Comments on: Alexander Solzhenitsyn Dead at 89

By: Bruce Moomaw

Bruce Moomaw — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 02:45:28 +0000

Non-ideological footnote: Solzhenitsyn is hardly the only extremely important major 20th century world figure who was on balance a genuine hero, but who had a serious case of clay feet. Consider Winston Churchill's rabid, inexplicable, and literally genocidal hatred of Indians ("I hate them. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.") When Lord Mountbatten sent him a telegram in 1942 saying that there was a famine in the country and pleading for help, Churchill's only response was to send a telegram asking why Gandhi hadn't starved to death yet. (The entire world may yet end up paying for WC's prejudices in this direction, since it was at his insistence that Britain worked to encourage Pakistan to split away from India.)

By: Bruce Moomaw

Bruce Moomaw — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 02:37:02 +0000

Yep, Bits. It's certainly as annoying that the NY Times didn't mention what they said about the USSR 70 years ago as it is that National Review doesn't utter a peep nowadays about its energetic opposition to voting rights for southern blacks as late as 1964 (or the W.H. von Dreele poems they were printing as late as 1978 comparing Martin Luther King to Father Divine and announcing that Earl Warren deserved to go to Hell for the "Brown" decision).

By: sam

sam — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 13:05:29 +0000

I think it's fair to say that he thought the Enlightenment was an error, and that the West has compounded the error in the intervening centuries to present. He was no fan of liberal democracy as we know it in the West. One ought really to read his Harvard address

By: Bithead

Bithead — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 12:23:26 +0000

A long NYT obit, “Solzhenitsyn, Literary Giant Who Defied Soviets, Dies at 89,” notes that, “Mr. Solzhenitsyn outlived by nearly 17 years the Soviet state and system he had battled through years of imprisonment, ostracism and exile.”

It strikes me as annoying that the "Paper of Walter Duranty's Record" said nothing in those eight pages about the apoligist role they played for the Soviets that Solzhenitsyn spent his life fighting.