************************************************************************
REEDINGS . . .
Notes on Books by Gerard Reed
April 2004
Number One Hundred Forty-eight ************************************************************************
During the 1970s I read most of Alexander
Solzhenitsyn’s novels (One Day in the
Life of Ivan Denisovich; First Circle; Cancer
Ward) as well as The Gulag
Archipelago, a massive (three volume) documentation of Soviet brutality
under Lenin and Stalin, and The Oak and the Calf, an account of his
struggles with censorship in the USSR.
By the decade’s end, thanks to Solzhenitsyn, I was delivered from some
of the academy’s gilded portraits of the USSR and a bit better prepared to
discern the Marxist rhetoric so glibly infusing many analyses of American
history. And I was also prompted to
re-examine, during the next decade, America’s role in the world vis-à-vis both Communism and similarly
aggressive ideologies such as Islam.
Recently, assessing Spanish elections,
wherein a docile public wilted in the face of terrorism, I find myself thinking
about, and re-reading, some of Solzhenitsyn’s addresses. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1970, and
his Nobel Lecture (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, c. 1972) focused on art and the role
of the artist. “One kind of artist,”
markedly evident in the avante garde individualists of the West,
“imagines himself the creator of an independent spiritual world and shoulders
the act of creating that world and the people in it, assuming total
responsibility for it” (p. 4). Such
self-serving rebels against convention enjoy moments of fame but do little
good. The other kind, endorsed by
Solzhenitsyn, rightly understands his sacred vocation and “acknowledges a
higher power above him and joyfully works as a common apprentice under God’s
heaven” (p. 4).
To work wisely and well as an artist
is a truly noble calling, for as Dostoevsky said, “Beauty will save the
world.” Great art, truthful art,
weathers the winds of time and gives wings to our souls. Indeed, Plato’s “old trinity of Truth,
Goodness, and Beauty” (p. 7) retains its ancient grandeur, and nothing rivals
the importance of investing one’s life in illuminating and defending such
transcendent realities, the “permanent things.” Speaking personally, Solzhenitsyn noted that he miraculously
survived his years in the Gulag, while thousands perished. So he had a sacred mission: to record, to explain, to imbed their story
in the nation’s literature. “Our
twentieth century has turned out to be more cruel than those preceding it, and
all that is terrible in it did not come to an end with the first half” (p. 22). Millions died because too few believed in “fixed
universal human concepts called good and justice” while the oppressors
disdained them as “fluid, changing, and that there for one must always do what
will benefit one’s party” (p. 220.
Sadly enough, might-makes-right philosophies forever enlist devotees,
and hijackers and terrorists ever wreck their carnage. But despite the fact that (as Dostoevsky
lamented) there is much “slavery to half-cocked progressive ideas” (p. 24), one
must courageously seek to refute them.
This means refuting the “spirit of
Munich” that has spread cancerously throughout the West. That spirit, Solzhenitsyn says, “is dominant
in the twentieth century. The
intimidated civilized world has found nothing to oppose the onslaught of a
sudden resurgent fang baring barbarism, except concessions and smiles. The spirit of Munich is a disease of the
will of prosperous people; it is the daily state of those who have given
themselves over to a craving for prosperity in every way, to material
well-being as the chief goal of life on earth” (p. 24). He referred, of course, to the agreement
Neville Chamberlain made with Adolf Hitler in 1938, declaring: “How horrible, how fantastic, how incredible
it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks because of a
quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing!” Returning to the cheering masses in England,
he proclaimed the arrival of “Peace in Our Time.”
Replying to Chamberlain, Winston Churchill said: “I
do not grudge our loyal, brave people
. . . the natural, spontaneous outburst of joy and relief when they
learned that the hard ordeal would no longer be required of them at the moment;
but they should know the truth. They
should know that . . . we have sustained a defeat without war, the consequences
of which will travel far with us along with our road.” The next year, of course, Germany invaded
Poland. Even then, however, many
Europeans sought to remain “neutral,” numbly paralyzed in their pacifism. This, Churchill said, was “lamentable; and it
will become much worse. They bow humbly
and in fear of German threats. Each one
hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last. All of them hope that the storm will pass
before their turn comes to be devoured.
