Post by Rose on Aug 9, 2008 18:36:42 GMT -5
Total Solar Eclipse, August 1, 2008...
As I wrote in my August forecast intro, Solar Eclipses are event generating -especially in the areas where the eclipse path travels, and also when they ignite your chart (esp. the personal planets.) We often see prominent passages or births of note. Note that events do not necessarily occur on the exact date, events can occur at any time during the eclipse cycle (most commonly in the month prior or in the several months following.)
Aug 1 Eclipse path: Northern Canada (Nunavat), Northern Greenland, the Arctic Ocean, Central Russia, Mongolia, and China.
Below are a few of the recent events linked to the Eclipse Season, please feel free to add to this list..
Solar Eclipse:
Aug 1:
1. Alexander Solzhenitsyn dies Aug 3: russian revolutionary (exiled), visionary, author; exposed Stalin & the gulage?
2. Russia invades Georgia (this Russian event has been touted as the start of a new cold war)
3. John Edwards affair scandal
(interesting that it also hit Hillary’s chart and there was some talk that she was cheated out of a fair race because of this)
(Hillary Clinton resurfaces to help Obama by appealing to her supporters to get behind her previous opponent.)
4. The two main political parties in Pakistan strike a deal to impeach President Musharriff (what about parliament?)
5. The Bejing Summer Olympics are held amid great controversy
Aug 8 - 24.
Bernie Mack and Issac Hayes die within hours of each other (and they just finished making a movie together.)
LUNAR ECLIPSE:Aug 16:
1. Russian president signs a Georgia cease fire deal (what date?)
2. Aug 18: Musharrif announces his resignation
(around the Aug 1st Solar Eclipse, the two main political parties in Pakistan came together to strike a deal to impeach him.
3. Hurricane builds in Fla.
Solar Eclipse duration: watch key dates: Nov 2, and Jan 29 (next solar eclipse Jan 26)
It is interesting that the US presidential elections take place on Nov 4 and that the president official assumes office around Jan 29.
Lunar Eclipse – thresholds – Nov 16, Feb 13
These key dates are likely to hold some potency/significance/relevancy to what’s going on for you/us now.
Note that these Eclipses suggest an acceleration for the collective experience. Why? Because the nodes have been in Leo/Aquarius and don't forget that Chiron and the Sun opposed right across the nodes between the two eclipses. (Chiron has been traveling in tandem with the North Node in Aquarius since May-ish.)
See below for details take off the net:
___
World InactionRussia invades Georgia while the West watches. How did it come to this?
By Anne Applebaum www.slate.com/id/2197155/
Posted Friday, Aug. 8, 2008, at 6:00 PM ET
For the best possible illustration of why Islamic terrorism may one day be considered the least of our problems, look no further than the BBC's split-screen coverage of Friday's Olympics opening ceremony. On one side, fireworks sparkled, and thousands of exotically dressed Chinese dancers bent their bodies into the shape of doves, the cosmos, and so on. On the other side, gray Russian tanks were shown rolling into South Ossetia, a rebel province of Georgia. The effect was striking: Two of the world's rising powers were strutting their stuff.
The difference, of course, is that one event has been in rehearsal for years while the other, if not a total surprise, was not actually scheduled to take place this week. And that, too, is significant. The Chinese challenge to Western power has been a long time coming, and it is, in a certain sense, predictable. As a rule, the Chinese do not make sudden moves, and they do not try to provoke crises.
Russia, by contrast, is an unpredictable power, which makes a response more difficult. In fact, Russian politics have now become so utterly opaque that it is not easy to say why this particular "frozen" conflict has escalated right now. Russian sources said that Georgia had launched an invasion of South Ossetia, aiming to pacify the breakaway region. Georgia, meanwhile, said that its troops entered the South Ossetian "capital" in response to escalating South Ossetian attacks, which have been going on for a week—years, really—as well as the Russian aerial bombardment of Georgian territory.
