In the early years of the 70's, after barely surviving the turbulent excesses of the 60's, we heard a lone voice crying in the wilderness that was Harvard College, et al.
In the college's 1978 commencement speech a Russian "prophet" excoriated the West for its decadence and weakness.
That Russian was the Nobel Prize winning writer Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn.
He said there were real battles being fought for personal freedom and that we in the West weren't fully engaged. We were lazy, soft - we who should have been the guardians of the chalice.
His book The Gulag Archipelago was written because he sensed that those murdered by Stalin were crying from the dust, pleading not to be forgotten.
When I first opened the book, the number of dead he reported was staggering - tens of millions! Lost in the prisons, worked to death, tortured, shot and thrown in unmarked graves.
Millions disappeared in the middle of the night, never to return to their families.
For a small percentage (3-4%) of Communist Party members to rule the masses, that minority had to be willing to murder on a large scale to keep power.
That is the reason Saddaam Hussein so admired Stalin, and filled his personal library with every book about the Communist dictator available. Hussein's Baathist Party numbered only 3-4% of the Iraqui population.
His long beard, his dissident status, his anti-communist and anti-democracy position of paradox, calling on the West for an awakening to vigilance.
Not some few of us heard him, stiffened the sinews, and entered the fray.
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