Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes
In our country they do not permit any information to be X-rayed through and through, nor any discussion to encompass all the facets of a subject. All this is invariably suppressed at the very beginning, so no ray of light should fall on the naked body of truth. And then all this is piled up in one formless heap covering many years, where it languishes for whole decades, until all interest and all means of sorting out the rusty blocks from all this trash are lost.
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. The Oak and the Calf: Sketches and Memoirs. Translated by Harry Willetts, Harper & Row, 1980, p. 288.
As hard as it is for us to imagine today, while her husband was President of the United States, the First Lady wrote a nationally syndicated newspaper column every single day with politics frequently the subject. While she usually agreed with the President, there were occasions where they seemed to not see things exactly the same. She tended to be more liberal than he. However, there were those who believed that when she criticized politicians, it was with FDR’s knowledge and blessing and she sometimes did his “dirty work.” Eleanor Roosevelt was one of the most influential people in the country—certainly more-so than any First Lady before and since.
Before the Communists, the Nationalist Chinese government controlled the press even more so than the Communists did. And the Chinese Emperors before the Nationalists had a well educated elite of administrators who ran the government but the great mass of the people knew virtually nothing other than what the rulers wanted them to know. With mass illiteracy, there was no efficient way to communicate with the masses anyway. China, with a history of great intellectual accomplishment, has had the most ignorant people in the world by virtue of its size and general illiteracy.
Every military establishment has secrets that they should maintain and are not always forthcoming with facts d explanations. However, the Pentagon is so large with so many layers that there are subgroups and vested interests, prevaricate and lie, even to their own superiors. No one knows how prevalent this is, but there have be a number of major incidents where the were lies and cover-ups—usually to prevent public embarrassment to some element of the military industrial complex.
Wikileaks needs whistleblowers to send it confidential and secret material in order to have something that people might be interested in. And then, it needs continuous money donations to keep the website going. This statement refuted critics who claimed that Assange and his colleagues were just criminal activists who had no public support or interest in what they were doing.
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was a Russian novelist, philosopher, historian, short story writer and political prisoner. One of the most famous Soviet dissidents, Solzhenitsyn was an outspoken critic of communism and helped to raise global awareness of human rights abuses, the Gulag concentration camp system and political repression in the Soviet Union.
