Solzhenitsyn obits
Posted by Farhang Erfani on August 4th, 2008
Posted by Farhang Erfani on August 4th, 2008
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August 4th, 2008 at 3:44 pm
Today is a most sad day. Unfortunately, month long, 24 hour news network marathons covering a persons death are only really dealt for those who\’s lives had pathetically little significance. I doubt we will see the Larry King\’s of the world enlightening the American people with historians and philosophers taking up the precedence and principals and flat out necessities of liberty. And, I am sad to admit this doubt as this country races towards the tragic fate that Solzhenitsyn warned of and experienced first hand. We here are too easily pawned off by charismatic Uncle Toms who still war hawk every chance they get. We are too easily sold on trading liberties for so-called securities because of the fictional terror of Osama Bin Goldstein and his 40 thieves. But, most sadly, we are accepting of our own inability as is so harshly pressed upon us by the rising nanny state. We wait patiently in our homes begging for some crusader to burst form the wood work and act and deliver us from all that is wrong. We hope and pray for the tyrants to hear our logic and understand that we are innocent of any crime. But neither that person or that understanding will ever come. Solzhenitsyn had to learn that the hard way. And, he had to hear of it time and time again in the gulags as more and more innocent people fell victim to both the tyrant and their indifference to responsibility. I fear, terribly, that his warnings are not heard. And, I fear that we will suffer the same fate as him and so many like him because we simply did not love liberty enough. What a shame it is that we can rise so high and fall so low; our histories forgotten and our lessons unlearned. I too feel reduced to hoping for some crusader, some spark in the zeitgeist that charges the corpse of liberty. But, such a person or thing has never existed. We are the actors and nothing can be changed except ourselves.
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling in terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!” - Solzhenitsyn