Of Good and Evil – Solzhenitsyn on Appeasement

Solzhenitsyn died last Sunday at age 89, the Russian historian who singlehandedly documented the fascist excess of Russian communism and totalitarianism, a dictatorship of terror that caused the deaths of 60 million innocents. His book The Gulag Archipelago (1973) finally buried the West’s infatuation with things socialist, with politics Karl Marxian.

With clairvoyant intuition that would ring today with deafening silence amongst contemporary peaceniks, those “peace at any price” absolutists, those “good and evil are always relative” appeasers, Solzhenitsyn prophetically warned in his acceptance speech for the 1970 Nobel literature prize:

“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,” [1]

The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, August 5, 2008 Review & Outlook, pg. A18) pays homage to this great writer, who saw absolute evil triumph when good and evil are indelibly melded, who understood that the West blinds itself to such evil in its zealous discarding of moral criteria. 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." [2]

Unlike our own armchair liberals who wax eloquent on freedom and redemption from their San Francisco penthouse verandas, martini in one hand and The New York Times in the other, Solzhenitsyn’s extended internship in the Siberian prison camps (so eloquently elucidated in his 1968 novel Cancer Ward), exhumed the devastating reality of evil and the undeniable need to confront it.

Solzhenitsyn is a writer for all times, for all the world, whose understanding of man’s proclivity for evil necessitates our readoption of moral courage and a national clarity of vision, particularly in these times of terrorism and nuclear proliferation.


Footnotes:
[1] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121789190811311707.html?mod=opinion_main_review_and_outlooks

[2] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121789190811311707.html?mod=opinion_main_review_and_outlooks

The Wall Street Journal Article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121789190811311707.html?mod=opinion_main_review_and_outlooks

"Solzhenitsyn, Optimist" - The Wall Street Journal:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121822920626825461.html

Published on The Absurd Report: http://www.theabsurdreport.com/2008/of-good-and-evil-solzhenitsyn-on-appeasement-by-leslie-j-sacks/