Carl Wells Books

For some time I have pondered why so many people so readily become liberals. Political liberalism is such a pile of steaming ordure, and hurts so many people, that it seems at first glance counter-intuitive that so deleterious a philosophy would gain so many adherents so easily. This is a big topic and this brief blog post will only begin to discuss the situation. For a wonderful book on the attraction of liberalism, please see Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy. The book can be found at a reasonable cost, under $11.00 (shipping included, but prior to sales tax), especially at AbeBooks and ebay, and almost as cheaply at Alibris or Amazon.

Recently I stumbled on an article by Jay Langdale, in “Chronicles Magazine,” February 2020, pp. 16-18. He was writing about Richard Weaver (b. 1910-d. 1963), a southern conservative most famous for the book Ideas Have Consequences. Mr. Langdale recounts how Weaver was pondering, while driving on a Texas highway, whether or not to return to an academic job at Texas A&M. Weaver, as near as I can tell, must have been in his late 20s or early 30s. Mr. Langdale quotes from Richard Weaver:

“I did not have to go back to this job, which had become distasteful, and I did not have to go on professing the cliches of liberalism, which were becoming meaningless to me. I saw that my opinions had been formed out of a timorous regard for what was supposed to be intellectually respectable, and that I had always been looking over my shoulder to find out what certain others, whose concern with the truth I was beginning to believe to be not very intense, were doing or thinking. It is a great experience to wake up at a critical juncture to the fact that one does have a free will, and that giving up the worship of false idols is a quite practicable proceeding.”

There is so much here to unpack!

But first this caveat. When I first read this quote, I thought how much it explains about how liberals become liberals. They want to be intellectually respectable. But as the weeks have passed, I have begun to consider how profoundly this applies to mainstream conservatism as well–what is sometimes called Conservatism Inc–with its almost uniform warmongering position on foreign policy. The conservatives of our day, I think, are timorous and want to be intellectually respectable, just like the liberals. While I feared offending any liberals who accidentally read this column, now I needn’t worry. I can offend almost every mainstream conservative, as well. I am an equal opportunity offender.

Now a bit more about the Weaver quote. Weaver was being honest with himself. He used the word “timorous” to describe his behavior. He was not being brave. He wanted to be intellectually respectable–which would mean going along with what almost everybody else was thinking and saying. He was looking over his shoulder, shaping his own thoughts in the fashion he wanted others to approve. But he had begun to smell a rat about the love of truth among those others. Is this not a key for all of us? Is not the love of truth central for us? If we love truth, we will follow it where it leads. If we don’t love truth, we will just try to fit in with others, accept cliches as good enough.

Weaver was having an epiphany. He was waking up. He had free will. We might quarrel with that term, but all of us would probably agree that he had moral responsibility. Certainly he understood his own responsibility. He had worshiped false idols, but he didn’t have to do so. He was about age 30. He was not hardened in his wrongheadedness. He could change how he lived and thought.

Thomas Sowell, incidentally, dropped his youthful leftism at about the age 30. It seems to be the mid to late 20s and early 30s in which we begin to show whether or not we love truth or don’t. Before that age we are still developing intellectually. After too long a time without being willing to think for ourselves we can become hardened in our carelessness. Who among us has the courage to drop wrongheaded ideas after we have held them for long decades? A few, no doubt, but not many. The sooner we come to the love of truth, the better. Weaver had not become hardened in his timorousness and carelessness.

Of course there are other reasons to be a liberal, or a mainstream conservative, than a desire to be respectable. We can not be part of the ruling class elite if we don’t become liberals. We can not be successful members of Conservatism Inc if we think for ourselves. “National Review” is not going to publish our articles. We will be called unpatriotic if we do not support the wars “National Review” supports–as paleoconservatives found when they offended “NR” by not approving the second war with Iraq. We will always fit in if we become liberals or mainstream conservatives. (For an example of how wrongheaded one mainstream conservative can be–and he is far from the worst of the lot–please check out my post of Oct. 25, 2018, “A conservative with recommendations.” With friends like that, we don’t need enemies.)

