Man of the Century

            Time Magazine chose Albert Einstein as its Person of the 20^th Century. The honor was well-deserved, but in my opinion it should have gone to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn for writing what I consider to be to the most consequential book of the century, perhaps of any century.

            In his novel The Gulag Archipelago Solzhenitsyn exposed the political and human failure of the Soviet Union’s socialist ideology and was a major factor in the dismantling of communist dictatorships in Russia and its satellites in Eastern Europe. With 30 million copies published in 35 languages, no other book in modern history has championed the idea of freedom as much as this one.

            Interestingly enough, Solzhenitsyn became a fierce critic of the West as well. He despised our vulgar materialism and our pop culture, especially our addiction to moronic television and bankrupt music. Beyond that, he was a fierce critic of the press. In a commencement address he gave at Harvard in 1978, he attacked the media for its hypocrisy and deceit. “The press,” he said, “…not elected by anyone…has amassed more power than the legislative, executive, or judicial power. And in this “free” press itself, it is not true freedom of opinion that dominates, but the dictates of the political fashion of the moment, which lead to a surprising uniformity of opinion.” I wonder what he would have to say our mainstream media today.

            When it came to the subject of freedom, Solzhenitsyn was a great admirer of America as a bastion of liberty. But he railed against those who would abuse freedom by turning it into license. A freedom without morality and spirituality, he felt, is a corruption of the ideal upon which this nation was founded.

            Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born in 1918 and died in 1998. We should honor him in this, the 100^th anniversary of his birth and the 20^th anniversary of his death, by heeding his words of wisdom, especially now that the socialist ideology he fought to destroy continues to be force-fed to young minds in our universities and echoed by leftist politicians and their sycophants in the media.