Tuesday, February 24, 2015

How self censorship prevents Radio Liberty and Voice of America from satisfying the spiritual needs of their listenersi

National Review today reprints an essay written in 1982 by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn.
In the 30s — during the most dreadful time of Stalinist terror, when Stalin was exterminating many millions of people — editorials in the United States proclaimed the Soviet Union to be a country of social justice. President Roosevelt extended a helping hand to Stalin, and American businessmen rushed to provide the technological assistance without which Stalin could not have built his industrial base. And at the end of the war, America and Britain made Stalin a gift of all of Eastern Europe. It should have been understood that the Soviet rulers were enemies of their own people. But this was not understood.

...Failing to understand this was the great historical mistake that Roosevelt made in the Thirties and Forties. This mistake cost the Free World half of the globe — perhaps less than half in terms of territory, but more than half in population. And today the greatest danger is that the Free World’s leaders will repeat Roosevelt’s fatal mistake.

In fact, the same mistake has been repeated over and over again through the years. For instance, with Tito. Tito was the murderer, the executioner, of his people. Right after World War II, he shot hundreds of thousands of his fellow citizens. He even shot down American civilian planes near the Austrian border. All this was forgiven (and worse, forgotten), and he has been held up as a great statesman. The same error was repeated again with Cuba. It was proclaimed in the Free World that what had taken place in Cuba was a people’s revolution. The same error was repeated again with North Vietnam. A totalitarian gang there seized the whole country, and American progressives proclaimed that it was a national movement for freedom. In Nicaragua, right under our nose, a totalitarian group of Communists seized power, and the Carter Administration hurried to help them financially.

The fatal historical mistake of liberalism is to see no enemy on the left, to consider that the enemy is always on the right.

...No matter what the Chinese rulers may say when they are looking for favors from the U.S., no Communist government ever cares about the rights, the development of its people. Communist governments are like cancerous tumors: they grow wildly and have two aims only: first, to strengthen their power, and second, to expand their boundaries. Those are the aims of the Chinese government, as they are those of the Soviet government.

...Not to know what is happening in and to your own country is crippling. That is why the Voice of America’s self-imposed limits are so misguided. What does the average Soviet citizen know about, say, Afghanistan? Everything he hears from the government is distorted. And yet the Voice of America, which could fill this gap, has placed limits on its own best sources of information. It refrains from using rich accumulations of material because it believes that it only has the right to broadcast in a way which will not irritate the Communist leaders.

...The greatest spiritual need of our people is to become aware of themselves. If during the past 30 years the Western broadcasts had helped our people remember who they were, helped them to rise spiritually to their feet, the entire world situation would be different. Our recent history has been trampled and distorted beyond recognition; everything we hear is saturated with propaganda. It is hard for Americans to imagine such ignorance. The average Soviet citizen in essence knows nothing: what were the causes of the Revolution; how it occurred, and how the Bolsheviks took it over and instituted totalitarian rule; what people’s movements there were against the Bolsheviks, and how they were suppressed; how our peasantry and our working class were destroyed by terrorist means. We need to know the truth about all this. If such knowledge were given us, we would — both civilian and soldier — become spiritually free of our government.

...Communist power seeks to deprive us of religion; and American radio broadcasts, directed by ideologues who accept the stupid premise that Russian Christianity is “reactionary,” follow the Communists’ lead.
Read more here.
I wonder what Solzhenitsyn would say today. I can't imagine that things have improved since 1982, with the ideologues currently in power in our government and media.

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