Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Solzhenitsyn on the Vendée

Matterhorn at The Sword & The Sea notes Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's visit to the Vendée to dedicate a memorial to the victims of the genocide there:

Twenty decades have now passed, and throughout that period the Vendée uprising and its bloody suppression have been viewed in ever new ways, in France and elsewhere. Indeed, historical events are never fully understood in the heat of their own time, but only at a great distance, after a cooling of passions. For all too long, we did not want to hear or admit what cried out with the voices of those who perished, or were burned alive: that the peasants of a hard-working region, driven to the extremes of oppression and humiliation by a revolution supposedly carried out for their sake-- that these peasants had risen up against the revolution!

The great Solzhenitsyn never ceased to raise his voice against the moral vacuum of the modern deracinated world, perhaps nowhere better expressed than in his 1978 address at Harvard University:

Harvard's motto is "Veritas." Many of you have already found out and others will find out in the course of their lives that truth eludes us if we do not concentrate with total attention on its pursuit. And even while it eludes us, the illusion still lingers of knowing it and leads to many misunderstandings. Also, truth is seldom pleasant; it is almost invariably bitter. There is some bitterness in my speech today, too. But I want to stress that it comes not from an adversary but from a friend.

Thank you, Aleksandr Isayevich.
Vive le Roy.

4 comments:

  1. You're ever so welcome, Matterhorn; thank you for sharing this.

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  2. prof premraj pushpakaran writes -- 2018 marks the 100th birth year of Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn!!!

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