We all have a need to consider ourselves righteous. But typically we are only self-righteous rather than righteous. Self-righteousness is easy. Righteousness is hard, and depends on us believing and obeying the teachings of God. That is easier said than done, given our preference for easy over hard.

Weaver has hit upon the fact that we tend to be timorous rather than brave. We need to develop the kind of feisty behavior of King Henry “the Eight,” as described by Huckleberry Finn.

‘”Well, Henry he takes a notion he wants to get up some trouble with this country. How does he go at it–give notice?–give the country a show? No. All of a sudden he heaves all the tea in Boston Harbor overboard, and whacks out a declaration of independence, and dares them to come on.”‘ (Chapter XXIII of Huckleberry Finn)

We need to imitate King Henry. We need to tell the liberals and mainstream conservatives, “A plague on both your houses,” whack out our own declaration of independence and dare them to come on.

If we base our thinking on what the Bible teaches, we will have a solid foundation for honest thinking. Do we love truth enough? Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn quoted a Russian proverb: “One word of truth outweighs the whole world.” Neither liberalism nor mainstream conservatism have much truth. Which means, that if the God of the Bible exists, their respectable lies one day will be exposed and overthrown by God.

It might be smarter, as well as braver, for us to at least try to be on the side of the angels, whether we can get there or not.

Today we continue our look at Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s very important book, first published in the U.S. only in 2018: Between Two Millstones: Book I: Sketches of Exile 1974-1978. Book II is slated for publication sometime in the unknown future.

Part of a sentence shows what S was up against: “The so-called intellectual circles of the West had also decided to march into battle against me” (p. 271). And it is what you and I are up against. The intellectual circles of the West really are only “so-called.” The enemies of civilization are the supposed intellectual elites. S was writing of the late 1970s. But our situation is far worse now, in 2020. Our so-called intellectuals are more numerous, more firmly entrenched. And more corrupt. We can complain and whine about it–I reserve the right to do so endlessly–but most of all we need to develop a brand of intellectual honesty. We need to love and support the truth. There are honest thinkers. We need to find them, and show them we appreciate them. Even a horse gets a lump of sugar once in a while, as we heard on one episode of “The Dick Van Dyke Show.”

“Here in the West I could have fallen deep into despair had I not had my work. Mountains of work, for years to come. You have to perform your duty first–and only then make your demands of History.” (p. 281) Is this not what will help us from giving up in despair–doing the work we have on our platter in front of us? If we do that, we will be able to fight off despair, and to have hope.

At his home in Vermont, S would pray with his sons. In the following, the ellipsis is S’s:

‘We knelt on a bed of pine needles by the bushes, and they repeated after me short prayers and our own special prayer that I had composed: “Grant us, O Lord, to live in health and strength, our minds bright, until the day when you will open our path home to Russia, to labor and to sacrifice ourselves so that she may recover and flourish.” A few steps behind us was a rock that looked very much like a horse, its legs tucked under, a winged horse that had been turned to stone. I told the children, and they believed me, that the horse breathes lightly at night and that when Russia will rise again the spell shall be broken, the winged horse will breathe in deep and carry us on its back through the air, across the North, all the way to Russia . . . (At bedtime the boys would ask me: You’ll go to the horse tonight, won’t you, to check if it’s breathing?)’ (p. 282)

The link below features a picture of S with his three young sons, on this rock. The Soviet Union fell in late 1991, and the magic horse took S and his wife back to Russia in 1994. The sons remained in the U.S.–they were adults by then–although one son did subsequently return to Russia.

https://www.solzhenitsyncenter.org/photo-galleries/vermont

S interrupted his work long enough to accept an invitation to give the commencement address at Harvard. As so often happened, there was a mixed response, many in the West offended by S’s frankness. “A sense of responsibility before God and society has fallen away.” (p. 285)

‘Before my Harvard speech, I naively believed that I had found myself in a society where one can say what one thinks, without having to flatter that society. It turns out that democracy expects to be flattered. When I called out “live not by lies!” in the Soviet Union, that was fair enough, but when I called out “live not by lies!” in the United States, I was told to go take a hike.’ (p. 287)

However, this episode gave S an opportunity to see the best of us also! He gives us almost three pages of quotes from Americans who respected S’s comments, who understood what he was saying, and agreed! Astonishing, and we should be heartened. We were not all morally dead yet, in the late 1970s. Nor are we all morally dead in 2020.

