When your country is about to have a major election, it’s a good time to observe the proceedings from a perch somewhere outside of it. In 1979 at Harvard, Russian historian Alexandr Solzhenitsyn made a few observations, from which I select these snippets:

Regarding the choosing of Presidents: “It is not possible that assessment of the President’s performance should be reduced to the question of how much money one makes or to the availability of gasoline….”

Regarding cozying up to China, suddenly a sticky issue in the present Tibetan troubles: “I would not wish such an outcome to any country in the world. First of all, it is…a doomed alliance with evil….”

Regarding terrorists: “Life organized legalistically has shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil…When a government earnestly undertakes to root out terrorism, public opinion immediately accuses it of violating the terrorists’ civil rights….”

Regarding the use of diplomacy with certain nations: “The truth is that the split is both more profound and more alienating…than one can see at first glance….The anguish of a divided world gave birth to the theory of convergence….It is a soothing theory which overlooks the fact that these worlds are not at all evolving toward each other and that neither one can be transformed into the other without violence.”

Regarding politicians: “Political and intellectual functionaries exhibit this depression, passivity, and perplexity in their actions and in their statements, and even more so in their self-serving rationales as to how realistic, reasonable, and intellectually and even morally justified it is to base state policies on weakness and cowardice.”