Both sides have deeper motives for fighting. The Russians have an interest in preventing Georgia from joining NATO, as Georgia, a Western-oriented democracy—George Bush called the country a "beacon of liberty"—has long wanted to do. In this, the Russians will almost certainly succeed. There is no Western power that has any interest in a military ally that is involved in a major military conflict with Russia.
The Georgian leadership, by contrast, had come to believe that the constant pressure of Russian aggression, coupled with the West's failure to accept Georgia into NATO, compelled them to demonstrate "self-reliance." Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili has been buying weapons in preparation for this moment. Those who know him say he believed a military conflict was inevitable but could be won if conducted cleverly. As of Friday night, with Russian soldiers fighting in South Ossetia—only a few dozen miles from Tblisi, the Georgian capital—it seems as if he might have miscalculated, badly. Russia has not sent 150 tanks across that border in order to lose.
Still, the bottom line is this: Georgia should have stepped back from the brink—and should still do so if it has a chance—but Russia's deployment of such a large and carefully prepared force, not only in South Ossetia but in the rest of Georgia, is totally unacceptable. And the other indisputable conclusion? Wherever the blame for this week's escalation is finally laid, the West has very little influence on the outcome. Saakashvili's appeals for help and moral support—"This is not about Georgia," he told CNN, "it is about America, its values"—aren't going to come to much unless Russia wants them to.
___
BEIJING - Georgia’s 35-strong Olympic team may pull out of the Games because of the Russian offensive in their country, their National Olympic Committee told Reuters on Saturday.
“We don’t know what will happen but we’re talking about it now. It will be the decision of the president of the country (Mikheil Saakashvili),” spokesman Giorgi Tchanishvili said.
Georgia called for a cease-fire on Saturday after Russian bombers widened an offensive to force back Georgian troops seeking control over the breakaway region of South Ossetia.
Russia put the death toll at 2,000, and 30,000 refugees from South Ossetia had fled to Russia over the past 36 hours. Moscow said two of its warplanes had been shot down, 13 of its soldiers killed and 70 wounded.
The Georgian Olympic team urged the international community to help end the violence.
“This deliberate strategy of aggression has grown into a full-scale military intervention involving all regions of Georgia,” the athletes said in a statement.
“Georgia calls upon the international community to make it clear (to Russia) that intrusion into and bombing of the territory of a sovereign state is unacceptable in the 21st century and that such acts cannot and will not be tolerated.”
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Russian novelist, dramatist & historian, dead at 89:
Born: December 11, 1918– death (late) August 3, 2008
Through his writings, he made the world aware of the Gulag, the Soviet Union's labour camp system, and for these efforts, Solzhenitsyn was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970. He returned to Russia in 1994. He died at home after years of declining health on August 3, 2008.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, an icon of the great Russian writer in the mold of Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, died of heart failure late on Aug 3, 2008 in his Moscow home. He was 89 years old. As hundreds gathered in the rain on Tuesday to pay their last respects to Solzhenitsyn, other writers, national leaders and public figures began pondering the essence of who he was for Russian society - dissident, writer, a historical figure endemic to the 20th century, thinker or simply legend. He was buried Wednesday at Donskoy Cemetery in a ceremony that included goose-stepping guards and the dirges of a religious choir.
A Day in the Life
Indeed, the dismantling of the Communist state in Russia would not have been possible without Solzhenitsyn's relentless pursuit in uncovering the atrocities of the Stalin regime, a quest that began in 1962 with the publication of his first short novel, "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich." Based on his own three years at a labor camp in Kazakhstan, it chronicled the typical, "almost happy" day of a political prisoner. "He was one of the undisputed great Russian writers left," the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, a supporter of Solzhenitsyn who suffered for his political views in the 1970s, told The Moscow News. "He put up a barricade against our Stalinist past that was documented in The Gulag Archipelago and the rest of his books."
