Remembering William F. Buckley

William F. Buckley died yesterday.

When I was growing up, liberal by default (because everyone I knew was liberal), William F. Buckley was a figure of ridicule. What I knew of him came from the impressionist David Frye, who imagined him speaking of Apollo 11 landing on the "Mare Tranquillitate" (Latin) rather than the Sea of Tranquillity, because Latin sounded so much more erudite.

In the 70's, after I had discovered Solzhenitsyn, I came across an issue of National Review. To my surprise this publication wasn't foolishly spouting idiocy in Latin. What won my regard was this issue had excerpted a whole chapter (perhaps two) from First Circle, the passage where Stalin is alone pondering that it isn't egocentric for him to become Emperor of the World, and pondering how he has to control everything. Buckley introduced this excerpt saying we needed to remember this is how totalitarians thought.

In this decade, when I began looking for political commentary on the Internet, I remembered National Review quoting Solzhenitsyn, and looked it up. I haven't seen them run more excerpts from Solzhenitysn since, but they do mention him from time to time. And the NRO (National Review Online) has become one of my Internet favorites.

Whatever happened to the Sharansky-Bush doctrine?

The Sharansky-Bush doctrine??

Let me explain. In late fall 2004 I was reading on National Review Online how George W Bush, recently re-elected, was reading a book called The Case for Democracy by Natan Sharansky. My wife alertly ordered the book for me as a Christmas gift, and we both enjoyed it. It was an eloquent appeal to stand up for human rights around the world, to no longer ignore the abuses of dictatorships in the name of "diplomacy" or "stability".
Then in January 2005 George W Bush made the principles in the book the theme of his second inaugural address.

"We have seen our vulnerability - and we have seen its deepest source. For as long as whole regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny - prone to ideologies that feed hatred and excuse murder - violence will gather, and multiply in destructive power, and cross the most defended borders, and raise a mortal threat. There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment, and expose the pretensions of tyrants, and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant, and that is the force of human freedom.

We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world."

This resounded in my heart because this was what was missing all those years in our relationships with the Soviet Union, we never fully acknowledged the evil that was happening because we wanted to be at peace.

In our world now, the Soviet Union is gone but tyranny still exists.

Another quote from Bush's second inaugural:
"All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: the United States will not ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you."

But what does this mean? Are we obligated to invade other countries to keep this doctrine? We ended one tyrant's rule in Iraq, should we invade Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Myanmar, Zimbabwe? No I don't think so. I think the promise above commits us to noticing what goes on in other countries, to lobbying for freedom and to try to remember those who are imprisoned. Maybe there ought to be a US government website that tells the stories of people around the world who are in prison or oppressed by their governments.

As George W Bush's term nears its end, it seems like the vision he laid out in the second inaugural hasn't been implemented much at all. I read on National Review Online excerpts of news from Iran, with stories such as this one "Yaqoub Mehr-Nahad, journalist and civil-society activist, condemned to death. Mehr-Nahad was arrested after participating in a seminar called "Questioning Youth, Responsible Authorities" in Zahedan, the capital of the Sistan va Baluchestan province of Iran. His family reports that he bore “signs of severe torture” and believes the execution seeks to silence any revelations about torture in prisons of the Islamic Republic." I'm not aware of anything the US govt is doing to stand with people such as this in Iran.

Whatever happened to the Sharansky-Bush doctrine?

The Sharansky-Bush doctrine??

Let me explain. In late fall 2004 I was reading on National Review Online how George W Bush, recently re-elected, was reading a book called The Case for Democracy by Natan Sharansky. My wife alertly ordered the book for me as a Christmas gift, and we both enjoyed it. It was an eloquent appeal to stand up for human rights around the world, to no longer ignore the abuses of dictatorships in the name of "diplomacy" or "stability".
Then in January 2005 George W Bush made the principles in the book the theme of his second inaugural address.

"We have seen our vulnerability - and we have seen its deepest source. For as long as whole regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny - prone to ideologies that feed hatred and excuse murder - violence will gather, and multiply in destructive power, and cross the most defended borders, and raise a mortal threat. There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment, and expose the pretensions of tyrants, and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant, and that is the force of human freedom.

We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world."

This resounded in my heart because this was what was missing all those years in our relationships with the Soviet Union, we never fully acknowledged the evil that was happening because we wanted to be at peace.

In our world now, the Soviet Union is gone but tyranny still exists.

Another quote from Bush's second inaugural:
"All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: the United States will not ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you."

But what does this mean? Are we obligated to invade other countries to keep this doctrine? We ended one tyrant's rule in Iraq, should we invade Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Myanmar, Zimbabwe? No I don't think so. I think the promise above commits us to noticing what goes on in other countries, to lobbying for freedom and to try to remember those who are imprisoned. Maybe there ought to be a US government website that tells the stories of people around the world who are in prison or oppressed by their governments.

