Western Intellectuals Quotes

“Or why should one refrain from burning hatred, whatever its basis--race, class, or ideology? Such hatred is in fact corroding many hearts today. Atheist teachers in the West are bringing up a younger generation in a spirit of hatred of their own society. Amid all the vituperation we forget that the defects of capitalism represent the basic flaws of human nature, allowed unlimited freedom together with the various human rights; we forget that under Communism (and Communism is breathing down the neck of all moderate forms of socialism, which are unstable) the identical flaws run riot in any person with the least degree of authority; while everyone else under that system does indeed attain 'equality'--the equality of destitute slaves. This eager fanning of the flames of hatred is becoming the mark of today's free world. Indeed, the broader the personal freedoms are, the higher the level of prosperity or even of abundance--the more vehement, paradoxically, does this blind hatred become. The contemporary developed West thus demonstrates by its own example that human salvation can be found neither in the profusion of material goods nor in merely making money.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

“The discomfort provoked is what makes this poem so important. Placing that event (the barbaric treatment of the family of the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva in 1939) beside the idealisation of Stalin in MacLean's poem sets all sorts of crucial questions resonating. It raises the hugely disturbing question of the prolonged support offered by writers and intellectuals in the West for a regime characterised by an appalling degree of criminality systematically applied. The fact that Stalin's armies defeated Hitler's does nothing to change the nature of the regime he headed. Within four years of writing 'An Cuilithionn', MacLean became totally alienated from his poem for these very reasons. It would be wonderful if they made it a bad poem, but they don't. You can write splendid poetry in support of a mistaken political cause. MacLean was not the only one to get it wrong - far from it.”
― Christopher Whyte