Solzhenitsyn, RIP

For many of us passionate anti-communists, he remains an icon. Reading his books in my teens made a huge impression on me, convincing me of the evil of the Soviet Union and the hideousness of the collectivist ethos. In my fogeyish repressed adolescence, I was never a big fan of the United States – it took actually living here for me to fall head over heels for this country – but Solzhenitsyn (framed by Orwell) persuaded me that there was no comparison with the alternative. His accounts of what torture and dehumanization do to people – the enforcers and the victims – helped me better understand the utter incompatibility of freedom and torture of any kind, anywhere. If I had to point to one author who inspired my horror at what Cheney and Bush have done to America’s integrity these past few years, it would be Solzhenitsyn.

He was, of course, an inveterate reactionary, hostile to modernity, a paleocon to out-do every other paleocon. He was not just opposed to the Enlightenment but even to the Renaissance, calling the modern liberal world "the calamity of an autonomous, irreligious humanistic consciousness."

He wrote:

It has made man the measure of all things on earth—imperfect man, who is never free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other defects. We are now paying for the mistakes which were not properly appraised at the beginning of the journey. On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility.

In Russia, such feelings and instincts run deep and in Solzhenitsyn the depth was close to an abyss. But it was out of this love for country and its soul and out of this love of God that he found the strength to resist evil, even as it tried to destroy his body and his soul.

For that resistance, in hours darker than most of us will ever experience, he deserves our deepest honor and gratitude. And it was partly through this one man’s resistance that an entire evil empire fell.