Solzhenitsyn. Endless Concessions To Aggressors
Modern totalitarian regimes and violent Islamist terror movements do their best to cloak their real intentions and obfuscate their motivations. And some of the time, it works. Not only do naive "anti-imperialist" activists in the West take these reactionary forces at their word when they say they are fighting for freedom, national determination and the rights of the oppressed. It has also become official policy among NGOs and even governments like the United States government to back off in the face of these enemies and even subsidize their terror.
This habit has a very long pedigree, originally pointed out by Russian exile Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in 1975 in Washington, D.C. He delivered a dramatic warning to all the world - and to Americans in particular. The Nobel Prize winning author denounced the West for a "senseless process of endless concessions to aggressors" in the Kremlin.
The Propagandist has highlighted certain parts of this excerpt of Solzhenitsyn's speech with links to demonstrate certain parallels with today's threats.
Through the decades of the 1920s, the 1930s, the 1940s, the 1950s, the whole Soviet press wrote: Western capitalism, your end is near.
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 didn't believe that, either. They took it as a joke.
Now, of course, they have become more clever in our country. Now they don't say "we are going to bury you" anymore, now they say "detente."
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 "detente."
In order to understand this, I will take the liberty of making a short historic survey - the history of such relations, which in different periods have been called "trade," "stabilization of the situation," "recognition of realities," and now "detente." These relations 'now are at least 40 years old.
Let me remind you with what sort of system they started.
The system was installed by armed uprising.
It dispersed the Constituent Assembly.
It capitulated to Germany - the common enemy.
It introduced execution without trial.
It plundered the villagers to such an unbelievable extent that the peasants revolted, and when this happened it crushed the peasants in the bloodiest possible way.
It reduced 20 provinces of our country to a condition of famine.
This was in 1921, the famous Volga famine. A very typical Communist technique: To seize power without thinking of the fact that the productive forces will collapse, that the fields will not be sown, the factories will stop, that the country will decline into poverty and famine - but when poverty and hunger come, then they request the humanitarian world to help them.
We see this in North Vietnam today, perhaps Portugal is approaching this also. 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 this civil war, then they asked America, "America, feed our hungry." And indeed, generous and magnanimous America did feed our hungry.
The so-called American Relief Administration was set up, headed by your future President Hoover, and indeed many millions of Russian lives were saved by this organization of yours.
But what sort of gratitude did you receive for this? In the USSR not only did they try to erase this whole event from the popular memory - it's almost impossible today in the Soviet press to find any reference to the American Relief Administration - but they even denounce it as a clever spy organization, a clever scheme of American imperialism to set up a spy network in Russia. I repeat, it was a system that introduced concentration camps for the first time in the history of the world.
