Obi’s Sister

Tuesday, stuck on the couch with a stomach virus, I spent the day with one of my favorite pastimes. NO, not Sprite and crackers…. Old movies. It was Janet Leigh day on Turner Classic Movies. Lucky me, I caught one I’d not seen – The Red Danube. Made in 1949, it tells the story of the forced repatriation of Russian “citizens” back to the USSR. A very young Leigh, along with Walter Pidgeon, Ethel Barrymore (more nuns), a very young Peter Lawford and a very young Angela Lansbury weave a suspenseful tale of cat and mouse between the British and Soviets in post-war Vienna. It comes as a surprise to the Colonel (Pidgeon) that each person, as they are tracked down in the British zone, would rather commit suicide than return to their “motherland.” An excellent film and a pointed example of how today’s generation doesn’t understand the significance of WWII and the Cold War.

So with that movie rattling around in this brain, I ran across this article in City Journal remembering Alexander Solzhenitsyn (I told you I was behind. Work can be so inconvenient!). Solzhenitsyn understood the despair of communism – no “romance of the people” here.

Contrary to popular belief, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who died last week at 89, told the world nothing that it did not already know, or could not already have known, about the Soviet Union and the Communist system. Information about their true nature was available from the very first, including photographic evidence of massacre and famine. Bertrand Russell, no apologist of conservatism, spotted Lenin’s appalling inhumanity and its consequences for Russia and humanity as early as 1920. The problem was that this information was not believed; or if believed, it was explained away and rendered innocuous by various mental subterfuges, such as false comparison with others’ misdeeds, historical rationalizations, reference to the supposed grandeur of the social ideals behind the apparent horrors, and so forth. Anything other than admission of the obvious.

Solzhenitsyn’s achievement was to render such illusion about the Soviet Union impossible, even for its most die-hard defenders: he made illusion not merely stupid but wicked. With a mixture of literary talent, iron integrity, bravery, and determination of a kind very rarely encountered, he made it impossible to deny the world-historical scale of the Soviet evil. After Solzhenitsyn, not to recognize Soviet Communism for what it was and what it had always been was to join those who denied that the earth was round or who believed in abduction by aliens. Because of his clear-sightedness about Lenin’s true nature, it was no longer permissible for intellectuals who had been pro-Soviet to hide behind the myth that Stalin perverted the noble ideal that Lenin had started to put into practice. Lenin was, if such a thing be possible, more of a monster than Stalin, not so much inhumane as anti-human. Solzhenitsyn was always uncompromising—and, of course, quite right—on this point: no Lenin, no Stalin. Insofar as Solzhenitsyn finally destroyed the possibility in the West of intellectual sympathy for the Soviet Union (which inhibited the prosecution of the Cold War), he helped bring about the demise of the revolutionary, ideological state, and for that he will be remembered as long as history is written.

Maybe Solzhenitsyn should be required reading for certain presidential aspirants. Heh.

Fast-forward to today. Really today. While Obama’s temple is being built (pardon the videographer’s running commentary) and he’s putting the finishing touches on the Stairway to Heaven Speech Of All Time – rumbles abound even in his own party that perhaps, just perhaps, it’s a bit too much. But forget the Greek temple motif, this is Soviet imagery all the way. Nice model there, O-ster. As well it should it. Today we heard that these are the very same event stagers that Britney uses. We must release our inner celebrity! Must! MUST! MUST! I just hope he doesn’t have a wardrobe malfunction.

But in the midst of all this hoopla, will anyone remember that Obama said it himself – that he is too inexperienced to lead America?