“Gradually another America began unfolding before my eyes, one that was small-town and robust, the heartland, the America I had envisioned as I was writing my speech, and to which my speech was addressed. I now felt a glimmer of hope that I could connect with this America, warn it of what we had experienced, and perhaps even lead it to change direction. But how many years would that take, and how much strength?” (p. 291)

S says, ‘Criminals have always remained “socially close” to the Soviet State.’ (p. 307). This is true, and deserves some comment. According to the Soviet worldview, a criminal was one who instinctively, by being at enmity with bourgeois morality, was leaning toward the wise good Marxist orthodoxy. Thus the Soviets found ways to treat common criminals as fellow travelers to be encouraged, rather than as enemies. The Soviets were correct! The common criminal was socially close to the Marxist theology. Common criminals and Marxists were both thieves, and both cruel to ordinary people. The cruelty of both groups comes through very clearly in S’s The Gulag Archipelago. He was not exaggerating. It comes through just as clearly in Anne Applebaum’s Gulag: A History. The cruelty of the thieves is shocking in both books. And the Soviets instinctively felt “socially close” to such people. We know how viciously the Soviets acted. The irony is rich and darkly humorous: the thieves were cruel monsters–and the Marxists instinctively recognized their brothers under the skin.

S looks back with “puzzlement” at his own father. His father had had pronounced leftist leanings, which disappoints S. However, his father had shown courage in World War I. S “struggled” to understand his father’s state of mind. The Russian Civil War loomed.

“Where did his sympathies lie when it came to the struggle that was just beginning? Would he have taken up arms and, if so, against whom exactly? For how long would it have been his fate to live? How can something like that ever be gauged? I am aware of how naive and distorted our understanding of things can be: I myself was to lend my young sympathies to monstrous Leninism” (p. 310)

His father, however, died in a hunting accident in 1918, before S was even born.

These are a few of the highlights of the book for me. I have devoted eight segments to discussing some of what S says. The Gulag Archipelago has been called the most important book of the twentieth century. Might Between Two Millstones: Book I: Sketches of Exile 1974-1978 be the most important book of the twenty-first century? (Other than all of my books, of course.) Possibly, although the century is young.

But what he is saying is so important for us in the West! An honest and brilliant and thoughtful and hardworking Christian man is trying to warn us. Do we even hear him, let alone learn from him?

I remember an episode of my own life from a few years ago. I was speaking to a college student who was late in his college career. He had not even heard of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn! Yet this young man would end up a pastor in a Bible-believing denomination. I’ll bet the ranch he still has not read a word of Solzhenitsyn’s work. How can we take warning from our best and most honest Christian thinkers, if we will not even read them? If we don’t even know that they exist?! How can we replace “so-called” intellectuals with honest, thinking Christians, if we are unable or unwilling to learn from the best among our brothers? And Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is our best.

Don’t let this lengthy series on Between Two Millstones be all you know about the book. Buy your own durn copy, and read it. There is so much more to the book than my few words can convey. I have given you only the gist. Thank God for Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

We are taking a leisurely jaunt through Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Between Two Millstones: Book I: Sketches of Exile 1974-1978, a book published in English only in 2018. When we broke off last time, S mentioned that complications had arisen with the locals at Cavendish, Vermont. Governor Snelling advised S to talk to the locals at the annual town meeting.

S followed this good advice. Probably I should record the entire speech, which is given in appendix 20 at pages 383-384. But I will content myself with quoting part. You can read it all when you buy the book. The bracketed ellipses are mine.

“Citizens of Cavendish! Dear neighbors! I have come here today to say hello to you and to greet you. I will be turning sixty soon; yet in all my life I have never had any definite permanent place to live, much less my own home. Not knowing the conditions of Soviet life, you can barely imagine that people in the Soviet Union are not allowed to live where they choose. I did not have the opportunity to live in those places whee my work dictated that I should be; at times, I was not even permitted to live with my own family. Finally, the Soviet authorities would no longer tolerate me at all, and deported me from the USSR.