As George W Bush's term nears its end, it seems like the vision he laid out in the second inaugural hasn't been implemented much at all (since the invasion of Iraq had already happened).

The Oak and the Calf

It is an interesting story. (If you've never read it, it is not a novel but a memoir of the years he was a famous writer and dissident in the USSR, basically from the time Ivan Denisovich was prepared for publishing until he was expelled in 1974. I find myself thinking as some critics say, that AIS sounds too proud of himself in parts. As I said earlier, I'm not sure why recounting Tvardovsky's alcoholism needed to be in this story. (Tvardovsky was the magazine editor who decided to publish Ivan Denisovich). Although perhaps Solzhenitsyn wanted to portray Tvardovsky as a tragedy, the man for years edited the best (most truthful) magazine in the USSR, but had to make so many compromises with the authorities, and I think Solzhenitsyn wants us to see it was those compromises that drove him to drink.

And as I worried that he had been to proud, I was relieved to find this quote in his description of what he did when he found out about winning the Nobel prize.
"Perhaps in Saratov or Irkutsk our next Nobel Prize winner was writhing in shame for that wretched Solzhenitsyn. Why doesn't he bellow like a calving cow? Why doesn't he get out there and do a bit of tub thumping?"

The background of this, when he first heard he had won the Nobel, he told a foreign reporter that if the decision was up to him, he'd go to Sweden for the ceremony, and he was in good health. But in the end he decided not to apply to leave the USSR, because he sensed the Nobel prize organization didn't want him to make a 'political' speech, and he also thought the USSR might well refuse to let him back in, and his first son was just about to be born. So he found himself unable to make the kind of bold statement he as a younger man had wished Pasternak had made.

Back in the USA

Our year back in Niger ended last week, we're now back in the USA. And to my surprise, our local library actually has Scammell's biography of Solzhenitsyn and The Oak and the Calf. Funny thing though, the computerized card catalog has no record of The Oak and the Calf. Does this mean I could keep it and not turn it back? (grin).

I remember reading The Oak and the Calf almost twenty years ago, now I'm reading it again. Its good, the story of Solzhenitsyn revisiting the Mavrino sharashka site just at the time he submits Ivan Denisovich for publication is fascinating. But I can understand why relatives of Tvardovsky don't like the book, I myself wonder if AIS really needed to say that Tvardovsky was an alcoholic, it doesn't seem essential to the narrative.

Learning the Cyrillic alphabet

As I've said, I discovered Solzhenitsyn when I was in college. Our university library had most of his books, both in English translation and in Russian. At some point browsing the shelves or the card catalog, I began to think one could figure out the Russian alphabet by comparing "Solzhenitsyn". I'm sure I knew already that "C" stood for "S", since I knew from James Bond movies that "CCCP" was "USSR". And the "o" and the "e" that didn't change were also clues. I'm not sure how I got the idea that "zh" was only one letter in Russian, but that was the only tricky part to figuring out how it works. And then the first name wasn't that hard either -- "x" seemed to be represented by two letters, but then I remembered that it usually wasn't spelled "Alexander" in English but "Aleksandr".

One amusing story, once I had a class that met in one corner of the library (not a common occurrence for an entomology major). Opposite me was a series of volumes in Russian. So I started trying to decode the alphabet. "D", "A", "H", "L". I was awestruck. This must be Dahl's dictionary that Nerzhin and Rubin were so fond of. I was in rapture looking at those books. The woman sitting between me and Dahl's dictionary must have thought I had a crush on her. Of course, I did have a crush on her, and sometimes I was looking at her, not the books, but not all the time.

Characteristics of Solzhenitsyn as a writer

A while back I made the distinction between Solzhenitsyn the prophet, writing to expose to the world the evils of the Gulag and the Communist system, and Solzhenitysn the writer. I don't mean that these aspects are in contradiction with each other, maybe another way to look at it is the kinds of stories Solzhenitsyn tells, (Solzhenitsyn the prophet) and the way he tells his stories (Solzhenitysn the writer).

What do I notice as the way he tells a story? Here are a few ideas.
1) He tells the story from several different viewpoints. Cancer Ward, First Circle, and the narrative parts of Red Wheel have lots of different characters. One Day in the life of Ivan Denisovich is different, but then Solzhenitsyn doesn't actually consider this a novel, (I forget the exact term).
2) The story does not all take place inside the character's minds, but the story is not all outward events either.
3) Despite facing very grim and difficult problems, the characters are not all overcome by the futility of life, and everything doesn't go wrong. Stories don't have universally happy endings, neither do they have universally sad endings.
4) A significant part of the story involves the characters reading books, thinking about books and commenting on them.