Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is one of the great men of the 20th century West. His son has made a convenient and timely collection of ten of his public speeches in Europe and America between 1972 and 1997. Notre Dame University Press has just published it as We Have Ceased to See the Purpose: Essential Speeches of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Few people have better understood the history and troublesome trajectory of the West and are more genuinely relevant to our life today.


Perhaps younger readers might appreciate a little background since this great seer’s career has lapsed from public attention.


While serving as a patriotic Russian soldier during World War II, he wrote in a private letter some remarks that were deemed subversive of the Communist Soviet Union. He soon found himself for ten years in one of the many prison labour camps throughout Siberia which he described vividly in The Gulag Archipelago.


Eventually released, though a nonperson, Solzhenitsyn wrote brilliant books on Russian history. Then during the reign of Khruschev the Communists allowed some anti-Stalinist commentary and his prison camp novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was allowed to reach the West. He became well-known as an important writer behind the Iron Curtain.


Then the KGB cracked down. His writings were preserved from government censorship by friends in multiple handwritten copies.


He was too well known to be eliminated so he was deported from his homeland to the West, where he wrote prolifically and became a famous figure. He returned to Russia on the fall of the Soviet Union after a 20-year exile.


During his time in the West Solzhenitsyn was invited to make public addresses at various institutions. To the surprise of Western liberals, he did not praise the West but pointed out his sense of the moral and intellectual weakness of the West as seen by a refugee from a totalitarian state. In one of his later speeches he mentions the indifference of Western publics to “far grief.” That can apply to the suffering of the innocent in America’s aggressive wars.


Needless to say his popularity in the American media fell off considerably. The no-neck Republican Establishment President Gerald Ford, unlike Margaret Thatcher and the Pope, and despite a Nobel Prize, even refused to meet him. Establishment Republicans have long been deathly afraid of anything controversial or morally challenging that might upset their perks and their image of respectable moderation. (Witness their clandestine blocking of Trump reforms.)


“We Have Ceased to See the Purpose” is a good summary title to Solzhenitsyn’s message to our world lacking faith in human life for anything but the material and hedonistic.


A few observations of many of permanent value:


“Nations are the wealth of mankind, its generalized personalities; the least among them bears its own unique coloration and harbors within itself a unique facet of God’s design.”


“There is one other invaluable direction in which literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience from one generation to another. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation. It sustains within itself and safeguards a nation’s bygone history---in a form that cannot be distorted or falsified. In this way together with language, it preserves the national soul.”


“A statesman who wants to achieve something important for his country is forced to step cautiously . . . . Dozens of traps will be set for him . . . Thus does mediocrity triumph under the guise of democratic restraints.”


“Superficiality and haste---the psychological maladies of the twentieth century, manifest themselves, more than anywhere else, in the press... Such as it is, however, the press has become the dominant power in western countries... Yet one would like to ask: according to what law has it been elected and to whom it is accountable... who has voted Western journalists into their positions of power?”


“Your scholars are free in the legal sense, but they are hemmed in by the idols of prevailing fashion.”


American leftists disliked Solzhenitsyn because from the creation of the Soviet Union in the aftermath of World War I until its fall in 1992 they defended the Communist tyranny and covered up its crimes. The Communists around FDR made sure Russia got maximum support during World War II including secretly and illegally sending nuclear material. Despite Churchill’s warning they made sure that the Soviets got control of a large share of the peoples of Europe.


The fall of the Soviet Union was a blow to the leftist agenda. Having defended Communist Russia they became afraid of a newer more conservative and religious Russia. Having loved the Soviet Union they fear the new Russia. How sad that the U.S. stance toward Russia has been controlled by a small group with their own agenda.


American foreign policy, controlled by neoconservatives who came into power under Reagan, and whose only problem with Communism was that it was controlled by Stalin rather than Trotsky, has been unrelentingly hostile and abusive to the new Russia.

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How tragic that the end of a tyranny promised an era of peace and disarmament but the U.S. government chose to renew the Cold War against a civilizing Russia. And now we have a U.S. inaugurated and catastrophic war in Ukraine.