“God determined that every man should live among his own people, in the land of his birth. As a mature tree takes poorly to replanting, sickens, and sometimes dies in its new place, so too a man cannot always bear exile, and literally falls ill. I would like to hope that none of you will ever have to experience this bitter fate of forced exile. Nothing seems the same in a foreign land; nothing seems yours. You feel a constant anguish in those conditions under which everyone else lives normally–and you are seen as a stranger. [. . .]

“I like Vermont, but I hope my presence will not turn out to be unpleasant for you. [. ..] My life consists of work, and this work demands that it not be interrupted. An interruption of one’s work is enough to ruin it. [. . .] Soviet agents [. . .] have sent letters through the mail and even left notes at the gate, threatening to kill me or my family. [. . .] I would like to apologize even more to the snowmobilers and hunters across whose usual paths the fence now stands. I think that you will understand, now, that this is an essential condition for my work, and hence for my life. I could not have done otherwise. [. . .]

“The Communist system is a disease, a plague that has been spreading across the earth for many years already, and it is impossible to predict what peoples will yet be forced to experience this disease firsthand. My people, the Russians, have been suffering from it for sixty years already; they long to be healed. And the day will come when they are indeed healed of this Soviet disease. On that day I will thank you for being good friends and neighbors, and will go back to my homeland.”

These words, and the others he spoke in the same speech, were well received by the people of Cavendish. “Immediately, the tension in the town eased, and a staunch neighborliness was established.” (p. 245) We should note in passing that S, then and always, expected the Soviet disease to end, and for him to return to his home! This in 1975 or 1976! How could that possibly happen? Ridiculous.

The quiet of his home at Five Brooks, Cavendish, led S to hope to have time to edit his twenty volume complete works. His wife Alya was crucial to this work, she “fast became a virtuoso in the craft, preparing the final typed manuscripts of my collected works one volume after another.” (p. 248) Alya time and again proved to be the perfect wife for S.

For a period of about two years, Boston’s postal inspector, on his own kind initiative, monitored S’s mail, checking for letter bombs, and opening everything before sending it on to S. (p. 249)

At Five Brooks in Cavendish S now “had the office of my dreams.” He dragged four desks into the space on Dec. 31, 1976, “and on 1 January 1977 I began to work.” (p. 251)

“I came to the decision that henceforth I would dedicate myself to work, and nothing else. This would be the first real year of work in my life!” (p. 251) We grateful recipients of all the many wonderful books which he had already given us, should accept that comment only with the accompaniment of a large grain of salt. He was always a hard worker, long before 1977.

As he prepared to write about the Russian revolution of 1917, he tells us this:

“From my early years I had been aware that I had both the interest and the temperament to describe that revolution, and I was passionate and ready for the task.” (p. 251) So, he had not just the needed interest in the revolution–he also had the temperament needed, and knew that from an early age. It is a fascinating comment. Nevertheless, the work in writing did not come easily to him.

He worked without distractions. Only a year or two ago he had been trying to rouse the rest of the world to see the danger of the Soviet Union. Now he wanted no external events. He wanted to write for three or four years. Maybe then he would need to go out into the world to renew his perspective. (p. 252) This reminds us of Ecclesiastes 3:1-8); “there is an appointed time for everything.” (3:1) He wanted eventually to go to . . . Russia (pp. 252-253)

Writing long before the Soviet Union fell in 1991, S tells us,

“This would be a rebirth, a new youth despite my gray beard. (And though my mind cannot conceive how this might come about, my premonition leads me to believe with conviction that a return to Russia will happen in my lifetime.)” (p. 253)

“I came more and more to see that the political West, the West of the media, and, of course, of the Western business world, were not our allies–or were too dangerous to have as allies in restoring Russia.” (p. 253)

“I, in fact, suited the all-powerful opinion of the Western political and intellectual elite as little as I did the Soviet rulers, or indeed the Soviet pseudo-intellectuals.” (p. 253) How true!