If Soviet authorities initially approved the publication, they would come to rue their lenience, as an unprecedented body of work documenting the vast chain of Gulag camps that developed to sustain the Soviet Union's forced labor economy followed. The Gulag Archipelago included volumes of eyewitness accounts, personal experience and research at a time when the existence of the camps was not disclosed. A documentary account, the book combined minute descriptions of the political, legal and bureaucratic apparatus that kept the archipelago alive, with bald, unsentimental prose to portray a regime that was solidly founded on slave labor, something that was irrevocably at odds with Communist ideology itself. Completed in 1968, the manuscript - with a few dog-eared copies left to circulate among dissidents and the intelligentsia back home, who reportedly had only 24 hours to read the book before passing it on - was smuggled out of the Soviet Union and published in Europe.
By the time the KGB got their hands on one of the manuscripts, it was too late to silence a writer whose works had leaked to the West and irrevocably tarnished the Soviet regime. In 1970, he was awarded the Nobel Prize - but was unable to attend the Stockholm ceremony. Soviet authorities expected him to refuse the prize, much like Boris Pasternak did before him, but Solzhenitsyn held firm. In 1974, he was convicted of treason and exiled - sending him to the camps for a second round was no longer an option.
War, Camp and Exile: The Making of a Dissident
Solzhenitsyn was born into a humble family in 1918, just as Russia had gotten itself out of World War I and into the thick of revolution and civil war. With his father killed in a hunting accident before he was born, he was raised by an educated mother steeped in the Russian Orthodox faith.
But there was hardly anything to predestine the young Solzhenitsyn to become a great writer. A communist despite his Russian Orthodox upbringing, he studied mathematics, philosophy, literature and history. With the breakout of World War II, he was so eager to join the front that he bypassed medical limitations, and went on to command an artillery unit. He was still fighting on German soil when a letter sent to a friend that was critical of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin landed him in prison. He was sentenced under the ubiquitous Article 58 (counterrevolutionary activities) to eight years in a labor camp.
Between 1945 and 1954, Solzhenitsyn endured forced labor, exile and even a bout with cancer. Those years served as the basis of his future works, including The Cancer Ward and The First Circle, both of which were published in the West.
That he refused to keep silent about his experience turned him into a serious problem for Soviet authorities. While Nikita Khrushchev approved Solzhenitsyn's first novel for publication, hoping that it would help his anti-Stalinist liberalization policies, Leonid Brezhnev's more repressive regime tried to clamp down on the writer. However, it was no longer possible to do so. The Soviet authorities were forced to acknowledge him, albeit referring to his work as "the lying writings of Solzhenitsyn" when forced to confront it. Exiling him from Russia was a necessary concession.
But when Solzhenitsyn finally settled in the United States after a brief stay in Switzerland, he somewhat disappointed his new compatriots. Never a conformist, he was not about to begin - nor was his American exile a welcome one for a man who had never wanted to leave his homeland in the first place. Accommodated first by Stanford University, the Hoover Institution and then Harvard University, Solzhenitsyn gave a vitriolic Harvard Commencement Address in 1978, lashing out against modern Western culture and lambasting everything from consumerism to rock music.
As a dissident who had fought against totalitarianism back home, Solzhenitsyn was expected to become a herald of liberty. Instead, he showed himself as a monarchist, a Russophile and a critic of Western-style liberalism. Indeed, Henry Kissinger once had to talk President Gerald Ford out of a meeting with the writer, explaining that his political views dishearten many of his fellow dissidents. David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, wrote of him in 2001 as a dominant writer of the 20th century, but also as "a freak, a monarchist, a crank, a has-been."
After his Soviet citizenship was restored, Solzhenitsyn traveled back to Russia in 1994, settling with his second wife in a dacha in Troitse-Lykovo, west of Moscow. If Americans were disillusioned by his failure to embrace their values, then Solzhenitsyn was in no rush to praise Boris Yeltsin's Russia after the fall of Communist rule, often railing against him as viciously as he had denounced so much in American culture. Solzhenitsyn continued with a number of historic works - most notable was his controversial Two Hundred Years Together, on the relations of Russians and Jews. From dissident, he was on the way to establishing himself as a reactionary.
