The great writer and Nobel Prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn spent eleven years in the Soviet gulag for protesting—in a PRIVATE letter to a friend while he was a Red Army artillery captain—against the atrocities committed against German civilians in East Prussia in 1945.
In 2002 he wrote a courageous two-volume book on Jewish-Russian relations under Two Centuries Together, and especially on the execrable role of Russian Jews in the horrors of Bolshevism.
Despite (or perhaps because of) this book with necessarily anti-Semitic conclusions, President Vladimir Putin granted him in 2006 in his second visit to the dacha (forest house) of the great Cossack the highest medal of Russia before the author’s death in 2007.
ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN
Excerpt from the lecture given at Harvard (Boston/Cambridge in Massachusetts, United States on June 8, 1978
“The decline of courage is perhaps what most strikes a foreign gaze in the West today. Civic courage has deserted not only the Western world as a whole, but even each of the countries that compose it, each of its governments, each of its parties, as well as, of course, the United Nations.
This decline in courage is particularly noticeable in the ruling stratum and in the dominant intellectual stratum, hence the impression that courage has deserted society as a whole.
Of course, there is still a lot of individual courage, but it is not these people who give direction to the life of society.
Political officials and intellectuals manifest this decline, this weakness, this irresolution in their actions, in their speeches, and even more in the theoretical considerations that they complacently provide to prove that this way of acting, which is the basis of the policy of a State founded on cowardice and servility, is somehow pragmatic, rational and justified, at whatever intellectual and even moral level one places oneself.
This decline of courage, which seems to lead all over to the loss of all trace of virility, is underlined with a particular irony in cases where the same officials are seized with a sudden fit of valor and intransigence with regard to weak governments, and small countries that no one supports or currents of thought condemned by all and manifestly incapable of fighting back with one single blow.
Their tongues just go dry and their hands get paralyzed in the face of powerful governments and menacing forces, in the face of aggressors and international terror.
Need I remind you that the decline of courage has always been considered the harbinger of the end? »
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