Solzhenitsyn: 'Spiritual Death Has... Touched Us All'

by Alexander Solzhenitsyn - February 12th, 1974 - Washington Post (reprinted)

And he who is not sufficiently courageous even to defend his soul -- don't let him be proud of his "progressive" views, and don't let him boast that he is an academician or a people's artist, a merited figure, or a general --let him say to himself: I am in the herd, and a coward. It's all the same to me as long as I'm fed and warm.

[snip]

"Why should cattle have the gifts of freedom? Their heritage from generation to generation is the belled yoke and the lash."

I remember when Alexander Solzhenitsyn was the hero of the right, and the left reviled him. Now, in typical revisionist history, the progressives he reviled for their tolerance of Stalin, Kruschev, Gorbachev and even Putin, are claiming him as their own and arguing that he was fighting against the people who protected him and raised him up.

It is a part of the battle here in America against the socialist, even Marxist, ideology. This tendency to reinvent "truth" by the left is curious. Truth was the great ideal of Sozhenisyn. It was the banner in which he led a battle that attracted the brightest and best. It is sad that the very people that he ridiculed, progressives, now claim him as one of their own. The Republican Party has its own problems with seeing the truth. All you have to do is witness the willingness to embrace socialism under the name of "compassionate conservatism" to recognize how easily we can deceive ourselves. However Solzhenitsyn is too courageous and too honest to allow this rewriting of history by those he opposed in life.

We need to honor Solzhenitsyn and his quest for truth. We must not allow his memory to be degraded. He was . . . and is . . . a great man.