Jessica Hooten Wilson: Solzhenitsyn against Propaganda

Too loosely is the word "Marxist" used to insult a conflicting viewpoint. When we conscript people to a "side" and reduce them with a label, we participate in the same silencing and censoring that we hope to fight against.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wisely refused to choose a side in American politics. While the Russian dissident did battle the unjust control of the Soviets in his country, he chose the most powerful of weapons--novels. He argued for the convincingness of art to force "even an opposing heart to surrender."
Through fiction, Solzhenitsyn provides a way to love our so-called enemies, encourage conversation rather than silencing, and, even when all appears despairing, open the door to hope.
Dr. Jessica Hooten Wilson, the Louise Cowan Scholar in Residence at the University of Dallas spoke on this subject for the Acton Institute's Acton Lecture Series on Thursday, April 29, 2021.
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[@alphonse-louisvinh214]

I am a scholar, single, without a wife and children. I'm amazed at our research work. How do you organise ourself in terms of your reading & writing.

[@deteodoru]

A sweet gilr addresses herein the manhood crisis of those of us who stepped into the gulag, survived it, and got out old and broken in that its wall are still the walls of our skull confining of flightful brains. But where is one's soul as one ages, as one's DNA no longer faithfully produces proteins that reproduce worn out these elements of tissues, as neoplastic aberrant crowd out the faithful cells that once gave us physiologically vigorous tissues? WE start weak, but have opportunities to become strong, even heroic. Yet, no matter which, we produce senescent cells from senescent cells that ever more expose our inner scaffolding. As a Romanian I lived twice under Communism: once as a child in the Stalin era of occupation and once as a medical student under Ceausescu. I got to meet this genius, once in Vermont and once in Russia. Both times he was searching for the relationship of goodness to truth, but in Russia, after Vermont, he cried out as if the last wheals of a mastodon sinking in a tar pit as his head goes under: "Why am I doomed to hopeless sophisticating in darkness?" as he looks up, and the cries out again: "Why am I given so little to start, so little to finish with, and an utter sense of irrelevance in between?". Whatever happens to a weasel happens to me and we both helplessly squirm and squeal! He grasped that man is a helpless animal, but uniquely burdened with a soul, making his squeals more polysyllabic, yet no less informative than the helpless weasel's squeaks and hopeless gyrations. The man facing the fate of that poor weasel is just as helpless in controlling his fate. But with imbecilic hubris he cries out to God: "Pull me out of this sophisticating muck for I have consciousness and gainfully learn from this experience. So to let me die is a sacrilege, after all, was I not made in the image of God?" One may wonder if it's worth the effort struggling o save a poor likeness to God as if it were the last. Man is not valued by his positioned position on the Zoological charts of Darwinian evolution, but rather by the soul he liberates, returning it ti God, as he perishes. Only megalanthropy-- as one British author called it-- can permit one to assume that the saving of one's life will add enough heat and light within the dark cold universe to change it's topographic randomness. When, upon return to Russia within a short time he called his motherland: "Liquid Shit." So it would seem that that the profound and spiritual people plagued by rhetorical questions in his novels, he eventually came to see as Russian sewage before he died, n'est pas? His rage was that of one defeated, not of a rage determined idealists seeking to clean it up. So beautiful a man was trampled by us mindless worker ants following the pheromone trail of the ants in front of us. Is USA really so different? Kant said that GOD IS DEAD. God replied that KANT IS DEAD. Are they BOTH dead? Our hero failed to deal with this question closer ro home....but then none of us ever resolved it either, so we just die like sheep a as the Jugular Vein and Carotid Artery are cut by those nice boys who shepherded us to that very day and knew us more by our mannerisms than by our identifying tags. If there is a God, then we are all sacrificial lambs. How strange that he gives us his lambs life to please Himself and we sacrifice it to honor Him!

[@lovethetruth7875]

Thank you for giving us in this world, the keys to accept our life

[@joanmadjid2855]

Excellent presentation!