Human Rights Twisted Out of All Recognition

Touchstone has a "News" section in the back of the book, usually small bits and pieces most of which have gone unnoticed in the rest of the media. This paragraph is from the current [July/August] number:

"Limitless human rights are what our cave-dwelling ancestor already had – nothing prevented him from depriving his neighbor of prey or finishing him off with a cudgel," said Nobel Prize winter Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, defending the statement on human rights of the tenth World Russian People's Council, which had criticized Western ideas that use human rights to promote immoral behaviors condemned by traditional religions. "Even to call for self-restraint is considered ridiculous and funny. However, it is only self-restraint that offers a moral and reliable way out of any conflict." If Russia joined NATO "which is engaged in propaganda and forcibly inculcating the ideology and practices of today's Western democracy in various parts of the planet, it would lead not to a expansion, but to decline, of Christian civilization."