Poet, novelist, essayist, translator and winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature, Czeslaw Milosz died on August 14, 2004. He was born in Lithuania of Polish parents and lived under two totalitarian systems of modern history -- national socialism and communism. In his 1953 work titled The Captive Mind he was asked   'Are Americans really stupid?' The question reveals the attitude of the average person in the people's democracies toward the West: it is despair mixed with a residue of hope. During the last few years, the West has given these people a number of reasons to despair politically. World War II "destroyed not only [Eastern European] economies, but also a great many values which had seemed till then unshakable." Milosz describes how the average European during wartime was not accustomed "to thinking of his native city as divided into segregated living areas, but a single decree can force him to this new pattern of life and...(Read Full Article)