"At inhuman speed we endured inhuman experiences, of which the Western world—and this includes Britain—still hasn't, or more accurately still fears to have, any real conception. And it is with a strange feeling that those of us who hail from the Soviet Union look upon today's West: as if we were neither neighbors on the same planet nor contemporaries, we contemplate the West from your future, or else look back at our own seventy-year-old past suddenly repeating itself. And what we see is still the same, still the same as then: the universal reverence of adult society for the opinion of children; the feverish infatuation, on the part of many young people, with vanishingly worthless ideas; the timorousness of professors to find themselves outside the latest trends; the failure of journalists to take responsibility for the words they fling so readily; the universal sympathy for revolutionary extremists; the muteness of people with serious objections; the passive defeatism of the majority; the feebleness of governments and the paralysis of society's defense mechanisms; the spiritual dismay leading to political cataclysm." Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn