Technological
Titans, Moral Midgets:
The Death Of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
By Niranjan Ramakrishnan
12 August,
2008
Countercurrents.org
Somehow it seemed only fitting
that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn should breathe his last just as the celebration
of technical wizardry was to reach its crescendo in Beijing; if the
21st century has any unifying allegiance, it is to the Diocese of
Technology, and indirectly, to its Major Sponsor, the Church of Globalization.
Both command a degree of reverence and blind worship amongst the elites
of the world rivaled, if at all, only by the religious fanaticism
of sanscullotes up and down the Hindu Kush.
Solzhenitsyn left not a moment too soon. Quite apart from his age,
he was a moral misfit in the New World Order. He reposed his faith
in Man and God, not Consumer and Conglomerate. If other men like Arther
Koestler were disillusioned by what befell their Brave New World of
the 1920's, Solzhenitsyn, to mix metaphors this Olympic season, was
destined to win a Triple Crown in Heartbreak: disgusted by the Soviet
Union, disappointed by the West, and dismayed by what replaced Communist
rule: the Reign of Fool and Knave, aka the Gorbachev-Yeltsin Kleptofest.
An Olympic Games with the theme One World, One Dream -- an apt coup
de grace for one whose most famous speech was titled, A World Split
Apart.
I should begin by confessing not having read a single one of Solzhenitsyn's
books. It was quite by accident last year that I came across his Harvard
Speech, and was struck by its scorching prescience. Delivered in 1978,
it could still harpoon the conscience even as yesterday's opening
ceremonies in Beijing riveted the eye.
If all else is forgotten about Solzhenitsyn, two things will be remembered.
First, that he went to jail (concentration camp, actually) for professing
his beliefs, a fate practically unknown amongst intellectuals in our
day. Then there is his aphoristic message to the Russian people as
he was being thrown out of Russia. "Live Not By Lies". The
deadly truth of his words was to become evident to the Soviet Union
in a few short years.
Others in our own time, like Cindy Sheehan and Kathy Kelly, have tried
to give a similar message to America -- with their words falling on
equally deaf ears. True, unlike Solzhenitsyn, they and her ilk have
not been consigned to some faraway gulag, but what does it say about
us and our free press that they doesn't need to be (see Silence of
the Lambs)?
We live in a world of knitted brows, besotted with technology and
wedded to fear; hopeful, if not wholly convinced, that the one can
obviate the other. The few with smiles are those who have known all
along that marrying fear to technology is the philosopher's stone
of our times. They are the proverbial ones laughing all the way to
the bank.
It is of this imminent future that Naomi Klein has written a fantastic
piece (China's All Seeing Eye) in Rolling Stone Magazine: how the
Beijing Olympics are really the first test case for the technology
underlying National Security State 2.0, cameras everywhere with every
face photographed and matched in real time. Shorter but entirely brilliant
is Fred Reed's one page "Don't Sweat the TSA" in the current
issue of American Conservative (not yet available online) on the enormous
erosion of privacy in our time, and the complete equanimity with which
we have countenanced it.
At the Opening Ceremony, you saw Bush, launcher of two foreign wars,
chatting pleasantly with Putin, who had just that day launched his
first! Both sat enjoying an Olympics gala whose theme, remember, was....
"One World, One Dream". Elsewhere the Anthrax Lie was already
being covered up even as it was being exposed, and Edward(s) the Confessor
sat for a bare-all interview seeking to mitigate past two-timing with
current good timing: to be aired while the world was still being dazzled
by the Olympic extravaganza.
Live not by lies, said Solzhenitsyn.
There is an old RK Laxman cartoon: The day after an Indian election,
when every wall has been plastered with posters several times over,
a conscientious party worker returns to scrape them off. Strangely,
the landlord rushes out...not to scold him for sticking posters without
permission, but to stop him taking them down. "Don't, don't,
don't" he yells anxiously, "without the posters the building
will fall".
Live not by lies? And face the moral choices that would result? Not
for us, thanks. Time to Sprint.
Niranjan Ramakrishnan is a writer living on the West
Coast. He can be reached at [email protected]. Some
of his other writings may be found at Indogram.