Aleksander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008)Rest in Peace
In the summer of 1971, I returned to the United States when my father was reassigned from being the Consul General for Northern Japan, based in Sapporo, to the State Department in Washington D.C. I was about to enter a stateside school for the first time in my life and the establishment that my parents managed to squeak me into was Mater Dei, where I was to matriculate for 8th Grade.
I received my summer reading list in the mail and it was quite formidable. I honestly don't remember all the books, but one stuck with me, "A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," by Aleksandr Solzhenitisyn. The depictions of the biting cold of Siberia were actually comforting to me in that sweltering Washington heat - the climate we had just left was strikingly similar. The horror of imprisonment and deprivation were shocking. I was naive and even though I had been an avid student of history, devouring books on the Civil War and World War II, I could not imagine that one man could treat another with such unbridled cruelty. But Aleksandr knew. He wrote passionately about the zeks (prisoners) and how individuals developed their own way to cope with cruelty.
In "The Cancer Ward," he wrote: "A man dies from a tumour, so how can a country survive with growths like labour camps and exiles?" Solzhenitsyn suffered through the horrors of imprisonment in the Soviet labor camps and the indignities of constant surveillance and search by the wretched KGB throughout the 1960's until he was finally exiled in 1974. He moved to the United States and took up residence in Vermont. Along the way, he managed to publish the monumental "Gulag Archipelago," which brought the full nightmare of the Soviet system to light. I always found it ironic that the left hailed this great man of letters as one of the greatest writers of the epoch (he was) and ignored what he wrote about.
In 1970 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, but could not leave the Soviet Union to accept it for fear he would not be allowed back in. A ceremony was planned at the Swedish Embassy in Moscow, but the appeasing Swedes backed out for fear of upsetting the Russians. When he did accept the award in 1974, after returning to the USSR was no longer an issue, he said the following (quoted in the Wall Street Journal this morning):
Re-read that paragraph...the bolding is mine. He wrote this in 1974 about the Soviet police state. But I am sure that Aleksandr understood that this is a human condition and barbarity can hide it's face in a Communist uniform or a Jihadi turban. Evil does not change, it just changes it's costume. Sadly, neither does cowardice. Cowardice can come dressed in the common clothes of a Soviet citizen struggling to survive under the watchful eyes of the state or in the voting masses of an election in the United States, where the fear of being called politically incorrect outweighs the common sense of calling Islamic fundamentalism what it is: evil.
Solzhenitsyn defeated the evil that imprisoned him. He did it by being human and by having the courage to speak the truth. He spoke truth to us when he called the American left out for our failure in Vietnam in a speech at Harvard in 1978: "But members of the U.S. antiwar movement wound up being involved in the betrayal of Far Eastern nations, in a genocide and in the suffering today imposed on 30 million people there. Do those convinced pacifists hear the moans coming from there?"
He calls to us still in a voice that is not Russian, or European or American. It is the cry of Western Civilization - the challenge for us to all be free with the understanding that it can only happen when we have the courage to stand up and erase our fear with the certainty of truth:
Godspeed, noble zek, Godspeed.
Rumble on!
*Speech to Congress in 1975
In "The Cancer Ward," he wrote: "A man dies from a tumour, so how can a country survive with growths like labour camps and exiles?" Solzhenitsyn suffered through the horrors of imprisonment in the Soviet labor camps and the indignities of constant surveillance and search by the wretched KGB throughout the 1960's until he was finally exiled in 1974. He moved to the United States and took up residence in Vermont. Along the way, he managed to publish the monumental "Gulag Archipelago," which brought the full nightmare of the Soviet system to light. I always found it ironic that the left hailed this great man of letters as one of the greatest writers of the epoch (he was) and ignored what he wrote about.
In 1970 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, but could not leave the Soviet Union to accept it for fear he would not be allowed back in. A ceremony was planned at the Swedish Embassy in Moscow, but the appeasing Swedes backed out for fear of upsetting the Russians. When he did accept the award in 1974, after returning to the USSR was no longer an issue, he said the following (quoted in the Wall Street Journal this morning):
"The spirit of Munich has by no means retreated into the past; it was not merely a brief episode. I even venture to say that the spirit of Munich prevails in the 20th Century. The timid civilized world has found nothing with which to oppose the onslaught of a sudden revival of barefaced barbarity, other than concessions and smiles. The spirit of Munich is a sickness of the will of successful people, it is the daily condition of those who have given themselves up to the thirst after prosperity at any price, to material well-being as the chief goal of earthly existence. Such people-and there are many in today's world-elect passivity and retreat, just so as their accustomed life might drag on a bit longer, just so as not to step over the threshold of hardship today-and tomorrow, you'll see, it will all be all right. (But it will never be all right! The price of cowardice will only be evil; we shall reap courage and victory only when we dare to make sacrifices.)"
Re-read that paragraph...the bolding is mine. He wrote this in 1974 about the Soviet police state. But I am sure that Aleksandr understood that this is a human condition and barbarity can hide it's face in a Communist uniform or a Jihadi turban. Evil does not change, it just changes it's costume. Sadly, neither does cowardice. Cowardice can come dressed in the common clothes of a Soviet citizen struggling to survive under the watchful eyes of the state or in the voting masses of an election in the United States, where the fear of being called politically incorrect outweighs the common sense of calling Islamic fundamentalism what it is: evil.
Solzhenitsyn defeated the evil that imprisoned him. He did it by being human and by having the courage to speak the truth. He spoke truth to us when he called the American left out for our failure in Vietnam in a speech at Harvard in 1978: "But members of the U.S. antiwar movement wound up being involved in the betrayal of Far Eastern nations, in a genocide and in the suffering today imposed on 30 million people there. Do those convinced pacifists hear the moans coming from there?"
He calls to us still in a voice that is not Russian, or European or American. It is the cry of Western Civilization - the challenge for us to all be free with the understanding that it can only happen when we have the courage to stand up and erase our fear with the certainty of truth:
"Until I came to the West myself and spent two years looking around, I could never have imagined to what an extreme degree the West had actually become a world without a will, a world gradually petrifying in the face of the danger confronting it…All of us are standing on the brink of a great historical cataclysm, a flood that swallows up civilization and changes whole epochs."*
Godspeed, noble zek, Godspeed.
Rumble on!
*Speech to Congress in 1975