But I fear—I fear greatly—the storm will not pass. It will rage and it will roar, ever more
loudly, ever more widely.”
The ghastly carnage of WWII, of course, might have
been avoided had Churchill’s warnings been heeded. But Chamberlain’s appeasement postponed the conflict until it
could only be waged against desperate odds.
Neither the League of Nations nor Europe’s politicians had the courage
to resist. So it’s up to writers such as
himself, Solzhenitsyn said, to speak the truth to the world. While struggling against the autocracy of
the USSR, he’d found an international fraternity of writers who rallied to his
side when Communist hardliners sought to suppress him. His weapon, naturally, was the writer’s pen
enlisted to proclaim the truth.
Tyranny thrives by lying. Truth
tellers expose and ultimately defeat the tyrants. Writers “can VANQUISH LIES!
In the struggle against lies, art has always won and always will” (p.
33). And so, he memorably declared in
closing: “ONE WORD OF TRUTH OUGHTWEIGHS
THE WORLD” (p. 34).
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Exiled from the USSR soon after
receiving the Nobel Prize, Solzhenitsyn found refuge in the mountains of
Vermont, where he continued to write and declare the truth. Initially lionized by the American
intelligentsia, he was invited to deliver the 1978 commencement address at
Harvard University, published as A World
Split Apart (New York: Harper &
Row, c. 1978). He began his speech
abrasively, noting that though Harvard’s motto is Veritas graduates would find that “truth seldom is sweet; it is almost invariably bitter” (p.
1). But he would speak truly
anyway! And his words proved “bitter”
to many who heard him!
After assessing various developments
around the world, he questioned the resolve of the West to deal with them. Alarmingly, he said, “A decline in courage
may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West
today. The Western world has lost its
civic courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, in each
government, in each political part, and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly
noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elites, causing an impression of a
loss of courage by the entire society” (pp. 9-11). This decline, “at times attaining what could be termed a lack of
manhood,” portended a cataclysmic cultural collapse.
Solzhenitsyn also lamented the West’s
materialism, litigiousness, licentiousness, and irresponsible
individualism. Personal freedom is, of
course, a great good, but irresponsible freedom erupts in evil acts and
“evidently stems from a humanistic and benevolent concept according to which
man—the master of this world—does not bear any evil within himself, and all the
defects of life are caused by misguided social systems, which must therefore be
corrected” (p. 23). If so, it would
seem that affluence would eliminate crime!
Strangely enough, however, crime was more rampant in the wealthy West
than in the impoverished USSR!
Then he upbraided the media. Granted virtually complete “freedom,”
journalists in the West used it as a license for irresponsibility. Rather than working hard work to discover
the truth, they slip into the slothful role of circulating rumors and personal
opinions. Though no state censors
restrict what’s written, “fashionable” ideas get aired and the public is denied
free access to the truth. Fads and
fantasies, not the illumination of reality, enlist the mainstream media. “Hastiness and superficiality—these are the
psychic diseases of the twentieth century and more than anywhere else this is
manifested in the press” (p. 27).
Consequently, “we may see terrorists heroized, or secret matters
pertaining to the nation’s defense publicly revealed, or we may witness
shameless intrusion into the privacy of well-known people according to the
slogan ‘Everyone is entitled to know everything’” (p. 25).
Solzhenitsyn was further disturbed by
the widespread pessimism and discontent Westerners displayed regarding economic
development. Amazingly, elite
intellectuals celebrated the very socialism that had destroyed his
homeland. (Remember that Harvard’s
superstar economist, John Kenneth Galbraith, still trumpeted the virtues of
socialism in the 1980s!) This,
Solzhenitsyn warned, “is a false and dangerous current” (p. 33). In the East, “communism has suffered a
complete ideological defeat; it is zero and less than zero. And yet Western intellectuals still look at
it with considerable interest and empathy, and this is precisely what makes it
so immensely difficult for the West to withstand the East” (p. 55). But the capitalist system in the West is no
panacea either. Both East and West, he
said, need “spiritual” rather than “economic” development, and the spirit has
been “trampled by the party mob in the East, by the commercial one in the West”
(p. 57).
