

 

Solzhenitsyn's Warning to the West, Part IV

 

Day four of selected passages from Solzhenitsyn’s Warning to the West, from his speech to the AFL-CIO in D.C. on 30 June 1975.  In ’75, for those too young to remember, the U.S. Government was trying to avoid Nuclear War with the USSR by pandering and détente.  Ford was not a strong voice for freedom.  Here’s what Alexandr thought of that diplomatic approach.  Again, note how this lines up with current events and how we’re dealing with China currently:

You have to understand the nature of Communism, all of Lenin’s teachings, are that anyone who doesn’t take what’s lying in front of him is considered a fool.  If you can take it, do so.  If you can attack, strike.  But if there’s a wall, then retreat. [No shit, that’s a direct fucking quote.]  The Communist leaders respect only firmness and have contempt for persons who continually give in to them.  Your people are now saying—and this is the last quotation Iam going to give you from the statements of your leaders—'Power, without any attempt at conciliation, will lead to a world conflict.’  But I would say that power with continual acquiescence is not power at all.

 From our experience I can tell you that only firmness makes it possible to withstand the assaults of Communist totalitarianism.  History offers many examples, and let me give you some of them.  Look at little Finland in 1939, which by its own forces withstood the attack.  You, in 1948, defended Berlin by your own firmness of spirit, and there was no world conflict.  In Korea in 1950 you stood up to the Communists, only by your firmness, and there was no world conflict.  In 1962 you forced the missiles to be removed from Cuba.  Again it was only firmness, and there was no world conflict.  The late Konrad Adenauer conducted firm negotiations with Khrushchev and initiated a genuine détente with Khrushchev, who started to make concessions…

 …We, the dissidents of the USSR, have no tanks, no weapons, no organization.  We have nothing.  Our hands are empty.  We have only our hearts and what we have lived through in the half century under this system.  And whenever we have found the firmness within ourselves to stand up for our rights, we have done so.  It is only by firmness of spirit that we have withstood.  And if I am standing here before you, it is not because of the kindness or good will of Communism, not thanks to détente, but due to my own firmness and your firm support.  They knew that I would not yield an inch, not a hair’s breadth.  And when they could do nothing they themselves fell back.

 …Finally to evaluate everything that I have said to you, we need not remain on the level of practical calculations.  Why did such and such a country act in such and such a way?  What were they counting on?  Instead we should rise above this to the moral level and say: ‘In 1933 and 1941 your leaders and the whole Western world made an unprincipled deal with totalitarianism.’  We will have to pay for this; someday it will come back to haunt us.  For thirty years we have been paying for it.  And we’re going to pay for it in an even worse way in the future. 

Look around.  Check’s come due.  Pay attention.

Solzhenitsyn's Warning to the West, Part III

 

More from Solzhenitsyn’s Warning to the West speech of 30 June 1975 in D.C., to the AFL-CIO.  He describes the context of the Communist system.  Most Americans aren’t tracking this information.  Not much of it has been taught in schools.  Note that the Soviet tyranny was several of orders of magnitude larger than that of Nazi Germany, and China is several orders of magnitude larger than the USSR.  With that in mind, as you read, note the parallels between the nascent Soviets and what is happening around us in Canada, Europe, and the US right now.  I lost count.

For decades on end, throughout the 1920’s, the 1930’s, the 1940’s, and 1950’s, the Soviet Press kept writing ‘Western Capitalism, your end is near.  We will destroy you.’

But it was as if the capitalists had not heard, could not understand, could not believe this.

Nikita Khrushchev came here and said, ‘We will bury you!’ They [the capitalists] didn’t believe that either.  They took it as a joke.

Now, of course, they [the Soviets] have become more clever in our country.  Today they don’t say ‘We are going to bury you,’ now they say, ‘Détente!’.

Nothing has changed in Communist ideology.  The goals are the same as they were, but instead of the artless Khrushchev, who couldn’t hold his tongue, now they say, ‘Détente.’

In order to make this clear, I will take the liberty of presenting a short historic survey—the history of these relations which in different periods have been called, ‘trade,’ ‘stabilization of the situation,’ ‘recognition of realities,’ and now ‘détente.’  These relations have at least a forty year history.

