Eugene David<br>...The One-Minute Pundit

Posted 5:51 PM by Gene

Twenty-five years ago, hard to believe, Solzhenitzyn made his Harvard commencement address that the NEWS HACKS promptly made idiotic fun of because he blasted Western decadence, rock music, etc., etc., etc. But a speech with a line like this -- "Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil" -- goes beyond the contemporary menaces of its day, rooted in Soviet communism, to the terrorist menace yet awaiting its biggest hours. The great Russian writer justifiably worried we weren't up to the challenge of battling evil. The alacrity with which we've dispatched its forces after September 11 has only partly put his fears to rest. And consider his concluding lines:

Even if we are spared destruction by war, life will have to change in order not to perish on its own. We cannot avoid reassessing the fundamental definitions of human life and society. Is it true that man is above everything? Is there no Superior Spirit above him? Is it right that man’s life and society’s activities should be ruled by material expansion above all? Is it permissible to promote such expansion to the detriment of our integral spiritual life?

If the world has not approached its end, it has reached a major watershed in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It will demand from us a spiritual blaze; we shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life, where our physical nature will not be cursed, as in the Middle Ages, but even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon, as in the Modern Era.

In a world ruled by JACQUEASSES and RUPERT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!s and Sumners, are we capable of a spiritual blaze? Solzhenitzyn could not have been optimistic even then, but little more than a decade after these words the Soviet Union collapsed under the weight of its lies. Perhaps we have reason to hope.