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!
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