Roads to the Great War: Remembering a Veteran: Isaakii Solzhenitsyn, Russi...

Roads to the Great War: Remembering a Veteran: Isaakii Solzhenitsyn, Russi...: Isaakii Solzhenitsyn Isaakii Semyonovich Solzhenitsyn (11 June 1891–15 June 1918) was an officer in the Imperial Russian Army and the father...

Wednesday, February 14, 1974. Solzhenitsyn expelled.

A Soviet court revoked Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's citizenship and ordered him expelled from the USSR.  He was placed on an Aeroflot flight to West Germany with only the clothes on  is back.

His family was left in the Soviet Union.

The following day, the Soviet Ministry of Culture directed libraries containing One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich to remove them.

The novel is one of my favorites.

Last prior:

Thursday, February 7, 1974: Blog Mirror: "Blazing Saddles" Premieres

Friday, December 28, 1973. The Endangered Species Act.

On this day in 1973, the Endangered Species Act, having passed by the House of Representatives, 355 to 4, with the only opposing votes coming from Congressmen Earl Landgrebe of Indiana, H. R. Gross of Iowa, Robin Beard of Tennessee and Bob Price of Texas, was signed into law.

The Nixon Administration, now mostly remembered for Watergate, and the duplicitous end to the Vietnam War, had a remarkable record of passing environmental legislation, including this landmark example.  Perhaps more remarkable, at this point in time, Wyoming's Congressman, Teno Roncolio, voted for it.

My, how things have changed.

And more amazing yet, Teno Roncalio, was a Democrat, the last Wyoming Democrat to hold that position.  For that matter, one of the two Senators from Wyoming, Gale McGee, was as well.  McGee is the last member of the Democratic Party to hold that office in Wyoming.

Presently to admit that the ESA is a great piece of litigation is to invite castigation in Wyoming, and the world "Democrat" is nearly slanderous in nature.

On the same day, Nixon signed the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) which provided to train workers for jobs in public service.

Whatever else may be the case about him, the country owes a debt to Nixon for legislation passed during his administration.

Solzhenitsyn's tome The Gulag Archipelago was published. The very first published edition on the horrors of the Soviet penal system were in French.

Bobby Darin (Walden Robert Cassotto) died at age 37 following a surgery to repair artificial heart valves he had received three years prior.

Darin had been a major Ameican entertainer of the 50s and 60s.  Of Sicilian descent, his early life was complicated, having had a grandfather that was a member of the mafia.  He was raised believing that his mother, who had borne him out of wedlock at age 17, was his sister, something she did not reveal to him until he was 32.

Participation in lies

The simplest and most accessible key to our self-neglected liberation lies right here: Personal non-participation in lies.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Mid Week At Work. Career

 Only those who decline to scramble up the career ladder are interesting as human beings.  Nothing is more boring than a man with a career.

Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

Fashionable trends of thought

[I]n the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those that are not fashionable:  nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its ways into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges.

Solzhenitsyn. 

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn on Courage

A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today… Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elites, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society. There are many courageous individuals, but they have no determining influence on public life… Political and intellectual functionaries exhibit this depression, passivity, and perplexity in their actions and in their statements, and even more so in their self-serving rationales as to how realistic, reasonable, and intellectually and even morally justified it is to base state policies on weakness and cowardice… Must one point out that from ancient times a decline in courage has been considered the first symptom of the end?

 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's 1978 Harvard Graduation address.