With the death of Alexander Solzhenitsyn comes the eulogies and the descriptions of what hell great transformations of loyalty and spirit suggest. Few have written so much about their gulag experience and lived to tell about it. Few who worshiped the state gave up on it in the end. Solzhenitsyn lived to tell of his experiences but even that hell was not enough to bring about a whole transformation in state-worship. That said, he was a significant figure because he objected to the Soviet system, having been there. It is easy to object to totalitarianism once you are in the gulag or the concentration camps. It is fitting justice that hundreds of thousands of intellectuals were strangled by the systems they helped to build. The same goes on today.

Who knows what morons our intellectuals will turn out to be given their worship for green totalitarianism, theocracy, and every statist initiative that comes along? The fitting justice they deserve, however, will threatens us.

The UK spectator points out that the Russian blogosphere is full of vitriol towards Solzhenitsyn. “Glory to Stalin, Glory to the Soviet Union.” “He wasn’t a writer, he was a traitor.” So, it is written. They can’t let go of the idea that strength is found in the super-state. Behind this nationalism, state-worship, and Stalin fixation is power-lust of weak-minded people.

I like these two paragraphs from the article:

“In Russia, writers are more than just writers. Russians look to their literary heroes not simply for beauty and entertainment, but for a philosophy of life. Writers…are Russia’s spiritual legislators…in the works of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and Pushkin and Chekhov …Russians find their universal truths, the nuts and bolts of people wrestling with freedom and oppression.

“Russians look to their writers not just to think but to live more deeply than ordinary mortals; the best ones end up crucified on crosses of their own weakness, or of the state’s disapproval. This was certainly true of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Not only did he, in the pungent Russian phrase, experience the horrors of the Russian century ‘on his own hide’, but he was possessed with an overwhelming moral imperative to record what he saw and felt. The impulse was so strong that while he was in the Gulag he memorised thousands of lines of his own poetry and prose when there was no paper to write on; the rest he scribbled on pieces of cement and scrounged scraps of paper.”

There is one great unspoken blessing to being born in the USA. You don’t have to cover up history or shill for it. There are no monuments to slavery or dictators. Wilson, the Roosevelts, and Nixon are un-memorialized. They, with Clinton and the Bushes, are unfit for marble.

Our national institutions are not Stalin or Mao. They are ideas and accomplishments. Why else do we have museums and halls of fame, walks of fame,  libraries, and universities?

Looking at China, the red is everywhere and it is hard to get away from it. How can you be thrilled to introduce people to a square of bloodshed? Or to Mao’s or Lenin’s tomb? They don’t have much else to show, everything else having been razed in cultural revolutions. By showing the red leaders, they by default honor gruesome evils. Without a good national idea, they can’t shed evils. The Beijing Olympics are a way of doing that without saying so. The stadiums and competitive grounds are new monuments where the best in mind and body walk the earth and swim the waters.

In the US we have institutions and symbols to great ideas, not men. The Statue of Liberty, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the Brooklyn Bridge. The Washington Monument symbolizes Washington’ refusal to be a king or tyrant—which to remind future presidents—is the highest political monument in America.

And so many more.

This frees us from having to rationalize our history and makes us a more psychologically healthy people.

We can separate America from the US government or any of the problems in our history because they are history. America the idea endures—which allows us as a people to endure the past, to have a maturity of distinguishing between ideals and failures that is unappreciated by the Europeans, who for all their alleged maturity, covet to relive their ancient disputes. (Look at the mind-twisting tension-driven hatred in the Arab world, Cuba, and North Korea)

We have the maturity to let go of history but hold onto our best ideas.

Even Barack Obama knows that you can’t hold slavery over the head of the nation which fought to end it by using its founding principle. Slavery, far from being a blight on America, is a testament to our resolve to end it. It was a test of our commitment to our founding idea, and even though it has become mythologized, it was real. That is why the Left’s critique of America—on full display in Barack’s church—is categorically rejected by the American people. They do not equate America with its history, but with its potential.

That keeps history in history. For all the short memories we have as Americans, it does keep the peace.

Lorenz Kraus © 2008