…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.
No comments:
Post a Comment