American politicians who appeased
Communism especially elicited Solzhenitsyn’s scorn. In fact, looking at the nation’s recent withdrawal from Vietnam,
he said: “the most cruel mistake occurred
with the failure to understand the Vietnam War. Some people sincerely wanted all wars to stop just as soon as
possible; others believed that the way should be left open for national, or
Communist, self-determination in Vietnam (or in Cambodia, as we see today with
particular clarity). But in fact,
members of the U.S. antiwar movement became accomplices in the betrayal of Far
Eastern nations, in the genocide and the suffering today imposed on thirty
million people there. Do these
convinced pacifists now hear the moans coming from there? Do they understand their responsibility
today? Or do they prefer not to
hear? The American intelligentsia lost
its nerve and as a consequence the danger has come much closer to the United
States. But there is no awareness of
this. Your short-sighted politician who
signed the hasty Vietnam capitulation seemingly gave America a carefree
breathing pause; however a hundredfold Vietnams now looms over you” (p. 41). The future he envisioned would be shaped by
a “fight of cosmic proportions,” a battle between the forces of either Goodness
or Evil. Those who are morally neutral,
those who exalt in their moral relativism, are the true enemies of mankind. Thus, two years before Ronald Reagan was
elected President, Solzhenitsyn insisted that only a moral offensive could turn
back the evil empire.
Cowardice had led to retreat in
Southeast Asia. Democracies themselves,
Solzhenitsyn feared, lack the soul strength for sustained combat. Wealthy democracies, especially, seem
flaccid. “To defend oneself, one must
also be ready to die; there is little such readiness in a society raised in the
cult of material well-being. Nothing is
left, in this case, but concessions, attempts to gain time, and betrayal” (p.
45). More deeply, the “humanism” that
has increasingly dominated the West since the Renaissance explains its
weakness. When one believes ultimately
only in himself, when human reason becomes the final arbiter, when human
sinfulness is denied, the strength that comes only from God will
dissipate. Ironically, the secular
humanism of the West is almost identical with the humanism of Karl Marx, who
said: “communism is naturalized
humanism” (p. 53).
Consequently, he said, “If the world
has not approached its end, it has reached a major watershed in history, equal
in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It will
demand from us a spiritual blaze; we shall have to rise to a new height of
vision, to a new level of life, where our physical nature will not be cursed,
as in the Middle Ages, but even more importantly, our spiritual being will not
be trampled upon, as in the Modern Era” (pp. 60-61). This speech ended Solzhenitsyn’s speaking career in the United
States. The nation’s elite
newspapers—the New York Times and Washington Post—thenceforth ignore him. Prestigious universities, such as Harvard, closed their
doors. He became something of a persona non grata and spent the last 15
years of his life in America living as a recluse, working industriously on
manuscripts devoted to Russia’s history.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
* *
In the years immediately prior to
Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard speech, he spoke to several American and British
audiences, setting forth themes summarized at Harvard. His speeches were published in Warning to the West (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, c. 1976). He particularly assailed the appeasement
proposals of Bertrand Russell, summed up in the slogan “Better Red than dead.” To Russell and his fifth-column ilk,
Solzhenitsyn replied: “Better to be
dead than a soundrel. In this horrible
expression of Bertrand Russell’s there is an absence of all moral criteria” (p.
119).
Delivering an address over BBC in
1976, Solzhenitsyn noted that “until I came to the West myself and spent two
years looking around, I could never have imagined the extreme degree to which
the West actually desired to blind itself to the world situation, the extreme
degree to which the West has already become a world without a will, a world
gradually petrifying in the face of the danger confronting it, a world
oppressed above all by the need to defend its freedom” (p. 126). “There is a German proverb,” he continued,
“which runs Mut verloren—alles verloren: When
courage is lost, all is lost. There is
another Latin one, according to which loss of reason is the true harbinger of
destruction. But what happens to a
society in which both these losses—the loss of courage and the loss of
reason—intersect? This is the picture
which I found the West presents today” (pp. 126-127). This predicament, he thought, proceeds from centuries of
philosophical and theological development and colonial expansion.