Indeed, what appeared as a turn of heart baffled fellow dissidents and Westerners. But this view failed to take into account that Solzhenitsyn was never a typical dissident - a case in point is his polemic with the more liberal dissident, Andrei Sakharov.
"There is really no difference between his views from the 1960s and his views of the 1990s," Dmitry Bykov, writer, journalist and author of an acclaimed biography of Boris Pasternak, told The Moscow News. "He was a conservative dissident who believed that Soviet rule perverted the essence of Russia. In fact, there was a whole school of conservative Soviet dissidents, and Solzhenitsyn was just the flag bearer of the right-wing opposition, which criticized the Soviet regime from a conservative, right-wing position."
As such, there was also nothing surprising in his relative support of President Vladimir Putin's regime. In a May 2006 interview he gave to The Moscow News, Solzhenitsyn admitted that "saving the nation - numerically, physically and morally - is the greatest task for the state. All measures to raise living standards - housing, diet, health care, education, morality, etc. - are in effect designed to save the nation. This is an overriding priority."
In 2007, Putin presented Solzhenitsyn with a State Prize for humanitarian achievement, thus sealing what had superficially appeared to be a reconciliation with the state. And yet Solzhenitsyn was far from supporting any single political system.
"Solzhenitsyn certainly liked Putin more than Yeltsin. He saw something of Stoplypin in him," said Bykov, referring to the reform-minded prime minister who served under Tsar Nicholas II. "They even discussed the new forest code. And I think the big part of Russian society agreed with him on this. But of course the [government] never conformed fully to Solzhenitsyn's criteria, which were complex and contradictory."
Meanwhile, Oleg Ossetinsky, a Soviet screenwriter and acclaimed musician, had a different impression of Solzhenitsyn's influence. "He was unable to bring Russia to reason," he told The Moscow News. "I think he came to understand, though, that things don't change in Russia."
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin was one of the hundreds of mourners who gathered Tuesday in the rain outside Moscow's Academy of Sciences to pay their last tribute to a man who had remained for the last decade a living legend.
"We are proud that Alexander Solzhenitsyn was our compatriot and contemporary," Putin said Monday in a statement. "His activities as a writer and public figure, his entire long, thorny life journey will remain for us a model of true devotion, selfless service to the people, Motherland, the ideals of freedom, justice and humanism."
Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who restored Solzhenitsyn's citizenship as the Soviet Union's last leader, said that the writer had played a vital role in overcoming the Stalinist regime that had imprisoned him and millions of others. His books had "changed the minds of millions of people, making them rethink their past and present... We owe him a lot."
By Anna Arutunyan www.mnweekly.ru/national/20080807/55340765.html
John Edwards: Former US presidential candidate:
June 10, 1953 7:02 am EST
Seneca, South Carolina
Note the Venus/Neptune opposition of Solar Eclipse falls in his 2/8th houses – very fitting for the sex scandal first revealed by the tabloids (Mars transiting in Virgo in the 3rd.) The Solar Eclipse Sun/Moon conjunct John’s progressed Ceres - very fitting for his description of being "abducted by desires of his own willful narcissism" as he put it (loosely) – also this news is a resurrection of something from the past (Ceres– resurrection theme, the forbidden fruit, etc., the sting of karma) – transiting Jupiter is also opposing his natal Ceres (7/1 houses) - note also the Solar Eclipse Mars in a first quarter square to his Sun in the 12th (transiting mars is currently in the 3rd house of media) - the Lunar Eclipse Mars position will form a tight t square with his natal Mars (27 Gem) in the 12th house which has been opposed by transiting Pluto for quite some time - since the time of the affair in 2006 - Mars in Virgo square transiting Pluto in the 6th - that's a lot of guilt to deal with. The reason it has surfaced now? She’s just had a baby (they both deny he fathered the woman’s child – question of paternity also brings in the Neptune opp his natal Pluto) – child is represented by Leo (the Solar Eclipse Sun & Moon) and also Ceres in Leo.
