Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Solzhenitsyn – truth, freedom and reality.

He showed the stupidity of the post-modern, relativity cult.

by Lego Acies





Alexander Solzhenitsyn embodies courage in speaking the truth. Now dead at 89, the Russian mathematician, writer and freedom activist was as important as Andrei Sakhorov to bring to light, even to socialist and fascist sympathizers in the West, the true barbarity of the Soviet system. Not even the most mystically inclined statist, the most devout follower of freedom-effacing terrorist dictatorship, could deny that Solzhenitsyn spoke truth to reality. And today the same cadre of insufferable ignorasmuses and elitist 'intellectuals' are defending yet another pagan fascism – that of Islam. Solzhenitsyn's life proves Churchills' inviolable principle – 'humans never learn'.

Solzhenitsyn was a trained and very talented mathematician who was arrested during World War Two for criticising Stalin in a series of letters with a friend. He served a total of 12 years in prison and in re-education slave camps for this rather mild expression of personal opinion and critical faculty. During his 12 years in prison he somehow was able to write essays and books detailing his experiences. It is still unclear how, given the exigencies of slave-camp GULAG life, he was able to do this while under such physical and mental pressure.

The camps were extremely brutal – yet the books poured out of Solzhenitsyn. The Tenderfoot and the Tramp in 1946 described his first taste at losing any form of freedom. After being transferred to a scientific research camp he spent a few years in a special prison for those dissidents who did not get the message of big brotherly love. This was recorded in his work, The First Circle, written in 1950. At this time Solzhenitsyn was sent to the newly created 'Special Camps' in Kazakhstan which were intended only for troublesome political prisoners. This experience is captured in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, where he worked as a miner, a bricklayer, and a foundryman. It was here that Solzhenitsyn developed cancer – which was cured in the 1960s in a Tashkent cancer clinic.

Solzhenitsyn eventually escaped the camp system in June of 1956 – 12 years after being first arrested for criticizing Stalin in a letter. Stalin had died in 1953 most likely poisoned by his former KGB director Beria who had motive, reason and certainly the capability of taking down the dictator. Without Stalin's death it is highly unlikely that Solzhenitsyn would have been released.

For his clandestine writing, courage and incomparable literary industry Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1970. Yet Solzhenitsyn knew that democracies, and especially welfare dependent democracies were cowards in the face of terror. As he stated in his Nobel literature prize address, '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.'

This warning still applies today. The smiling idiots, and concessionists still abound and are still smiling, shaking hands, grinning and clasping Islamic ideology to their breasts as just another expression of human spirituality. Much like Soviet atheism and pagan brutality were just expressions of a communal experiment gone a little awry.

As one would expect when Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970, Sweden refused to let him receive his Nobel at its embassy in Moscow. They were too afraid of offending those dear, freedom loving Soviets. This attitude of grinning servitude and crass stupidity permeates Europe today. It is called post-modernism, a spiritual-less, nihilistic, socialised disease of the soul, mind and society. Solzhenitsyn often warned that faith-less societies who disavow morality, courage and standards soon fail. Europe's Arabicisation and Islamicisation only prove his point.

Solzhenitsyn's great work was of course his 1973 book, 'The Gulag Archipelgo' – a monumental accounting of the ferocious barbarism which underlay the Stalinist state and who system liquidated 60 million people. This work documented in great detail the lives destroyed by the Soviet state in its quest to annihilate the juridical, moral, and humanist Russian citizen – all in the search for a communal utopia. This product is the expression of Solzhenitsyn's search for a Christian morality, free will and for human intelligence in the darkness of Cold War Russia. Solzhenitsyn thus became a moral chronicler and a witness whose own experiences could not be discounted by the appeasing masses of Western society. He was telling a story of evil. He was giving advice on how to defeat it.

'The Gulag' was printed in Paris and it posed an immediate threat to Soviet leaders. To write this work Solzhenitsyn collected excerpts from documents, oral testimonies, eyewitness reports, and other material which irrefutably illustrated the monstrosity of Soviet injustice. The detailed account of the network of prison and labor camps - scattered like islands in a sea - in Stalin's Russia, angered the Soviet authorities and Solzhenitsyn was arrested and charged with treason. "A great writer is, so to speak, a second government in his country," Solzhnenitsyn wrote in The First Circle. "And for that reason no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones." The Soviets certainly had no love for Solzhenitsyn, but they could not kill him – he was too famous. So they expelled him and tellingly, Solzhenitsyn headed for America – not France, Sweden, Africa, or Latin America – but the USA.

For the rest of his life, Solzhenitsyn engaged in what he called "a struggle with falsehood," and warning about evil, state power and ideologies which destroy freedom. His diagnosis of threats to the West -- not least those from within -- remains relevant. Solzhenitsyn warned of "an atmosphere of moral mediocrity, paralyzing man's noblest impulses," and a "tilt of freedom in the direction of evil . . . evidently born primarily out of a humanistic and benevolent concept according to which there is no evil inherent to human nature." How appropriate is that today when you have a faineant West confronted by Islamic fascism?

These warnings and accountings of Soviet evil forced the West to take account of the human tragedy, the immoral barbarism which was Russian fascism. But they could apply to Islam. Solzhenitsyn was a moral prophet of the 20th century, a man who saw evil, wrote about it, and confronted it. He continued the great tradition of moral-Tolstoian Russian philosophers and writers looking for spirituality in a world in which evil resides and presents itself in various disguises. He was a Russian giant in many ways a man which the Russian nation should embrace and panegyrise and place alongside Dostoevsky, Gogol, Pasternak and Pushkin.