“Everything, absolutely everything, came together in a way that made it better for me to remain silent for a long time, not to speak out in public. A positive outcome of some kind would hopefully emerge of its own accord.” (p. 254)

Solzhenitsyn had generously decreed that all the royalties from The Gulag Archipelago go to something called the Russian Social Fund, an entity set up to help victims of the Gulag. What followed in 1977 was proof of the adage that “No good deed goes unpunished.” He found himself harassed, through no fault of his own, for the payment of taxes he did not owe. The whole sordid episode takes up several pages (pp. 262-270) I quote only part of one paragraph from this period.

“It was July 1977. I was feeling smothered, bewildered; how were we to live in the West? The millstone of the KGB had never tired of crushing me, I was used to that, but now a second millstone, the millstone of the West, was descending upon me to grind me all over again (and not for the first time). How were we to live here?” (p. 264) A footnote on p. 269, from S written in 1982, gives us the excellent news that full acknowledgment of his innocence finally came–after about nineteen months.

Hopefully I will be able to write part VIII next week.

We are continuing our run through Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Between Two Millstones: Book I: Sketches of Exile 1974-1978. The English language edition became available only in 2018. Hopefully a Book II will become available some day.

S’s lengthy search to find a place in the West where he could write finally came to an end. Via a friend, a property in Vermont was purchased sight unseen, while S and his wife were in Europe! But the choice turned out to be perfect.

S “had ceased to believe” that the West could understand what he was trying to tell them. (p. 207)

“It seems that each nation (and each person) is destined to walk the long path of errors and suffering, from beginning to end.” (p. 207) This is a bleak outlook! Can we never learn from the mistakes and sins of others? Well, as we look around us, and look at our own actions, S’s pessimism cannot be dismissed out of hand. We are so slow to learn! We prefer cliches to truth. The best we can say is perhaps that maybe if we are very willing to hear and believe truth and act on it, maybe we can learn from others. Maybe. Sort of.

S felt that his reading of Dickens helped him recognize British faces. “One feels one knows them all from Dickens: even the most unexpected face makes you think back for a moment: yes, yes, I have encountered you before!” (p. 209)

In Spain, S noticed that the victims of the Spanish Civil War were honored together, “without distinction as to which side they had fought on.” (p. 218)

“This equality of both sides, the equality of the fallen before God, made a profound impression on me. This is the result of the Christian side having won the war! Back home, Satan’s side had won, and for sixty years had been trampling and spitting on the other side, nobody uttering so much as a syllable about the equality of the dead, at least.” (p. 218)

Back in the United States, S spent time at the Hoover Institution in California, studying archives of the Russian Revolution. There he learned much that he had not realized about the February part of the revolution. He was learning things he had not understood for forty years of his adult life! (pp. 225-227) It is a reminder to us that we can learn, even later in life, when we are willing to search for and accept the truth. Here was one of the greatest writers in world history, learning when he was in his mid 50s.

He spent two months in the Hoover Institution library and archives, and would happily have stayed another six. (p. 233)

S sensed the need to cut back on public activity, to no longer disperse his energy in speeches and interviews. His wife Alya felt that America would swallow him up with public functions. (p. 229) But events would reveal that S did indeed find–perhaps the word make is better than find–time and silence to write in Vermont!

The blindness of our leadership elite comes through clearly on page 231. S was called, by important political leaders, ‘”just about a fascist,”‘ and ‘”a slightly balmy nineteenth century Russian mystic.”‘ We have to take a good long hard look in the mirror. How did these filthy people come to be the people speaking for us? Despicable as they are, they did not come to power by violent force. We have let such people speak for us.

Leaving from California, S and Alya, taking turns, drove day and night toward Vermont in a Chevrolet Suburban. So, sometime in 1976, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and his wife drove through the great state of Indiana, just a few miles north of me. Little did I know. They made the entire trip in under a day and a half, and S says “I don’t know how we came out of this alive.” (p. 235)

S settled in at his property in Vermont. It was the time of the Bicentennial, and on the radio S heard us praise ourselves “in truly effusive and excessive terms. It was yet a new surprise.” (p.236)

S’s home in Vermont needed extensive repairs. The results were shameful. The ellipsis is S’s.