As I wrote in my August forecast intro, Solar Eclipses are event generating -especially in the areas where the eclipse path travels, and also when they ignite your chart (esp. the personal planets.) We often see prominent passages or births of note. Note that events do not necessarily occur on the exact date, events can occur at any time during the eclipse cycle (most commonly in the month prior or in the several months following.)
Aug 1 Eclipse path: Northern Canada (Nunavat), Northern Greenland, the Arctic Ocean, Central Russia, Mongolia, and China.
Below are a few of the recent events linked to the Eclipse Season, please feel free to add to this list..
Solar Eclipse:
Aug 1:
1. Alexander Solzhenitsyn dies Aug 3: russian revolutionary (exiled), visionary, author; exposed Stalin & the gulage?
2. Russia invades Georgia (this Russian event has been touted as the start of a new cold war)
3. John Edwards affair scandal
(interesting that it also hit Hillary’s chart and there was some talk that she was cheated out of a fair race because of this)
(Hillary Clinton resurfaces to help Obama by appealing to her supporters to get behind her previous opponent.)
4. The two main political parties in Pakistan strike a deal to impeach President Musharriff (what about parliament?)
5. The Bejing Summer Olympics are held amid great controversy
Aug 8 - 24.
Bernie Mack and Issac Hayes die within hours of each other (and they just finished making a movie together.)
LUNAR ECLIPSE:Aug 16:
1. Russian president signs a Georgia cease fire deal (what date?)
2. Aug 18: Musharrif announces his resignation
(around the Aug 1st Solar Eclipse, the two main political parties in Pakistan came together to strike a deal to impeach him.
3. Hurricane builds in Fla.
Solar Eclipse duration: watch key dates: Nov 2, and Jan 29 (next solar eclipse Jan 26)
It is interesting that the US presidential elections take place on Nov 4 and that the president official assumes office around Jan 29.
Lunar Eclipse – thresholds – Nov 16, Feb 13
These key dates are likely to hold some potency/significance/relevancy to what’s going on for you/us now.
Note that these Eclipses suggest an acceleration for the collective experience. Why? Because the nodes have been in Leo/Aquarius and don't forget that Chiron and the Sun opposed right across the nodes between the two eclipses. (Chiron has been traveling in tandem with the North Node in Aquarius since May-ish.)
See below for details take off the net:
___
World InactionRussia invades Georgia while the West watches. How did it come to this?
By Anne Applebaum www.slate.com/id/2197155/
Posted Friday, Aug. 8, 2008, at 6:00 PM ET
For the best possible illustration of why Islamic terrorism may one day be considered the least of our problems, look no further than the BBC's split-screen coverage of Friday's Olympics opening ceremony. On one side, fireworks sparkled, and thousands of exotically dressed Chinese dancers bent their bodies into the shape of doves, the cosmos, and so on. On the other side, gray Russian tanks were shown rolling into South Ossetia, a rebel province of Georgia. The effect was striking: Two of the world's rising powers were strutting their stuff.
The difference, of course, is that one event has been in rehearsal for years while the other, if not a total surprise, was not actually scheduled to take place this week. And that, too, is significant. The Chinese challenge to Western power has been a long time coming, and it is, in a certain sense, predictable. As a rule, the Chinese do not make sudden moves, and they do not try to provoke crises.
Russia, by contrast, is an unpredictable power, which makes a response more difficult. In fact, Russian politics have now become so utterly opaque that it is not easy to say why this particular "frozen" conflict has escalated right now. Russian sources said that Georgia had launched an invasion of South Ossetia, aiming to pacify the breakaway region. Georgia, meanwhile, said that its troops entered the South Ossetian "capital" in response to escalating South Ossetian attacks, which have been going on for a week—years, really—as well as the Russian aerial bombardment of Georgian territory.
