XPost: alt.politics.cuba, soc.culture.cuba, soc.culture.spain   
   XPost: soc.culture.venezuela, talk.politics.reform   
   From: nowhere@none   
      
   Solzhenitsyn on Communism   
      
   Posted Monday, Feb. 18, 1980   
      
   Advice to the West, in an "hour of extremity"   
   Some Soviet dissidents still argue that their country's Marxist-Leninist   
   system can be reformed from within. Not Alexander Solzhenitsyn: he has never   
   swerved from his belief in the inherent evil of Communism. Last week, the   
   Nobel-prizewinning novelist composed this essay for TIME in response to the   
   crisis in East-West relations created by the Soviet conquest of Afghanistan.   
   Solzhenitsyn argues that Afghanistan is merely the latest demonstration of   
   the U.S.S.R.s insatiable desire for world conquest. As in his grim 1978   
   Harvard commencement address, he chides the West for weakness. But the West   
   may yet prevail, he says, if it will recognize that Communism and the people   
   oppressed by it are not one and the same.   
   Many Americans will find Solzhenitsyn's views too harsh, his vision too   
   chilling. But the reflections of Russia's greatest living writer on today's   
   crisis merit wide attention.   
   The West began its perilous miscalculation of Communism in 1918: from the   
   very beginning the Western powers failed to see the deadly threat that it   
   represented. In Russia at that time, all previously warring factions-from   
   the government forces to the Constitutional Democrats and the right-wing   
   Socialists-united against Communism. Though the peasants and workers were   
   not formally allied with these groups, and were not coordinated, thousands   
   of peasant revolts and dozens of worker uprisings reflected the masses'   
   opposition to Communism. A Red Army was mobilized by executing tens of   
   thousands of men who tried to evade Bolshevik conscription. But this Russian   
   national resistance to Communism received scant support from the Western   
   powers.   
   The most fantastically rosy notions about the Communist regime circulated in   
   the West, and so-called progressive public opinion greeted it with joy, in   
   spite of the fact that by 1921, 30 Russian provinces were undergoing a   
   Cambodia-like genocide. (In Lenin's lifetime, no fewer innocent civilians   
   perished than under Hitler, and yet today American schoolchildren, who   
   invariably regard Hitler as the greatest villain in history, look upon Lenin   
   as Russia's benefactor.) The Western powers vied with one another to give   
   economic and diplomatic support to the Soviet regime, which could not have   
   survived without this aid. Europe took no notice of the fact that some 6   
   million people in the Ukraine and the Kuban River basin had died of hunger.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)