It is not easy to find out what is going on in Washington these days. That is partly due to Donald Trump’s style - many initiatives and gambits, loudly and provocatively presented. Some of these, like the tariff business, are obviously maneuvering for position; others are serious.


This is wonderful and Trump is doing great service to our supposed government of the people. He is talking directly to the people and raising real issues. While for the last half century the Uniparty presidents and congresspersons have avoided all real issues as they increased federal power and pronounced platitudes about doing good that were believed only by those who were already slaves of the Establishment.


Another and larger reason for the difficulties in understanding is the total dishonesty of the now completely corrupted mainstream press and television. Media have always been biased. It used to be that you allowed for the bias and managed to get the genuine substance of what was happening. That is now impossible for the millions of dolts who still follow the mainstream media. No President has ever been subjected to the daily barrage of negative lies that Trump is experiencing.


In theory, reporters objectively report what a President proposes and has to say. They may add objective report of what critics and opponents have to say in response, and the editorial page may express opinion as to what is going on. That is proper public deliberation for a supposedly free country.


But the current media never report plainly what Trump does and says. The reader first hears of the proposals in a negative context. A few examples of recent online headlines: “Trump Appears to Change Tune”; “Trump Scrambles for Positive Spin”; “Buyer’s Remorse Strikes Trump Voters”; “Judge Declares Trump Action Unconstitutional.”


College Journalism courses are now called Media Arts or some such thing. It is now established that college Journalism majors rank even below Education majors in I.Q. They all aspire to be news anchors on television. I know where of I speak. In my long ago misspent youth I was a newspaper reporter for two years.


In those days reporters were curious, tough, and skeptical. Some had not even been to college. They did not accept the usual pablum from mayors, police chiefs, bureaucrats, judges, self-promoting political wannabes, and business tycoons. To the extent that the owners allowed, they tried to tell it like it was.


More recently I have had to opportunity to see how much the news “profession” has deteriorated. For a period the press was interested in me as (unbelievably) a “Southern nationalist.” I encountered a number of reporters. I never met one from a “respectable” news outlet who knew anything, was capable of independent thought, and able to report anything except in terms of current clichés.


Many friends on my side are expressing disappointment with Trump. He is not exactly the type of leader I admire. But he seems to have at least made a start on the immense, difficult, and necessary task of cleaning up immigration and firing federal bureaucrats. Who else who is high in public life has ever even considered doing such things?


Is it possible that even Trump’s greatest flaw, support of Israeli imperialist genocide, may offer some promise. He may have wrapped Netanyahu so tightly that he can exercise some control over him in the only way it can be done. May we hope?

These days some people are talking up “Christian nationalism.” It is not clear to me what Christ and nationalism have to do with each other. The New Testament, unlike the Old, strikes me as a message of liberation from nationalism.


It’s true that America began as a Christian society and remained so until fairly recent times. However, our Founders did not found a “nation.” They founded a republican Union. And the materials that make a Christian society no longer exist except among a minority. ‘Christian nationalism” is merely an ideology. And like most ideologies is a theory about something that doesn’t exist.

American Christians should be patriots who love their land and people, not nationalists who love their government, especially a government that is a force against both Christianity and patriotism. And American Christians should recognise that our Lord created different varieties of humans, all in His image, who needed to keep to their own given boundaries.


The last thing American Christians need is more nationalism. “Christian nationalism” is just a weak and sad revival of the old Yankee Puritanism which has done so much damage to our society, It is a blasphemous claim that America is the righteous chosen nation---a belief, as General Lee said, that makes a bad government--- aggressive at home and abroad.

The other evening I somehow persuaded myself to watch the annual Country Music Awards for the first time in years. I shut down in less than an hour, having given up any hope of ever hearing any “country music.” The show was a gaudy Hollywood spectacle driven at a frantic New York pace. There was not a thing about that was “country” or had any relationship to what was once known as country music. One of the more authentic recent country songs is rightly titled “Murder on Music Row.”



Of course, the term “country music” was a sales gimmick to avoid having to call it Southern music even as it swept the world with its talent and humanity. If you really want to know about this aspect of our Southern culture take a look at Joseph Stromberg’s recent book from Shotwell Publishing, Southern Story and Song.