Both sides have deeper motives for fighting. The Russians have an interest in preventing Georgia from joining NATO, as Georgia, a Western-oriented democracy—George Bush called the country a "beacon of liberty"—has long wanted to do. In this, the Russians will almost certainly succeed. There is no Western power that has any interest in a military ally that is involved in a major military conflict with Russia.
The Georgian leadership, by contrast, had come to believe that the constant pressure of Russian aggression, coupled with the West's failure to accept Georgia into NATO, compelled them to demonstrate "self-reliance." Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili has been buying weapons in preparation for this moment. Those who know him say he believed a military conflict was inevitable but could be won if conducted cleverly. As of Friday night, with Russian soldiers fighting in South Ossetia—only a few dozen miles from Tblisi, the Georgian capital—it seems as if he might have miscalculated, badly. Russia has not sent 150 tanks across that border in order to lose.
Still, the bottom line is this: Georgia should have stepped back from the brink—and should still do so if it has a chance—but Russia's deployment of such a large and carefully prepared force, not only in South Ossetia but in the rest of Georgia, is totally unacceptable. And the other indisputable conclusion? Wherever the blame for this week's escalation is finally laid, the West has very little influence on the outcome. Saakashvili's appeals for help and moral support—"This is not about Georgia," he told CNN, "it is about America, its values"—aren't going to come to much unless Russia wants them to.
___
BEIJING - Georgia’s 35-strong Olympic team may pull out of the Games because of the Russian offensive in their country, their National Olympic Committee told Reuters on Saturday.
“We don’t know what will happen but we’re talking about it now. It will be the decision of the president of the country (Mikheil Saakashvili),” spokesman Giorgi Tchanishvili said.
Georgia called for a cease-fire on Saturday after Russian bombers widened an offensive to force back Georgian troops seeking control over the breakaway region of South Ossetia.
Russia put the death toll at 2,000, and 30,000 refugees from South Ossetia had fled to Russia over the past 36 hours. Moscow said two of its warplanes had been shot down, 13 of its soldiers killed and 70 wounded.
The Georgian Olympic team urged the international community to help end the violence.
“This deliberate strategy of aggression has grown into a full-scale military intervention involving all regions of Georgia,” the athletes said in a statement.
“Georgia calls upon the international community to make it clear (to Russia) that intrusion into and bombing of the territory of a sovereign state is unacceptable in the 21st century and that such acts cannot and will not be tolerated.”
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Russian novelist, dramatist & historian, dead at 89:
Born: December 11, 1918– death (late) August 3, 2008
Through his writings, he made the world aware of the Gulag, the Soviet Union's labour camp system, and for these efforts, Solzhenitsyn was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970. He returned to Russia in 1994. He died at home after years of declining health on August 3, 2008.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, an icon of the great Russian writer in the mold of Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, died of heart failure late on Aug 3, 2008 in his Moscow home. He was 89 years old. As hundreds gathered in the rain on Tuesday to pay their last respects to Solzhenitsyn, other writers, national leaders and public figures began pondering the essence of who he was for Russian society - dissident, writer, a historical figure endemic to the 20th century, thinker or simply legend. He was buried Wednesday at Donskoy Cemetery in a ceremony that included goose-stepping guards and the dirges of a religious choir.
A Day in the Life
Indeed, the dismantling of the Communist state in Russia would not have been possible without Solzhenitsyn's relentless pursuit in uncovering the atrocities of the Stalin regime, a quest that began in 1962 with the publication of his first short novel, "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich." Based on his own three years at a labor camp in Kazakhstan, it chronicled the typical, "almost happy" day of a political prisoner. "He was one of the undisputed great Russian writers left," the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, a supporter of Solzhenitsyn who suffered for his political views in the 1970s, told The Moscow News. "He put up a barricade against our Stalinist past that was documented in The Gulag Archipelago and the rest of his books."
