The Truth From an Alien
No one I have read has had the forward-thinking and honesty to tell the United States of America the truth like Alexandr Solzhenitsyn did back in 1978 at the Commencement Ceremony, Harvard University, titled “A World Split Apart.”
What he said then still rings very accurate today.
Reading this speech is as if it was written yesterday, and it applies to what we see are the consequences of his observations 44 years ago, almost half a century.
The man was a deep thinker, and the contrast between the world he grew up in, fought a war for, and was punished for his thoughts, allowed him a drastic view between where we were and where we were going.
Forty-four years later, we are in the middle of what he was talking about. If we don’t get a paycheck from the government, we starve; if we don’t get a signal for our phone, we are put out; we want “the government” to “take care of us.”
More than that, the man was clairvoyant because what he wrote about applies to how “our reality” has been devolving in the last 30 years. We are upside down from what the founders defined in the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution.
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn was born in 1918. He was the best-known Russian author in the west upon his exile from the Soviet Union in 1974. He served in WWII and won medals for heroism, but Stalin put him in the Gulag when he wrote some derogatory things about communism and Stalin to a friend in a private letter in 1945. That experience provided him with the material for his long-life passion for philosophy and writing. His best-known work in the west is probably the book “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” which was published in 1962 when Khrushchev set him free and allowed him to return to Kazakhstan. In 1974 he was arrested and exiled to Germany. He eventually settled in Vermont, where he lived with his wife and two sons until his return to Russia in 1994. In his speeches around the world, he observed and made public his observations about the weak behavior of the west in the face of communist aggression and the love for materialism in the world. For all his works, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970.
In the 1978 speech at a Harvard University commencement, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn predicted the outcome in the United States; in this transcendental speech, the subject of the stories to follow.
For the fans of Star Trek, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn might as well be “Q” as John de Lancie played it in the series “Star Trek Next Generation.” Every word he said in that speech is accurate today.
A summary of it is as our founders idealized our country’s “Declaration of Independence,” which we have wrecked today:
