The 'truth' about Solzhenitsyn...

... as painted by pointy headed intellectuals with an agenda:

... under “classroom strategies” in the Norton instructor’s manual, teachers are told that they are likely to encounter the problem of students accepting the “truth” of what Solzhenitsyn has to say: “Because the story answers to most of the myths and preconceptions Westerners already have about Soviet life, the problem will be to make sure that students read it with the same degree of resistance with which they would normally confront any other piece of fiction.” Here we have the apologists for communism directing teachers: All that you’ve heard about the brutality of communism is merely part of our “myths and preconceptions.” Students must be reeducated to “resist” the testimony of Solzhenitsyn as dramatized in his fictional account.

No such “resistance,” however, is asked for the selections from Marxist authors, native American tribes, or the “colonized” writers like Wole Soyinka who extol the African tribal custom of having the king’s horseman commit suicide after the king’s death (a practice to which Christian “colonizers” insensitively object). Instructors are told to “Discuss the meaning of ritual suicide among the Yoruba as it is explained in Soyinka’s play,” and then ask students, “Under what circumstances may suicide be the right choice?”

It is this kind of sophistry that Solzhenitsyn had in mind when he said in his commencement speech at Harvard in 1978, “Without any censorship, in the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges.”

What is not fashionable today is a Judeo-Christian moral view, even if backed up by firsthand accounts and historical evidence. The hiring and editorial gatekeepers make sure that such a view does not make its way into the college classroom unaccompanied by tortured counterfactual explanations. Increasingly, such authors are “disappeared” to make way for fashionable writers, like the ubiquitous Castro-loving Alice Walker. On their own territory, Solzhenitsyn told the Harvard professors and graduates, “Many people living in the West are dissatisfied with their own society. They despise it or accuse it of not being up to the level of maturity attained by mankind. A number of such critics turn to socialism.” He traces the progression: “As humanism in its development became more and more materialistic, it made itself increasingly accessible to speculation and manipulation at first by socialism and then by communism.”

Well... I'm sure Barack Obama will be hoping to change that...  right?

Comments

[Mommynator]

Well, it's all part of re-writing history so the upcoming skulls full of mush can be manipulated.

Fiction? Do they know what that means? How many years did Solzhenytsin spend in the Soviet gulags? Was his experience fiction?

These people are going beyond sick to evil.