Indicting the Left's True Believers

In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn noted that Shakespeare's evildoers were content to commit only a handful of murders. They stop killing, Solzhenitsyn explained, because "they have no ideology."

This pithy observation succinctly distinguishes Macbeth from mass executioners Stalin, Mao, Che and Saddam. But what explains the curious fact that intellectuals can apply critical thinking to the study of Shakespeare's murderers, while ideological massacrists inspire -- in leftists -- the very opposite: a lapse in critical thinking so egregious that it amounts to a pathology?

Some say that Solzhenitsyn was the conscience of the 20th century. A conscience that too few of us cared to listen to.

Some here may recall his famous 1978 Harvard speech, A World Split Apart. He was jeered and booed, a fact that alone would explain more about our present circumstances than perhaps anything else. Here are a few excerpts:

The West has finally achieved the rights of man, and even to excess, but man’s sense of responsibility to God and society has grown dimmer and dimmer. In the past decades, the legalistic selfishness of the Western approach to the world has reached its peak and the world has found itself in a harsh spiritual crisis and a political impasse.
All the celebrated technological achievements of progress, including the conquest of outer space, do not redeem the twentieth century’s moral poverty, which no one could have imagined even as late as the nineteenth century.

And then there's this:

But the fight for our planet, physical and spiritual, a fight of cosmic proportions, is not a vague matter of the future; it has already started. The forces of Evil have begun their decisive offensive. You can feel their pressure, yet your screens and publications are full of prescribed smiles and raised glasses. What is the joy about?

Ignore this man at your peril. No modern man understood the nature of evil and the frailties of human nature better than Solzhenitsyn - who experienced them all first hand. Had he lives to see this day, he might well have wept at the sight of the decline and fall of the last best place on Earth.

Well, the fight isn't over - not by a long shot. As long as I have my rifle, I still get to vote.

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