"Aleksandr I.Solzhenitsyn. Words of Warning to the Western World " - читать интересную книгу автора

the same difficult situation, you would have
learned the same thing. Take Vladimir Bukovsky,
whose name is now almost forgotten. Now, I don't
want to mention a lot of names because however
many I might mention there are more still. And
when we resolve the question with two or three
names it is as if we forget and betray the others.
We should rather remember figures. There are tens
of thousands of political prisoners in our country
and - by the calculation of English specialists -
7,000 persons are now under compulsory psychiatric
treatment. Let's take Vladimir Bukovsky as an
example. It was proposed to him, "All right, we'll
free you. Go to the West and shut up." And this
young man, a youth today on the verge of death
said: "No, I won't go this way. I have written
about the persons whom you have put in insane
asylums. You release them and then I'll go West."
This is what I mean by that firmness of spirit to
stand up against granite and tanks.
Finally, to evaluate everything that I have
said to you, I would say we need not have had our
conversation on the level of business
calculations. Why did such and such a country act
in such and such a way? What were they counting
on? We should rather rise above this to the moral
level and say "In 1933 and in 1941 your leaders
and the whole western world, in an unprincipled
way, made a deal with totalitarianism." We will
have to pay for this, some day this deal will come
back to haunt us. For 30 years we have been paying
for it and we're still paying for it. And we're
going to pay for it in a worse way.
One cannot think only in the low level of
political calculations. It's necessary to think
also of what is noble, and what is honorable - not
only what is profitable. Resourceful western legal
scholars have now introduced the term "legal
realism." By legal realism, they want to push
aside any moral evaluation of affairs. They say,
"Recognize realities; if such and such laws have
been established in such and such countries by
violence, these laws still must be recognized and
respected."
At the present time it is widely accepted
among lawyers that law is higher than morality -
law is something which is worked out and
developed, whereas morality is something inchoate
and amorphous. That isn't the case. The opposite
is rather true! Morality is higher than law! While