A Doom-Struck Message

Evidently unhappy about the criticism of his refusal to meet with Russian Writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn last July, President Ford recently moved to make amends. In an enthusiastic telegram to the Freedom Foundation of Valley Forge, Pa., Ford said he was "delighted" at the award of the foundation's American Friendship Medal to the Nobel prizewinner. The President's pleasure might well have been diminished had he anticipated Solzhenitsyn's bitter attack on U.S. foreign policy, aired last week on William F. Buckley's public television show Firing Line.

In this hour-long rebroadcast of a BBC show that created a furor in England earlier this month, an interpreter translated Solzhenitsyn's declaration that in the past two years "terrible things have happened." The West, he claimed, "has given up not only four, five or six countries, it has given up all its world positions." He cited the "loss of freedom" in Angola and the Communist victory in Indochina as examples of the West's loss of nerve and spiritual strength. Moral considerations, he charged, have no bearing on politics in the West. "One should not consider that the great principles of freedom terminate at one's own frontiers," he said. "No! Freedom is indivisible and one has to take a moral attitude toward it." He declared that the West's failure to defend the freedom of others has led to the "verge of a collapse created by its own hands." For Solzhenitsyn, the guiltiest parties were clearly Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

Eyes blazing, Solzhenitsyn brandished his unsheathed ballpoint pen like a rapier as he derided all Western efforts to come to an agreement with the Soviets, even over nuclear weapons. The West has made so many concessions recently, he said, that the "Soviet Union does not even need nuclear arms; you can be taken with bare hands."

Solzhenitsyn's doom-struck message created a stir. The Christian Science Monitor called the program a "time bomb" while the Wall Street Journal rated it "one of the most important pieces of TV journalism ever, and spellbinding besides." Still, most sober observers of world affairs are not likely to fall under his spell. Example: Sovietologist Richard Lowenthal has sorrowfully expressed his amazement at Solzhenitsyn's "utter disaccord with the facts of recent international history." Lowenthal points out that not all defeats for the West, as for instance in Indochina, are caused by surrender to the Soviet Union--or China--but can be the result of local forces. Moreover, he feels it would be "criminally irresponsible" for the U.S. to refuse communication with the U.S.S.R. as Solzhenitsyn desires, "for communication is the only way to control the risk of total destruction."

Solzhenitsyn's extreme view of events was illustrated not long ago in a lecture over Madrid television. He dismayed liberals by declaring that the Falangist victory in the Spanish civil war had been a victory for "the concept of Christianity." Addressing Spaniards who view their government as a dictatorship, Solzhenitsyn assured them that after an eight-day trip he could see that they enjoy "absolute freedom."

The great author of The Gulag Archipelago speaks out of a profound knowledge of the evil in Soviet Russia. That evil is real; so is much of the weakness and corruption he sees in the West. Yet as a prophet he has a vision so simple, single-minded and absolute that it cannot cope with a real and complex world. If he was right in his broadcast, the only alternative is the Apocalypse.

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