Interfax (on Orthodox News) April 29, 2006
Solzhenitsyn shares the Church’s opinion: human rights concept should be built on Russia’s traditional values
Moscow, April 28, Interfax – Renowned writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn shares the Russian Orthodox Church’s view of the human rights concept.
“Metropolitan Kirill, speaking at the 10th People’s Council, rightly pointed out that ‘realization of freedoms should not threaten the Fatherland, nor should it insult religious and national feelings”, Solzhenitsyn said in an interview published by Moskovskiye Novosti weekly on Friday.
According to him, limitless ‘human rights’ is ‘what our cave-dwelling ancestor already had as nothing prevented him from bereaving his neighbor of his prey or finish him off with a cudgel’.
The writer noted that we are not called today to defend ‘human obligations’ and ‘even to call for self-restraint is considered to be something ridiculous and funny’. ‘However, it is only self-restraint, self-constraint that offers a moral and reliable way out of any conflict’, Solzhenitsyn added.
Answering a question about the conflict of civilizations, the writer agreed that it existed, representing a confrontation between Third World countries and the so-called ‘golden billion’. He said Muslim countries used the secularization of the West ‘as a convenient target’. ‘It is this triumphant secularism which provokes the strongest indignation in Muslim countries’, Solzhenitsyn concluded.
He also expressed the opinion that Russia’s joining the North Atlantic alliance, ‘which is engaged in propaganda and forcible inculcation of the ideology and forms of today’s western democracy in various parts of the planet, would lead not to an expansion but to a decline of the Christian civilization’.
