He is stranger in this country and doomed to be stranger till the end of his life. He is traveler from the past, from Terra incognito, which lay on the other side of the Iron Curtain from Democracy...view moreHe is stranger in this country and doomed to be stranger till the end of his life. He is traveler from the past, from Terra incognito, which lay on the other side of the Iron Curtain from Democracy.
It was an odious, twilight world isolated and immersed in itself—a world of gray cities, gray streets, gray squares, glum men, and exhausted women; a world of censorship and uniformity, where most natural things were banned and those that were not were subject to strict limitations.
He got lucky. He left the Evil Empire forever, and his meeting with the new world dazed and besotted him.
But he can't conceal a strange forgotten feeling. What strange reminiscences. Is it chimera, delusion, self-hypnosis, an echo of the past? Maybe. He watched the system collapsing, its foundation eroding, its fastenings cracking, its rods bursting at the joints; he watched the monumental decorative structures fall, burying millions of lives under a cloud of dust. It is not from the history books that he learned how flame leaps up from smoldering conflicts, and ugly, dark hatred erupts, and how long-festering wounds begin to bleed. But how can he explain this instinctive feeling of a deadly threat here, in the realm of freedom, universal contentment, and emancipation?
Are there answers to these questions? Any civilization—the Roman Empire, Christianity, communism, or liberal democracy—can be assessed and understood only in its original coordinate system, retrospectively, and through the prism of the initial idea. Alexander suggests joining his exciting and at same time frightening study that he made.view less