Author: Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
This short work of 130 pages is both a love letter and a warning to America. It is evident that we have now come face to face with communism.
Solzhenitsyn tells us what it looks like: “Nationality is suppressed by the communist system and is forfeited by the leaders and zealots…It is everywhere alike; everywhere totalitarian, everywhere bent on crushing individuality, conscience, even life itself, everywhere backed up by ideological terror and everywhere aggressive…”
Is this not what has already begun to happen in America?
“…to destroy the national way of life and to pollute nature, to desecrate national shrines and monuments…”
Look what it has done to Russia.
“…to keep the people in hunger and poverty for the last sixty years [as of 1980]…shows that the communist leaders are alien to the people and indifferent to its suffering.”
re: Two Fallacies About Communism
“Two mistakes are especially common. One is the failure to understand the radical hostility of communism to mankind as a whole – the failure to realize that communism is irredeemable, that there exist no “better” variants of communism; that it is inescapable of growing “kinder,” that it cannot suvive as an ideology without using terror, and that, consequently, to coexist with communism on the same planet is impossible. Either it will spread, cancer-like, to destroy mankind, or else mankind will have to rid itself of communism (and even then face lengthy treatment for secondary tumors).
The second and equally prevalent mistake is to assume an indissoluble link between the universal disease of communism and the country where it first seized control – Russia.”
Originally published in Foreign Affairs, Vol. 58, No 4 (Spring 1980), under the title “Misconceptions about Russia Are a Threat to America.”
THE MORTAL DANGER is a compilation of letters from from Robert C. Tucker, Silvio J. Treves, Robert W. Thurston, Eugen Loebl, John R. Dunlap, and Alexander Dallin copyright 1981 by Council on Foreign Relations, Inc.
First Harper Colophon edition published 1981
ISBN 0-06-090882-3