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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, MAY 20, 1983
PAGE 7
Solzhenitsyn also was critical of the West's abandonment of fun
damental values in favor of easy options. "The meaning of 1ife
in the West ceased to stand for anything more lofty than the
pursuit of 'happiness,'" Solzhenitsyn said.
"The concepts of
good and evil have been ridiculed for several centuries•.•they
� beenreplace'd""'E_Y�l1 t1cal or ciass considerations of short-
11ved value."
Associated Press (AP) added other points Solzhenitsyn made in a post-speech
news conference, especially concerning naive "peace movements" in the
Western world.
Exiled Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn said Wednesday that
anti-nuclear protesters in the West are blind to a threat from
the Soviet Union and don't know the difference between good and
evil.
He said the late English philosopher Bertrand Russell was wrong
when he suggested it was better to be red than dead. "Just as
lobsters are thrown into boiling water and gradually turn red, so
under Communism some die immediately and some take a little
longer," the Nobel prize winner, exiled in 1974, said in a rare
meeting with reporters.
Accusing young disarmament campaigners of having their "eyes
bound" about the Soviet government and lacking a :1 y concept of
"absolute good and absolute evil," Solzhenitsyn said:
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They are
against any kind of struggle at all. They just want to· give up
altogether. They feel their carefree existence will go on for
ever. They believe Bertrand Russell that it's better to be red
than dead. But here even Bertrand Russell was mentally lacking;
he saw an alternative whe·
re there is none, because to be red
means to become dead gradually."
Russell, who died in 1970 at age 98, helped inspire the nuclear
protest movement and said in 1958 that "if the Communists con
quered the world, it would be very unpleasant for a while but not
forever." Some characterized the remark as a "better red than
dead" outlook.
In a two-hour news conference at Claridge' s
Hotel, conducted through a Russian interpreter, Solzhenitsyn
alleged that "Soviet means and money" were involved in the organ
ization of anti-nuclear demonstrations. "I don• t want to say
that all of them have been bought, bribed or lack conscience,"
but Western protesters are being used, he claimed.
Solzhenitsyn criticized Western governments, newspapers, the
Nobel prize committee, Amnesty International and the non
communist world for what he called their failure to confront
communism. He•••ridiculed the "hundreds of professors and jour
nalists" who talk about "hawks and doves" in the Kremlin•••.
Solzhenitsyn said that in 1919, Russian revolutionary Vladimir I.
Lenin "proclaimed a death sentence to the West, and this sentence
has never been rescinded." [ Reuters news service added that
Solzhenitsyn said:
"You have been living here under a death
sentence for the last 65 yea'r's'"but you fail tounderstand this.
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J