“The contractor from nearby Springfield cared neither about the quality nor the timeliness of the work, bringing in up to fifteen workers a day, a good deal more than were needed to handle the construction, and everyone was paid by the hour, paid more in a single hour than a Soviet worker could make in a week. I ruefully thought of the old Russian groups of artisans, where a worker would be ashamed to be outdone by another! . . . But these free workers behaved like the lowest of our enslaved camp inmates: they came late, never began work right away, lounged about, and kept taking coffee breaks (which labor-camp inmates of course could not do), and then, whenever these builders did shoddy work, we had to pay by the hour all over again to have it fixed. (Not to mention that if a worker made a mess somewhere he would never pick up after himself. Cleaning up was beneath the dignity of his trade.)” (p. 237)

The end result was that the construction costs were three or four times what he might have paid for two houses in good condition. S partly blamed himself due to his “inexperience and lack of involvement.” (p. 238) What a pity that he was treated so by the “free”–read slave-minded–people building his house. On the bright side–S now “could breathe! I could write!” (p. 238) He had a home base, and could immerse himself in his work. This was “natural life” to him. (pp. 238-239) So “many unknown terrains” he needed to explore Where would he find the time? (p. 239)

We learn in a footnote that a KGB defector eventually, in 1990, said that there had been plans to murder S in Switzerland. But by that time he had moved on to America. (p. 242) We remember that the KGB had tried to kill him another time in the early 70s. I would contend that God was determined to keep S alive.

The despicable Main Sleaze Media (my term, not S’s) continued to snipe at S, misrepresenting his Vermont retreat as a ‘”self-imposed gulag”‘ and a place where the family indulged in a ‘”bourgeois lifestyle.”‘

‘Ah, wretches, they were writing not about us but about themselves, revealing what mattered to them. We have been expelled from our country, our hearts are constricted, my wife’s eyes are never dry of tears, only work can save us–and this is our so-called “bourgeois lifestyle.”‘ (p. 243)

S regretted leaving Switzerland so silently: “(it had been quite rude, which hadn’t occurred to us)” (p. 244) Switzerland was offended. It was not generally known that the Swiss police had forbidden S to make any political statements. S tells us that “the ordinary Swiss people had always been good to me.” (p 244)

An “avalanche” of mail came to S from Americans, and when the avalanche subsided, a steady flow continued. He was not a novice at such circumstances, and defended his time well. But he always replied to cancer patients immediately–this we can readily guess as a result of his own experience of being threatened with death by cancer earlier in life. (p. 245)

Complication with the locals began! Next week we will try to see what were the long-term results from that situation. Don’t touch that radio dial.

We have been looking at some of the highlights of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s book, Between Two Millstones: Book I: Sketches of Exile 1974-1978.

“To me it was clear that Communism could not last forever. It was decaying from within, chronically ill, but on the outside seemed immensely powerful, marching forward with great strides! And it was marching forward because the hearts of the affluent people of the West were timid, timid due to that very prosperity. But with Communism, as with thugs, you must show unrelenting toughness. In the face of toughness they will relent, toughness they respect.” (p. 183)

We can adapt those words to our own situation. We might say, “It is clear that the U.S. can not last forever. It is decaying from within, but still seems powerful. Our timid Christian hearts have refused to stand firmly for God’s truth. But with the Deep State thugs, we must show unrelenting toughness. If we show toughness, along with hearts willing to obey God in every particular, He will support us.”

S presciently foresaw the weakness and death of the Soviet Union. Perhaps we should begin to understand the weakness and approaching death of the U.S. It will be our job to replace Deep State thuggery with something better! Can it be done? Stay tuned; we may be about to find out in the next few decades.

“Silence and solitude: without them I cannot manage. It was a great task for me to turn away from my work and drag my soul into this fleeting and fast-flowing political battle, initially by forcing myself, and then at full speed. The most difficult thing is overcoming one’s inertia, changing directions; once one is in motion, heading in the direction one has chosen, much less effort is needed.” (p. 183)

In a long drive, a Russian emigre

“gave me a taste of the seething and bilious tangles and intrigues of Washington’s inner circles, which turned out to be more sinister and heartless than I had pictured. The country was not being run by responsive and humane men, but by cynical politicians.” (pp. 183-184) I would say that nothing has changed for the better since 1974 or 1975.

