Nation: Is Solzhenitsyn Right?

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Solzhenitsyn's own experience seduces him to hope that the cure for evil totalitarianism — which does not tolerate people like him — may be a good totalitarianism which will ban "inaccurate" journalists, will keep "pornography, crime and horror" off the television screen, and will protect consumers against the free market. But how?

Whatever he may tell us of himself, he says very little about us. He has missed the point. This immigrant nation attests the novel possibility that people can be held together, their community strengthened and deepened, not by homogeneity but by diversity. The courage we inherit from our Jeffersons and Lincolns and others is not the Solzhenitsyn courage of the true believer, but the courage to doubt.

George Meany: No Voice More Eloquent

President of the AFL-CIO since 1955, Meany was the first official of any major U.S. organization to invite Solzhenitsyn to speak after his abrupt expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1974.

I am proud that it was the AFL-CIO that provided Alexander Solzhenitsyn with the first major platform for his speeches to the American people. We forget how violently Solzhenitsyn provoked the knee-jerk minds of the day, immersed as they were in an unhealthy mixture of post-Viet Nam guilt and a fashionable anti-anti-Communism emanating not only from the left but from American businessmen hell-bent on trade with the Soviet Union.

I do not agree with everything he says, but I would urge the knee jerkers to tread warily. His prophetic voice has turned out to be righter than their cliches of yesterday. Opponents of the Viet Nam War will not like to hear that "members of the U.S. antiwar movement wound up being involved in the betrayal of Far Eastern nations, in genocide and in the suffering today imposed on 30 million people there." Nor will certain journalists want to hear these questions: "What sort of responsibility does a journalist have? If he has misled public opinion or the Government by inaccurate information or wrong conclusions, do we know of any cases of recognition and rectification of such mistakes?" Like it or not, Solzhenitsyn is right.

I would agree with Solzhenitsyn's charge that the West has experienced a decline in courage. I do not believe this decline is as deep or pervasive as Solzhenitsyn sometimes implies, but there is no doubt that American policy toward the world's totalitarians has been excessively accommodating in recent years.

No man who has passed through the intense moral experience of the gulag can emerge to find the moral sensitivity or responsiveness of the West adequate. But I do not think that we are spiritually exhausted or that any exhaustion can be ascribed to our material progress. Labor's contribution to this progress has been large and indispensable, and I cannot recognize any incompatibility between material and spiritual wellbeing.