The First World War, culminating this process,
virtually destroyed Europe, and in its wake the evils of socialism inundated
Russia, annihilating 100 million or more of its people. Europeans, eschewing moral criteria to
follow narrowly pragmatic policies, stood by silently. England’s prime minister, “Lloyd George
actually said: ‘Forget about
Russia. It is our job to ensure the
welfare of our own society” (p. 131).
So Russia’s erstwhile “allies,” ignoring her wartime sacrifices, did
nothing to stop the Bolshevik’s triumph, tyranny, and terror. Even as millions were executed or sent into
the Gulag Archipelago, when six million peasants died in the Ukraine in the
1930s, Westerners ignored it. Sadly,
Solzhenitsyn said: “Not a single
Western newspaper printed photographs or reports of the famine; indeed, your
great wit George Bernard Shaw even denied its existence. ‘Famine in Russia?’ he said. ‘I’ve never dined so well or so sumptuously
as when I crossed the Soviet border.’” (p. 133).
Similarly, during WWII England and the Allies
benefited from Russia’s assistance. But
following the war Stalin continued, with little criticism in the West, to
oppress his people. “Twice we helped
save the freedom of Western Europe,” he said.
“And twice you repaid us by abandoning us to our slavery” (p. 136). Frankly, he believed that Westerners
preferred peace and security, pleasure and comfort, to demanding justice for
Russia’s oppressed. So they ignored the
mass deportations of “whole nations to Siberia” and the occupation of Estonia,
Latvia, and Lithuania! Having stopped
Hitler, they seared their consciences and remained untroubled with Stalin.
Indeed, rather than seriously
evaluating and learning from Russia’s disaster, Western intellectuals seemed
(in the 1970s) willing to replicate it!
“And what we see is always the same as it was then: adults deferring to the opinion of their
children; the younger generation carried away by shallow, worthless ideas;
professors scared of being unfashionable; journalists refusing to take
responsibility for the words they squander so easily; universal sympathy for
revolutionary extremists; people with serious objections unable or unwilling to
voice them; the majority passively obsessed by a feeling of doom; feeble
governments; societies whose defensive reactions have become paralyzed;
spiritual confusion leading to political upheaval” (p. 130).
Solzhenitsyn was particularly incensed
by the “misty phantom of socialism” so prevalent in places like England. “Socialism has created the illusion of
quenching people’s thirst for justice:
Socialism has lulled their conscience into thinking that a steamroller
which is about to flatten them is a blessing in disguise, a salvation. And socialism, more than anything else, has
caused public hypocrisy to thrive,” enabling Europeans to ignore Soviet atrocities
(p. 141). There’s actually no logic to
socialism, for “it is an emotional impulse, a kind of worldly religion,”
embraced and followed with blind faith (p. 142). As an ideology, it is spread and embraced by immature, sophistic
believers.
The British, of course, had drifted
toward socialism under the post-WWII Labor leaders. Consequently, “Great Britain, the kernel of the Western world,
has experienced this sapping of its strength and will to an even greater
degree, perhaps, than any other country.
For some twenty years Britain’s voice has not been heard in our planet;
its character has gone, its freshness has faded” (p. 144). The land of Churchill had vanished! “Contemporary society in Britain is living on
self-deception and illusions, both in the world of politics and in the world of
ideas” (p. 144). What was true about
Great Britain, he insisted, was equally true about much of the West.
As one would anticipate,
Solzhenitsyn’s BBC career ended abruptly!
Neither British nor American politicians, labor leaders, professors or
journalists wanted to be rebuked for their failures! In the 1970s, neither the United Nations nor the Europeans,
neither Richard Nixon nor George
McGovern, neither Gerald Ford nor Jimmy Carter, neither William J. Fullbright
nor John F. Kerry had the courage to oppose Communism in Southeast Asia. Nor do numbers of their successors today
seem ready to deal with the violence and injustices in the Middle East. Let us, however, never say that no one
warned us about appeasement’s desserts!