If Soviet authorities initially approved the publication, they would come to rue their lenience, as an unprecedented body of work documenting the vast chain of Gulag camps that developed to sustain the Soviet Union's forced labor economy followed. The Gulag Archipelago included volumes of eyewitness accounts, personal experience and research at a time when the existence of the camps was not disclosed. A documentary account, the book combined minute descriptions of the political, legal and bureaucratic apparatus that kept the archipelago alive, with bald, unsentimental prose to portray a regime that was solidly founded on slave labor, something that was irrevocably at odds with Communist ideology itself. Completed in 1968, the manuscript - with a few dog-eared copies left to circulate among dissidents and the intelligentsia back home, who reportedly had only 24 hours to read the book before passing it on - was smuggled out of the Soviet Union and published in Europe.
By the time the KGB got their hands on one of the manuscripts, it was too late to silence a writer whose works had leaked to the West and irrevocably tarnished the Soviet regime. In 1970, he was awarded the Nobel Prize - but was unable to attend the Stockholm ceremony. Soviet authorities expected him to refuse the prize, much like Boris Pasternak did before him, but Solzhenitsyn held firm. In 1974, he was convicted of treason and exiled - sending him to the camps for a second round was no longer an option.
War, Camp and Exile: The Making of a Dissident
Solzhenitsyn was born into a humble family in 1918, just as Russia had gotten itself out of World War I and into the thick of revolution and civil war. With his father killed in a hunting accident before he was born, he was raised by an educated mother steeped in the Russian Orthodox faith.
But there was hardly anything to predestine the young Solzhenitsyn to become a great writer. A communist despite his Russian Orthodox upbringing, he studied mathematics, philosophy, literature and history. With the breakout of World War II, he was so eager to join the front that he bypassed medical limitations, and went on to command an artillery unit. He was still fighting on German soil when a letter sent to a friend that was critical of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin landed him in prison. He was sentenced under the ubiquitous Article 58 (counterrevolutionary activities) to eight years in a labor camp.
Between 1945 and 1954, Solzhenitsyn endured forced labor, exile and even a bout with cancer. Those years served as the basis of his future works, including The Cancer Ward and The First Circle, both of which were published in the West.
That he refused to keep silent about his experience turned him into a serious problem for Soviet authorities. While Nikita Khrushchev approved Solzhenitsyn's first novel for publication, hoping that it would help his anti-Stalinist liberalization policies, Leonid Brezhnev's more repressive regime tried to clamp down on the writer. However, it was no longer possible to do so. The Soviet authorities were forced to acknowledge him, albeit referring to his work as "the lying writings of Solzhenitsyn" when forced to confront it. Exiling him from Russia was a necessary concession.
But when Solzhenitsyn finally settled in the United States after a brief stay in Switzerland, he somewhat disappointed his new compatriots. Never a conformist, he was not about to begin - nor was his American exile a welcome one for a man who had never wanted to leave his homeland in the first place. Accommodated first by Stanford University, the Hoover Institution and then Harvard University, Solzhenitsyn gave a vitriolic Harvard Commencement Address in 1978, lashing out against modern Western culture and lambasting everything from consumerism to rock music.
As a dissident who had fought against totalitarianism back home, Solzhenitsyn was expected to become a herald of liberty. Instead, he showed himself as a monarchist, a Russophile and a critic of Western-style liberalism. Indeed, Henry Kissinger once had to talk President Gerald Ford out of a meeting with the writer, explaining that his political views dishearten many of his fellow dissidents. David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, wrote of him in 2001 as a dominant writer of the 20th century, but also as "a freak, a monarchist, a crank, a has-been."
After his Soviet citizenship was restored, Solzhenitsyn traveled back to Russia in 1994, settling with his second wife in a dacha in Troitse-Lykovo, west of Moscow. If Americans were disillusioned by his failure to embrace their values, then Solzhenitsyn was in no rush to praise Boris Yeltsin's Russia after the fall of Communist rule, often railing against him as viciously as he had denounced so much in American culture. Solzhenitsyn continued with a number of historic works - most notable was his controversial Two Hundred Years Together, on the relations of Russians and Jews. From dissident, he was on the way to establishing himself as a reactionary.