Let me remind you with what kind of system relations began [the Soviet System].

The system was installed by an armed uprising.

It dispersed the Constituent Assembly.

It capitulated to Germany—the common enemy.

It introduced punishment and execution without trial through the Cheka [Secret Police].

It crushed workers’ strikes.

It plundered the countryside to such and unbelievable extent that the peasants revolted, and when this happened it crushed the peasants in the bloodiest possible manner.

It smashed the Church.

It reduced twenty provinces of our country to utter famine.

This was in 1921, the infamous Volga famine. It was a typical Communist technique: to struggle for power without thinking of the fact that the productivity is collapsing, that the fields are not being sown, that the factories stand idle, that the country is sinking into poverty and famine—but when poverty and hunger do come, then turn to the humanitarian world for help.  We see this in North Vietnam today, Portugal is on the same path.  And the same thing happened in Russia in 1921.  When the three-year civil war, started by the Communists—and ‘civil war’ was a slogan of the Communists, civil war was Lenin’s purpose; read Lenin, this was his aim and his slogan—when they had ruined Russia by civil war, then they asked America, ‘America, feed our hungry.’ And indeed, generous and magnanimous America did feed our hungry…

…This was a system which was the first—long before Hitler—to employ false announcements of registration, that is to say: ‘Such and such persons must appear to register.’ People would comply and then they were taken away to be killed.  For technical reasons we didn’t have gas chambers in those days.  We used barges.  A hundred or a thousand persons were put into a barge and then it was sunk…

…This was a system which exterminated all other parties.  And let me make it clear to you that it not only disbanded each party, but destroyed its members.  All members of every non-Communist party were exterminated.

This was a system which carried out genocide of the peasantry.  Fifteen million peasants were shipped off to their deaths. 

This was a system which introduced serfdom, the so-called passport system.

This was a system which, in time of peace, artificially created a famine, causing six million persons to die in the Ukraine between 1932 and 1933.  They died on the very threshold of Europe. And Europe didn’t even notice it.  The world didn’t even notice it.  Six million persons!

 Keep all this in mind. The media narrative ignores Antifa, their destruction, and their arrogance while tacitly excusing their ideology.

Solzhenitsyn's Warning to the West, Part II

 

Night 2 of the series of selections from Solzhenitsyn's "Warning to the West", published in 1976. This is part of his speech to the AFL-CIO on 30 June 1975.  Solzhenitsyn had just survived 10 years in the Soviet Gulags, and had been exiled from his homeland.  He wrote the Gulag Archipelago and won a Nobel Prize for doing so, back when that award had some meaning.

Let me remind you of a recent incident which some of you may have read about in the newspapers, although others might have missed it: certain of your businessmen, on their own initiative, set up an exhibit of criminological technology in Moscow.  This was the most recent and elaborate technology that here, in your country, is used to catch criminals, to bug them, to spy on them, to photograph them, to tail them, to identify them.  It was all put on exhibit in Moscow in order that the Soviet KGB agents could study it, as if the businessmen did not understand what sort of criminals would be hunted down by the KGB.

 

The Soviet government was extremely interested in this technology and decided to purchase it.  And your businessmen were quite willing to sell it.  Only when a few sober voices here raised an uproar against it was this deal blocked.  But you must realize how clever the KGB is.  This technology didn’t have to stay two or three weeks in a Soviet building under Soviet guard.  Two or three nights were enough for the KGB to examine and copy it.  And if today, persons are being hunted down by the best and most advanced technology, for this I can also thank you, Western capitalists.

 

Think of what happened in Hong Kong last year.  How the CCP completely steam rolled that entire island, despite their promises of 1997.  They used American technology to create biometrics and roll up an entire opposition, deport them to the mainland, and imprison them in Gulags…

Just like the 1920s in the USSR.  We’ve allowed our elites to do this once.  Silicon valley is fucking doing it again.  Sit up and take notice.

-Unclean

Solzhenitsyn's Warning to the West, Part I

 

In 1975-1976, Alexandr Solzhenistyn, Nobel Peace Prize winner (back when it still had some meaning) spoke to UFL-CIO gatherings in the United States, and was allowed on the BBC in the United Kingdom.  Someone transcribed those speeches into a compendium that was published in 1976 as "Warning to the West".

