Local opinion: We face another testing hour in America's Gulag

In 1976, my wife and I lived in a village in southern Vermont, where I worked as a meat cutter at a local butcher shop, and she as a teller at the local bank. Lots of daily conversations with neighbors took place “over the counter.”

One day in 1976 these conversations touched on the recent arrival of a Nobel Prize winner to a nearby town. Aleksander Solzhenitsyn won the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature, but instead of being honored, he was targeted for assassination by the KGB, and then in 1974 was stripped of his citizenship and exiled. He and his family fled Russia, and in 1976 settled, well hidden in plain sight, in southern Vermont.

Everyone in that small village protected him for nearly 20 years, enabling him to write in peace.

Solzhenitsyn’s literature changed my life.

A decade later, as a teacher at a Vermont high school, I was invited to Boston to view a documentary film, “One Word of Truth,” from Anglo-Nordic Productions Trust, based on Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel Prize address, which was smuggled out of Russia when he was unable to deliver it in person.

His speech, accompanied by the stark images from the Gulag where he was imprisoned, inspired me to speak out for truth in art and literature for the rest of my life

Among Solzhenitsyn’s words that changed my life are these, excerpted from Patrick Colquhoun's translation of the documentary film, which I own a copy of, and can show in Tucson.

“We shall be asked, what can literature do against the merciless onslaught of open violence? But let us not forget that violence does not live alone and is not capable of living alone: it can only exist with the help of the lie. Between these two there is a most intimate, natural, and fundamental connection. Violence can only be concealed by the lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence.

"And writers and artists can achieve more: they can defeat the lie! Art has always won its fight against lies, and it will always win. Everyone can see that. No one can deny it. The lie can resist many things in this world, but it cannot resist art.

"We must not seek excuses on the grounds that we lack weapons, and we must not give ourselves over to a life of ease and security. We must go out into battle.

"In Russia the most popular proverbs are about truth. These proverbs express the people’s deep and bitter experiences, sometimes with astonishing force – “one word of truth outweighs the whole world.”


A half-century after these words were written, Arizonans are facing another testing hour. In 1976, the United States embraced an immigrant and protected him from tyranny. Today our leaders have flipped their allegiance to truth to instead embrace the violence and the lies that Solzhenitsyn’s literature decried.

In 2002, I visited Auschwitz to bear witness to the lies and violence of a previous generation. Our modern-day resurgence of violence and the lie is documented by the recent photo of the Director of Homeland Security arrogantly posing in front of a Salvadoran prison cell, packed with human beings who have been convicted of no crime in any United States court of law.

Today, private prisons hidden (just as Auschwitz was) in rural parts of our country (including Arizona) are 21st Century examples of Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago.”

Everyone who loves the United States must stand up and speak out, support courageous artists and writers as they create and celebrate the art needed to sustain America’s pledge of indivisible liberty and justice for all.

Everyone must resist the tyranny of the lie. It is not enough to simply be nice people. As children’s book author ("Be Kind") Naomi Shulman wrote,

“Nice people made the best Nazis. My mom grew up next to them. They got along, refused to make waves, looked the other way when things got ugly, and focused on happier things than ‘politics.’ They were lovely people who turned their heads as their neighbors were dragged away. You know who were not nice people? Resisters.”

Resist.