Indeed, what appeared as a turn of heart baffled fellow dissidents and Westerners. But this view failed to take into account that Solzhenitsyn was never a typical dissident - a case in point is his polemic with the more liberal dissident, Andrei Sakharov.
"There is really no difference between his views from the 1960s and his views of the 1990s," Dmitry Bykov, writer, journalist and author of an acclaimed biography of Boris Pasternak, told The Moscow News. "He was a conservative dissident who believed that Soviet rule perverted the essence of Russia. In fact, there was a whole school of conservative Soviet dissidents, and Solzhenitsyn was just the flag bearer of the right-wing opposition, which criticized the Soviet regime from a conservative, right-wing position."
As such, there was also nothing surprising in his relative support of President Vladimir Putin's regime. In a May 2006 interview he gave to The Moscow News, Solzhenitsyn admitted that "saving the nation - numerically, physically and morally - is the greatest task for the state. All measures to raise living standards - housing, diet, health care, education, morality, etc. - are in effect designed to save the nation. This is an overriding priority."
In 2007, Putin presented Solzhenitsyn with a State Prize for humanitarian achievement, thus sealing what had superficially appeared to be a reconciliation with the state. And yet Solzhenitsyn was far from supporting any single political system.
"Solzhenitsyn certainly liked Putin more than Yeltsin. He saw something of Stoplypin in him," said Bykov, referring to the reform-minded prime minister who served under Tsar Nicholas II. "They even discussed the new forest code. And I think the big part of Russian society agreed with him on this. But of course the [government] never conformed fully to Solzhenitsyn's criteria, which were complex and contradictory."
Meanwhile, Oleg Ossetinsky, a Soviet screenwriter and acclaimed musician, had a different impression of Solzhenitsyn's influence. "He was unable to bring Russia to reason," he told The Moscow News. "I think he came to understand, though, that things don't change in Russia."
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin was one of the hundreds of mourners who gathered Tuesday in the rain outside Moscow's Academy of Sciences to pay their last tribute to a man who had remained for the last decade a living legend.
"We are proud that Alexander Solzhenitsyn was our compatriot and contemporary," Putin said Monday in a statement. "His activities as a writer and public figure, his entire long, thorny life journey will remain for us a model of true devotion, selfless service to the people, Motherland, the ideals of freedom, justice and humanism."
Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who restored Solzhenitsyn's citizenship as the Soviet Union's last leader, said that the writer had played a vital role in overcoming the Stalinist regime that had imprisoned him and millions of others. His books had "changed the minds of millions of people, making them rethink their past and present... We owe him a lot."
By Anna Arutunyan www.mnweekly.ru/national/20080807/55340765.html
John Edwards: Former US presidential candidate:
June 10, 1953 7:02 am EST
Seneca, South Carolina
Note the Venus/Neptune opposition of Solar Eclipse falls in his 2/8th houses – very fitting for the sex scandal first revealed by the tabloids (Mars transiting in Virgo in the 3rd.) The Solar Eclipse Sun/Moon conjunct John’s progressed Ceres - very fitting for his description of being "abducted by desires of his own willful narcissism" as he put it (loosely) – also this news is a resurrection of something from the past (Ceres– resurrection theme, the forbidden fruit, etc., the sting of karma) – transiting Jupiter is also opposing his natal Ceres (7/1 houses) - note also the Solar Eclipse Mars in a first quarter square to his Sun in the 12th (transiting mars is currently in the 3rd house of media) - the Lunar Eclipse Mars position will form a tight t square with his natal Mars (27 Gem) in the 12th house which has been opposed by transiting Pluto for quite some time - since the time of the affair in 2006 - Mars in Virgo square transiting Pluto in the 6th - that's a lot of guilt to deal with. The reason it has surfaced now? She’s just had a baby (they both deny he fathered the woman’s child – question of paternity also brings in the Neptune opp his natal Pluto) – child is represented by Leo (the Solar Eclipse Sun & Moon) and also Ceres in Leo.