 

Ruth bought this compendium for me last month in honor of Fathers' Day, and I read it furiously for about three days.  I sat on it, and I can't do so any further, because you need to read what this man, who spent a decade in the Gulag, had to say regarding the expectations of a downtrodden people of the free folk in the United States.  What he describes, his predictions, and the method in which he describes it, should be imparted to every free man as a caution. 

 

Without further ado, I transcribe a selected portion of the speech that Solzhenitsyn gave to the AFL-CIO in Washington D.C. on 30 June 1975.

 

At the beginning of the Revolution, all those in the leadership, the Central Committee of the Communist Party, were émigré intellectuals who had returned after disturbances had already broken out in Russia to carry out the Communist Revolution.

But one of them was a genuine worker, a highly skilled lathe operator until the last day of his life, Alexander Shliapnikov.  Who is familiar with that name today?  And yet it was he who expressed the true interests of the workers within the Communist leadership. 

In the years before the Revolution, it was Shliapnikov who ran the whole Communist Party in Russia—not Lenin, who was an émigré.  In 1921, he headed the Workers’ Opposition, which charged that the Communist leadership had betrayed the interests of the workers, that is was crushing and oppressing the proletariat, and had degenerated into a bureaucracy.

Shliapnikov disappeared from sight.  He was arrested later, and since he firmly stood his ground he was shot in prison; his name is perhaps unknown to most people here today.  But I remind you: before the Revolution, the head of the Communist Party of Russia was Shlipnikov—not Lenin.

Since that time, the working class has never been able to stand up for its rights and, in contrast to all the Western countries, our working class receives only handouts.  It cannot defend its simplest, everyday interests, and the least strike for pay or for better living conditions is viewed as counter-revolutionary.  Thanks to the closed nature of the Soviet system, you have probably never heard of the textile strikes in 1930 in Ivanovo, or of the 1961 worker unrest in Murom and Alexandrovo, or of the major workers’ uprising in Novocherkassk in 1962—this was in Khrushchev’s time, well after the so-called “thaw”.

The story of this uprising will shortly be told in detail in my book, The Gulag Archipelago III.  It is a story of how workers went in peaceful demonstration to the Novocherkassk party headquarters, carrying portraits of Lenin, to request a change in economic conditions.  They were fired on with machineguns and dispersed with tanks.  No family could even collect its wounded and dead; all were taken away in secret by the authorities…

…In 1947, when liberal thinkers and wise men of the West, who had forgotten the meaning of the word “liberty,” were swearing that there were no concentration camps in the Soviet Union at all, the American Federation of Labor published a map of [Soviet] concentration camps, and on behalf of all prisoners of those times, I want to thank the American workers’ movement for this. 

But just as we feel ourselves your allies here, there also exists another alliance—at first glance a strange and surprising one, but if you think about it, one which is well-founded and easy to understand: this is the alliance between our Communist leaders and your capitalists.

This alliance is not new.  The very famous Armand Hammer, [a businessman] who flourishes here today, laid the basis for this when he made the first exploratory trip to Soviet Russia in Lenin’s time, in the very first years of the Revolution.  He was extremely successful in his reconnaissance mission and ever since then, for all these fifty years, we see continuous and steady support by the businessmen of the West for the Soviet Communist leaders.  The clumsy and awkward Soviet economy, which could never cope with its difficulties on its own, is continually getting material and technological assistance.  The major construction projects in the initial five-year plan were built exclusively with American technology and materials.  Even Stalin recognized that two-thirds of what was needed was obtained from the West.  And if today the Soviet Union has powerful military and police forces—in a country which is poor by contemporary standards—forces which are used to crush our movement for freedom in the Soviet Union—we have Western capital to thank for this as well…

Here is a man talking 45 years ago about something that happened 104 years ago that is currently happening right now between the global corporations and the Chinese Communist Party.  We’ve fucking been here before, and we don’t need to do it again.  More tomorrow.  Thanks for reading to the end.

-Unclean