Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes
The Communists have for decades loudly proclaimed their goal of destroying the bourgeois world, while the West merely smiled at what seemed to be an extravagant joke.
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. Warning to the West. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976, p. 115.
During the Cold War and afterwards many Americans attributed the problems we were having with the Soviet Union emenated from the fact that they were Communists, and our focus was anti-communism. Kennen, however argued that it was not Communism that was the cause of the Aggression of the Soviet Union. It was an extension of the Russian Culture. After the Soviet Union collapsed, and Communism was rejected by the Russians, we still had a great deal of Russian aggression and Foreign Policy problems with Russia. Kennan was right. It was the Russian culture, history, values and traditions that were the primary cause of most of the problems with Russia.
This was only 6 years after the Russian Revolution. Communist Russia had extended its influence to much of the world without firing a shot. To many, communism looked like the future. The Russian inability to make communism work economically in the next 70 years destroyed most of its influence.
who worked with the Communists. The Communists were to Flip-flop again when Russia needed arms and assistance to fight Hitler when the pact broke down. See {595773}
With the successful Chinese Communist Revolution, the Nationalists were driven off the mainland of China and occupied the island of Formosa (Taiwan) and had a small garrison of soldier on two tiny islands off the Chinese Coast, Quemoy and Matsu. The communist Chinese government wanted control of all three of the Nationalist held islands. It became a campaign issue or whether or not the United States should go to war to protect the two tiny islands from the communists even though there were no civilians on them and they had virtually no value other than symbolic. Nixon, took the position that the Chinese Communists must be stopped as they had world conquest as their objective. Philosophically, many Communists of the time, following Marxist theory, actually believed that Capitalism would crumble and communism would take its place. In that sense many felt that the world would be communist. China, as we now know, was more concerned with counterrevolution by the nationalists, expansionism and growth of Vietnam (her ancient enemy), the rise of Japan, border wars with India, and constant threats from Russia and China had no military plans for world conquest.
At the time, the Red Scare was prevalent and many Americans were terrified of communists. It was a very effective political tactic to imply that an opponent was a communist or communist sympathizer. For another harsh smear of Stevenson, see {619523}.
On November 3, 1979, the KKK had attacked a demonstration of Communists in Greensboro, NC and murdered 5 communists. The head of the Klan in NC saw no moral difference in gunning down 5 unarmed demonstrators and killing communist soldiers in The Vietnam War. Despite news video which clearly shows the shootings, an all white jury acquitted the 6 murderers. Later, they and the Greensboro police force were found guilty in a civil trial.
The president was surprised by the rapid spread and expansion of the anti-war movement at the time was convinced that the communists were organizing the effort. After all the investigations and histories, it was an extremely fast growing movement—perhaps the first of the digital political movements as e-mail was one of the tools used in the universities where e-mail was then coming into use.
WWII had come while most of the world was still recovering from the Great Depression. Communists, the world over, were expecting a major revolution in America, Britain and most industrial nations. However, continuation of Theodore Roosevelt’s reforms, the Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, the strong American wartime economy, Eleanor Roosevelt’s human rights accomplishments at the UN, the Marshall Plan and Truman’s support of non-communist governments in Europe, and the Labor Party coming to power in Great Britain produced an atmosphere of progress and hope, which provided an alternative to a proletarian revolution and communism. The Cold War then was the only road for international communism.
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.
