A Nobel Prize winner from a Communist country had prophetic words for America.
In 1978, at the Harvard University commencement, America heard from a prophetic voice when renowned Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn boldly and without apology challenged broadly accepted ideas that were then considered politically correct. His comments have not only proven true, but they are more relevant today than ever and, therefore, are worth revisiting.
Though few college commencement speakers these days dare to defy conventional wisdom or the secularism that undergirds it, on June 8, 1978, Solzhenitsyn’s stunning address not only made those assembled there uncomfortable, it provoked many of them to boo him.
Why would an audience boo a moral giant like Solzhenitsyn who had stared down a brutal Communist dictatorship’s Gulags and won the Nobel Prize in literature? Those who booed had expected him to celebrate the West and to direct his condemnations only at Communism. Instead, he condemned Communism and the West. In the process, Solzhenitsyn had the courage to speak of something that was reviled at the time by elites on both sides of the Atlantic, which was truth.
[T]ruth eludes us if we do not concentrate our attention totally on its pursuit. But even while it eludes us, the illusion of knowing it still lingers and leads to many misunderstandings. Also, truth seldom is pleasant; it is almost invariably bitter.
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