Solzhenitsyn’s Message for Our People

(1978)

FEW SPEECHES in recent years have generated as much critical comment as has Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s June commencement address at Harvard University.

The exiled Russian author was denounced by liberals and conservatives alike. The New York Times called him “dangerous,” because he questioned “the rationality of humankind.” A Boston Globe columnist said that “a mad Russian” had pulled “a fancy con-job” on the American people. Conservative editor William Buckley scolded the Nobel Prize winner in two consecutive issues of his National Review.

Liberal writer Arthur Schlesinger Jr. denounced Solzhenitsyn and his “irrelevance” to democratic society in a lengthy Washington Post article. And during Solzhenitsyn’s address, a Harvard protester held a sign reading “You Can’t Fight Stalinism With Fascism.”

Criticism of Solzhenitsyn was generally superficial (“undemocratic,” “a man of the past”) or self-serving (“in Russia they’d lock him up; but not here”).

Rosalynn Carter’s public reply to Solzhenitsyn showed that she didn’t even understand what the Russian author meant when he talked of “evil,” “courage,” and “freedom.” The President’s wife told the National Press Club that we live in a “good” society, because Americans are “caring people” who lead “useful lives.”

Naturally, Mrs. Carter does not sense the evil in the liberal-democratic way of life. Her stress on the importance of human happiness and her husband’s hypocritical cant about “human rights” are themselves expressions of the spiritually corrupt worldview which Solzhenitsyn damns.

The author of Gulag Archipelago means something quite different when he speaks of evil than do humanists. For example, Solzhenitsyn rejects the Soviet system, he wrote in 1973, “not because it is undemocratic, authoritarian, based on physical constraint — a man can live in such conditions without harm to his spiritual essence.” His objection is that “over and above its physical constraints, it demands of us total surrender of our souls.”

Any system based upon the idea of material comfort and human happiness as the highest good is evil, because it denies man’s place in the natural order. One consequence of living under such a system is that few Americans will actively defend or even acknowledge their own racial-cultural heritage. Most of them readily capitulate to outrageous minority blackmail with feelings of shame and guilt.

These are examples of the lack of civil courage in our people which Solzhenitsyn decries. Not many Americans even have the courage to speak openly and frankly about racial realities.

Solzhenitsyn vehemently rejects the liberal notion of freedom as an end in itself. The idea of freedom for its own sake is a sign of decadence. Historically an emphasis on “rights” above duties grows in an age of social and cultural decline.

For Solzhenitsyn, as for other great men of the West, true freedom is the freedom of self-restraint. Any fool can exercise the “freedom” to do whatever comes into his head, but the wise man shows freedom in being able to say “no.” Real freedom is the freedom to do what is right.

Solzhenitsyn’s awesome moral authority comes not only from years of suffering in communist labor camps and persecution by Soviet authorities, but far more from a sincere love of his Russian nation, a deep loyalty to the Western cultural heritage, and a passionate devotion to truth.

What a contrast between Solzhenitsyn’s quiet dignity, lofty moral bearing, and unshakeable national loyalty, and the strident demand for “rights” by Soviet “dissidents” like Scharansky, Ginzburg, Orlov, Slepak, and Begun — all Jews!

Solzhenitsyn’s ideas cannot simply be denounced as “Russian” or “old-fashioned.” His views are part of a long and rich Western spiritual heritage. He echoes Plato’s affirmation of social hierarchy and authority, Burke’s stress on tradition, and Hegel’s idea of the organic nation-state.

He strengthens the American intellectual legacy of James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, Henry Adams, Theodore Roosevelt, and the other builders of our nation. Solzhenitsyn is an infinitely better guardian of our racial-cultural heritage than the fashionable writers of the American press who have been busy pointing out the “dangers” in his ideas.

His compelling call to spiritual revolution recalls the European revolt against liberal-democratic materialism before the Second World War.

For years, the National Alliance has been making many of the same points Solzhenitsyn stressed in his Harvard speech, including the fraud of American “freedom of the press” and the shortsightedness of US foreign policy.

More significantly, the National Alliance has consistently emphasized that our social, economic, and racial problems are not merely the result of bad politicians, the Blacks, or a minority conspiracy, but stem from the corrupt and alien values which have insidiously crept into the thinking of our people.

Solzhenitsyn is right when he stresses that only a revolution of fundamental values can reverse the tide of evil. That is a bitter truth, for it means that there are no quick or easy solutions to our people’s dilemma.

To have any meaning, the new spirituality and sense of duty of which Solzhenitsyn speaks must have an organizational expression. In America, that expression is given by the National Alliance.

In an interview with Encounter magazine (April 1976) Solzhenitsyn said that our greatest task now is to tell the truth:

Never has the future of this planet depended upon such a handful of men. I think the first universal rule, with you as well as us, is not to accept lies. To speak the truth is to ensure the rebirth of liberty — regardless of pressure, interests, and fashions — to say what one knows, to be truthful, to keep repeating it. And if some people shrug their shoulders, repeat it again.

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Source: by M.W.; from Issue No. 62, National Vanguard tabloid, 1978; transcribed by Ray Wolbert