SOLZHENITSYN
Harvard Address - June 1978
DOUGLAS MURRAY on SOLZHENITSYN
.
The important part of this article is Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard Address at the link below. Fast-forward to the 19-minute mark. His criticisms of ‘The Press’ and GroupThink may be among the wisest words spoken in the past century.
.
“Enormous freedom exists for the press, but not the readership”.
.
SOLZHENITSYN’S HARVARD ADDRESS (1978)
.
.
Extract – Douglas Murray
.
Before Solzhenitsyn, there were plenty of writers from inside and outside the Soviet Union who had tried to bring to light the horrors of the Soviet system. But few works had the comprehensive, irrefutable power of Solzhenitsyn’s.
.
Not only does The Gulag Archipelago include mounds of research, detail, and firsthand experience—which, together, provide for an amazingly powerful window into the totalitarian perplex—Solzhenitsyn also delves into any number of painful philosophical questions: Why didn’t the people rise up against the secret police? How did the system of terror embed itself so completely? Why did people allow their neighbors to be arrested—disappeared—in the middle of the night while waiting, cowering, knowing that they would be next?
.
If Americans thought that Solzhenitsyn would not turn his penetrating gaze on them after he arrived in America, they were sorely mistaken.
.
He had been expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974 for writing books that were dangerously honest—and, worse yet, widely read—and in 1975, he moved with his family to the little Vermont town of Cavendish.
.
On June 8, 1978, the writer gave the commencement address at Harvard University, and he was as controversial as ever.
.
He was coruscating when it came to the “legalism” that had eclipsed the old culture of virtue in Western society. And he was equally coruscating when railing against what we would now call groupthink.
.
“Without any censorship in the West, fashionable trends of thought and ideas are fastidiously separated from those that are not fashionable, and the latter, without ever being forbidden, have little chance of finding their way into periodicals or books or being heard in colleges,” he said.
.
Then, he ended his speech with this poignant line: “This ascension is similar to climbing onto the next anthropological stage. No one on earth has any other way left but—upward.”
.
.