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August 09, 2008

Stay strong. Do not yield.

Christopher Hitchens considers individuals who, bafflingly, maddeningly, absurdly, cannot be broken (via the Drink Soaked Trots).

Should they manage to survive, such heroes have a good chance of outliving the state or the system that so grossly underestimated them. Examples are rather precious and relatively few, and they include Nelson Mandela refusing an offer to be released from jail (unless and until all other political detainees were also freed) and Alexander Solzhenitsyn having to be deported from his country of birth against his will, even though he had become—and had been before—a prisoner there.

Add John McCain to that short list.

Posted by Ghost of a flea at August 9, 2008 06:23 AM

Comments

About a million years ago I was assigned, by an East European professor of Political Theory, Solzhenitsyn's Warning to the West. As brilliant a lecture/book as I have ever read. And, entirely wrong.

Which I wrote.

And failed. (I was reprieved by Alan Carins who could understand that the Pan-Slav, anti-Western, polemics of Solzhenitsyn were, in fact, contrary to everything the West was, in fact, about.)

To read Solzhenitsyn is to understand how a man of grand thought can be enslaved by religion, prejudice, ignorance and yet be a brilliant novelist.

I shall miss the novels, especially the shorter ones, but I will not miss the man.

Posted by: Jay Currie [TypeKey Profile Page] at August 12, 2008 01:41 AM