His wife Alya gave him practical advice on how to give his speeches. He followed her advice, “and immediately a great weight fell from my shoulders.” (pp. 184-185) Throughout the book it is clear that Alya was profoundly valuable to S in countless ways.

He gave two confident and challenging speeches in the U.S. and it was only with the passing of a few years that he looked back with surprise at his confidence then. By then he no longer saw America as a staunch ally in Russia’s quest for liberation. “Definitely not!” (p. 186)

Henry Kissinger was instrumental in steering President Ford away from meeting with S. (p. 187) However, eventually S was invited to the White House, but he declined the spur of the moment invitation. (p. 191)

In the two weeks which had passed since his speeches, the mainstream American press “missed no opportunity of tearing my speeches apart.” (p. 189) “The free American press is entirely deaf to whatever is not to its advantage, preferring to hear what it wants to hear.” (p. 189) That was about 45 years ago–more than a generation. Today Main Sleaze Media is even far worse. But it is important to remember that they were horrible even then.

Vice-president Nelson Rockefeller, whom S found “unprepossessing,” (p. 191) tried to persuade S to meet with Kissinger, but S had begun to become wary.

“And by now I was resolved that it would be best never to meet with people who seem to have an opaque agenda, which could lead to their later giving the meeting a false interpretation. This has become my general principle.” (p. 192)

S well understood that his writing was central to his being. He called half of his archive “half of my life.” (p. 193) His life was the writing, based of course largely on the archives he was able to collect and protect from destruction.

For S and Alya, “Our unrelenting predicament was how to raise our children abroad but as Russians.” (p. 194)

S briefly notes that in 1945 the Great Powers (which included the U.S., by the way), “in an act of cowardice, had delivered Russian soldiers and refugees to Stalin” (p. 194) This is 100% true. The Secret Betrayal by Nikolai Tolstoy is only one of a small handful of books which expose this perfidious behavior. I would guess that not one in ten thousand Americans has heard of this evil done by our fathers and grandfathers. A true history of this country will take at least one full generation to begin to recover–when we begin to have truth tellers willing to speak, and the rest of us are willing to listen and understand.

S, as a writer, was occasionally blessed with what he calls ‘”avalanche days.”‘ Ideas and deductions keep coming at a rapid pace.

“You must seize them all before they slip away, you must write them down, faster and faster, the first, second, third idea, you are fired up, you cannot stay at your desk, you keep pacing and pacing, and thoughts, images, scenes keep coming and coming–if only I were able to capture at least some of them with rough jottings, to get a few ideas on paper.” (p. 198)

S recounts three incidents in a brief period of time in which he was quoted in interview form–but the interviews had never taken place! And this was by supposed allies!

“This was piracy, a living person treated as if he were dead! So this was the freedom of the press! These people from the Right were as dangerous as those from the Left, ready to skin one alive.” (p. 198)

In passing we have to note how unprincipled is Mainstream Conservatism in our own day. They seem to be getting worse and worse. But S experienced their dishonesty more than a generation ago.

S was forced to go to court to protect one segment of his writing. Going into details would be mind-numbing for me and for you, but part of S’s response is clear and should remind us of the kind of world we are forcing ourselves to live in.

“This was perhaps the first time, but I was to notice it in the future too: in legal clashes there is a physical sensation of tension in the upper chest, the tensing of muscles one feels in hand-to-hand combat, in this case a pointless tensing of the muscles, since this is a combat of souls. It is not a combat for which souls are suited: it is too low for them, and therefore a degrading encounter. (And then there is a long-term effect, an emptiness in the chest.) Legal battles are a profanation of the soul, an ulceration. As the world has entered a legal era, gradually replacing man’s conscience with law, the spiritual level of the world has sunk.” (p. 202)

Even if you were completely innocent, would you like to have your fate be decided by the American court system? I didn’t think so. If we start to rebuild civilization, one of our goals will need to be that we defend truth and innocence in our courts. Note the word if.

If possible, I will continue with a sixth part next week.