Solzhenitsyn-the West

Delivering the commencement address at Harvard University in

1978, he called the United States spiritually weak and mired in
vulgar materialism. Americans, he said, speaking in Russian through
a translator, suffered from a "decline in courage" and a "lack of
manliness." Few were willing to die for their ideals, he said. He
condemned both the United States government and American
society for its "hasty" capitulation in the Vietnam War. He criticized
the country's music as intolerable and attacked its unfettered press,
accusing it of violations of privacy. He said that the West erred in
measuring other civilizations by its own model. While faulting
Soviet society for denying fair legal treatment of people, he also
faulted the West for being too legalistic: "A society which is based
on the letter of the law and never reaches any higher is taking very
scarce advantage of the high level of human possibilities.