24 September 2013

Ready To Die

No weapons, no matter how powerful, can help the West until it overcomes its loss of willpower. In a state of psychological weakness, weapons become a burden for the capitulating side. To defend oneself, one must also be ready to die; there is little such readiness in a society raised in the cult of material well-being. 

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (at Harvard University in Boston, USA), 1978
Posted by Laguna Beach Fogey at 19:34

7 comments:

w. adam mandelbaum esq. said...

Wrong on that one Alex. The Berlin Wall came down, not the Brooklyn Bridge. Back to the Gulag for you!

25 September, 2013 08:22
Anonymous said...

Your observation seems misplaced . “Alex”, as you call him, was anything but a Berlin Wall chap. By the time he made this famous analysis on the West he had, in fact, identified several of the decaying signs of the other side of the Berlin Wall as well. That wall and that bridge are nothing but two sides of the same fake coin.

25 September, 2013 17:44
Steiner said...

Solzhenitsyn identified himself as a man of the West, and as a Russian, endorsed the traditional role of his people as a bulwark of Christian civilization. He was among us, speaking to us, because by 1978 he had been stripped of his Soviet citizenship and living in the West for years.

26 September, 2013 09:32
Anonymous said...

Consider the time period when Solzhenitsyn made his statement - 1978. The so-called "leader of the free world" was a spineless, foolish, liberal technocrat who repeatedly indicated that we were unwilling to enforce the Pax Americana. The Russian leadership often played him to both comic and tragic effect. How can a people follow such a leader? How can they be expected to make the necessary sacrifices to willingly stand behind and with a fool? Of course, how could those same people choose an unprincipled, inexperienced moron to lead them? But with an eye toward such recent history, the American people would never again permit such a farce and display such craven, weak-kneed, bumbling to exist at their top echelon - oh wait, I'm mistaken on that last part.

26 September, 2013 09:44
GSL said...

Solzhy's famous remarks seem rather quaint nowadays don't they. The West is going to lose by firing only one shot-a bullseye at it's own foot with this suicidal 3rd World immigration rotting our corpse as we sleep. Samuel Huntington & Pat Buchanan have warned us for years.

26 September, 2013 11:55
David said...

How do you square the occasional 'anti-materialist' stance with the, no doubt lucrative, banking career?

29 September, 2013 04:31
Anonymous said...

seems to me, one can make a honest living in banking and and not be a over the top materialistic moron. JRF

30 September, 2013 14:53

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