Word: solzhenitsyn
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Perhaps the most famous (or infamous) commencement address of the past century was delivered in Tercentenary Theater some 26 years ago. On June 8, 1978, Russian dissident-author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn stood on the dais and soberly warned the West that it was losing the struggle against Communism. He attributed this largely to “spiritual exhaustion,” a “decline in courage” and a profound “loss of will power...
...Soviet–American détente, the Russian author must have sounded hopelessly atavistic. The “lessons” of Vietnam were supposed to have humbled Cold Warriors and made them repentant for championing a policy of vigilant anti–Communism. Yet here was Solzhenitsyn defending not only the essential justness of U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia, but also rebuking the West for not doing more to meet the Communist challenge and stop “the forces of Evil.” As Harvard Law School professor Harold J. Berman later wrote...
...assured that no one will confuse U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s commencement address this June with Solzhenitsyn’s. Yet the relative timing of their Harvard speeches is somewhat analogous. To wit, just like Solzhenitsyn, Annan is speaking at a moment of his own apparent obsolescence...
...realities of the War on Terror, however, make Annan seem oddly anachronistic—as anachronistic as Solzhenitsyn seemed at Harvard 26 years ago. Annan is stuck in the mindset of the proverbial day before yesterday—or, more precisely, the mindset of Sept. 10. Naturally, he has sanctimonious reverence for the United Nations, considering it the definitive arbiter of U.S. foreign policy. As we have seen, such an exaggerated view of the United Nations can directly conflict with the ability of the United States to effectively combat the intersection of terrorists, outlaw regimes and weapons proliferation. In many...
Indeed, a totalitarian government’s domestic savagery is indissolubly connected to the external menace posed by its rulers. During the uncertain years of the Cold War, we had world-famous dissident-intellectuals such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov to remind us of this. It’s a lesson worth remembering as we ponder the awful dilemma of what to do about North Korea...