You must understand, the leading Bolsheviks who took over Russia were not Russians. They hated Russians. They hated Christians. Driven by ethnic hatred they tortured and slaughtered millions of Russians without a shred of human remorse. It cannot be overstated. Bolshevism committed the greatest human slaughter of all time. The fact that most of the world is ignorant and uncaring about this enormous crime is proof that the global media is in the hands of the perpetrators.
To coexist with communism on the same planet is impossible. Either it will spread, cancer-like, to destroy mankind, or else mankind will have to rid itself of communism (and even then face lengthy treatment for secondary tumors). For us in Russia, communism is a dead dog, while, for many people in the West, it is still a living lion. To reject this inhuman Communist ideology is simply to be a human being. Such a rejection is more than a political act. It is a protest of our souls against those who would have us forget the concepts of good and evil. 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.
Communism will never be halted by negotiations or through the
machinations of detente. It can only be halted by force from without or
by disintegration from within.
To destroy a people, you must first sever their roots. The
strength or weakness of a society depends more on the level of its
spiritual life than on its level of industrialization. Neither a market
economy nor even general abundance constitutes the crowning achievement
of human life. If a nation's spiritual energies have been exhausted, it
will not be saved from collapse by the most perfect government structure
or by any industrial development. A tree with a rotten core cannot
stand.
We
hear a constant clamor for rights, rights, always rights, but so very
little about responsibility. And we have forgotten God. The need now is
for selflessness, for a spirit of sacrifice, for a willingness to put
aside personal gains for the salvation of the whole Western world.
I hope that no one present will suspect me of offering my personal criticism of the Western system to present socialism as an alternative. Having experienced applied socialism in a country where the alternative has been realized, I certainly will not speak for it. The well-known Soviet mathematician Shafarevich, a member of the Soviet Academy of Science, has written a brilliant book under the title Socialism; it is a profound analysis showing that socialism of any type and shade leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death. Modern society is hypnotized by socialism. It is prevented by socialism from seeing the mortal danger it is in. And one of the greatest dangers of all is that you have lost all sense of danger, you cannot even see where it's coming from as it moves swiftly towards you. The solemn pledge to abstain from telling the truth was called socialist realism.
In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations. Evil people always support each other; that is their chief strength.
A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its civic courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, in each government, in each political party, and of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elites, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society. There remain many courageous individuals, but they have no determining influence on public life.
The generation now coming out of Western schools is unable to distinguish good from bad. Even those words are unacceptable. This results in impaired thinking ability.
I am deeply convinced that God is present both in the lives of every person and also in the lives of entire nations.
Do not pursue what is illusory - property and position: all that is gained at the expense of your nerves decade after decade, and is confiscated in one fell night. Live with a steady superiority over life - don't be afraid of misfortune, and do not yearn after happiness; it is, after all, all the same: the bitter doesn't last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing.
It is not our level of prosperity that makes
for happiness but the kinship of heart to heart and the way we look at
the world. Both attitudes lie within our power, so that a man is happy
so long as he chooses to be happy, and no one can stop him.
European
democracy was originally imbued with a sense of Christian
responsibility and self-discipline, but these spiritual principles have
been gradually losing their force. Spiritual independence is being
pressured on all sides by the dictatorship of self-satisfied vulgarity,
of the latest fads, and of group interests.
People who are at ease with their consciences always look happy. ... the inexorable lesson of centuries: suffering must be borne; there is no way out. How can you expect a man who's warm to understand one who's cold? Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relationships, this creates an atmosphere of spiritual mediocrity that paralyzes a person's noblest impulses. Only those who decline to scramble up the career ladder are interesting as human beings. Nothing is more boring than a man with a career.
The same old caveman feeling- greed, envy, violence, and mutual hate, which along the way assumed respectable pseudonyms like class struggle, racial struggle, mass struggle, labor-union struggle-are tearing our world to pieces. During my time in the camps, I had got to know the enemies of the human race quite well: they respect the big fist and nothing else; the harder you slug them, the safer you will be.
The name of 'reform' simply covers what is latently a process of the theft of the national heritage.
A work of art contains its verification in itself: artificial, strained concepts do not withstand the test of being turned into images; they fall to pieces, turn out to be sickly and pale, convince no one. Works which draw on truth and present it to us in live and concentrated form grip us, compellingly involve us, and no one ever, not even ages hence, will come forth to refute them. |