Solzhenitsyn spoke for millions

“In every life there is one particular event that is decisive for the entire person – for his fate, his convictions, his passions.” –Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1918-2008

For the great Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who died this week, the pivotal event of his life came when he was suddenly and unjustly pulled from freedom into captivity. Like millions of others, Solzhenitsyn was a victim of the Soviet Union’s political prison system, known by its notorious acronym: Gulag.

For writing politically unacceptable letters to a friend, Solzhenitsyn found himself stripped of rank, rights and liberty. He lamented that his tale was nowhere near unique. The Soviet Union spent decades locking up its own people in order to silence dissenters and terrorize those who were left.

But Solzhenitsyn’s gift for letters would prove to be his oppressors’ undoing. By chronicling the excesses of his communist captors, Solzhenitsyn exposed to the world the brutality of the Soviet Union. The truth and eloquence of his words could not be countered by communism’s elite apologists in the West and in 1970, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

A student hoping to learn from a Nobel laureate about the dangers of this world should set aside Al Gore’s Earth in the Balance and take up Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. Better yet, read Solzhenitsyn first, then consider how the assault on liberty he describes may apply to today’s religion of environmentalism. Solzhenitsyn’s canon is a study of the vigilance freedom requires, and the misery that comes when it is lost.

Tragically, communism did not collapse with the Soviet Union, and one-fifth of the world’s population is still subject to that demented ideology.

As the Olympic Games begin today in the People’s Republic of China, there has already been discussion of that communist regime’s suppression of its own people and its neighbours. The Laogai, China’s version of the Gulag, is the most extensive system of forced labour camps on the planet. Likewise, in North Korea and Cuba, political prison networks hold countless human beings in bondage for crimes of thought, speech and religion. This is the essence of communism, and the practitioners of today’s inhumanities are the heirs of Solzhenitsyn’s jailers.

But for all that he suffered and saw, Solzhenitsyn’s inclination was always toward mercy and goodness. This was not some version of pacifistic protest, however, but an act of intellectual will. “For mercy,” he said, “one must have wisdom.” In upholding this creed, he proved that the human spirit can maintain its divine spark, even in the face of true evil.

Understandably, Solzhenitsyn developed a cynicism toward politics, noting that fine words and high-minded ideology can blot out basic humanity. Of his cruel countrymen, Solzhenitsyn mourned, “Where had all that Russian generosity gone? It had been replaced by political consciousness.”

Solzhenitsyn knew his task was to tell the story of those who were silenced. In his dedication of The Gulag Archipelago to those who did not survive the prison camps, he asks their forgiveness, “for not having seen it all nor remembered it all, for not having divined all of it.”

But despite his human imperfection, Solzhenitsyn shed light on one of the greatest crimes in all history, and his imprisonment was not in vain. When Soltzhenitsyn’s oppressors took away his freedom, they gave millions of others a voice.

Flawed, but still noble

Any noble notion that is implemented by human beings will inevitably fall short of its ideals. The Olympic Games are no exception. But the glory of the effort, the pursuit of excellence that the Olympics embody, make the exercise worthwhile.

The Olympics are among those well-intentioned international institutions that purport to represent humanity’s highest aims. Like the United Nations or Greenpeace, the Olympics stand for ideals that ought to be universal, while implementing them imperfectly.

In practical terms, the Olympics combine competition among the planet’s greatest athletes – this is the ideal aspect of the Games – with unmistakably human oversight, represented by the International Olympic Committee.

For decades, the IOC has been the object of criticism, accused of corruption and complicity with the world’s worst regimes. The IOC’s coddling of the repressive People’s Republic of China has been well-documented since the day the 2008 Games were awarded to Beijing. Until recently, the IOC had planned to ban the newly democratic Iraq from this year’s event, claiming the country had politicized its process by replacing members of its national committee. This is the same IOC that raised no objection when Saddam Hussein was imprisoning and torturing Iraqi Olympians who underperformed.

In this way, the Olympics, and the IOC in particular, have much in common with the U.N. Both are playgrounds for tyrants, where bureaucratic elites overlook genuine injustice while scrutinizing the shortcomings of free nations. But these undeniable weaknesses do not outweigh the nobility of their aims.

Like the U.N., if the Olympics did not exist, we would have to invent them. Certainly, the world’s leaders should have a forum to meet and discuss things, just as nations should periodically put their weapons and differences aside for the sake of athletic competition. These ideals may have been pursued imperfectly, but they are still worth pursuing.

Fear of imperfection should be no deterrent. If human beings attempted only what we know we can do right, the world would be nothing but gibberish and genocide. The Olympics aspire to something better.

Inevitably, when athletes compete under flags, folks assign national significance that obscures the simple nobility of the event. But the notion of sport as proxy for politics was always a flimsy one. During the Cold War, from the Summit Series to Rocky IV, audiences in the East and West imagined that the success or failure of their athletes would vindicate or discredit their ideology. Of course, this conflates two unrelated issues. An athlete may be strong of limb or fleet of foot at the same time his government is utterly wrong about freedom of speech or foreign affairs.

With the demise of the Soviet Union, the quadrennial clash of ideology has been downgraded, but is not dead. Reports indicate that communist host-country China hopes to score a symbolic victory over its rival for superpower status, the United States, by topping the medal count in 2008. But now, as then, such notions are meaningless.

If China were to win every gold medal, it would not change the fact that communism is the most murderous, miserable ideology ever devised. And anyway, this is scorekeeping for politicians. The athlete’s lot is human competition, a universal language.

It is unlikely that the athlete in the arena, blessed with God-given talent and the discipline to develop it, is contemplating his voting choices – if he has the good fortune to represent a genuine democracy, that is – while performing.

One expects, rather, that he is focused on achieving his utmost at the moment that is likely the pinnacle of his life and career. The magnificence of such a spectacle is unique to the Olympics and deserves our attention. Unlike those whose best skills are, say, orthodontics or accounting, an athlete in top form is a thing of beauty to behold.

The Olympics could never be entirely apolitical. It is impossible to remove politics from even the most benign of human affairs. No one is suggesting that the Olympics require the comity of a global church picnic, with potato sack races contended at a world-class level. But it would behoove us to keep our eyes on the real prize. That is, the glory of sport.

The Olympics’ ideals are just that. While we live in an imperfect world, impurity will hold sway. But there is much to admire and enjoy in the Olympics’ pursuit of perfection. Let the Games begin.

Mayor brings "Torontonian values" to China

Trip funded by city taxpayers

Mayor David Miller has defended his recent, taxpayer-funded jaunt to the People's Republic of China by insisting he will be bringing "Torontonian values" to the despotic regime.

As our city faces a number of imminent difficulties, including a potential transit strike, it is fair to ask whether our chief executive should be travelling abroad on our dime, assuming for himself foreign policy duties heretofore unrelated to municipal government. More important, one wonders just what "Torontonian values" Miller means to represent.

Off the top of my head, here are a few of my values for Toronto: I value being able to get to work. I would value my trash being picked up without it having to be gift-wrapped. I value a city in which kids of every economic background have places to play, free of charge, all four seasons of the year. Just how, exactly, does His Worship buggering off to China address any one of these?

Prosaic as such things may seem to a romantic soul like Miller, these are precisely the sort of issues we elect city leaders to address. Moreover, if these and other city-level concerns like crime, litter and taxes were well in hand, I doubt I or anyone would begrudge the mayor soaring over to Asia to show folks how it's done.

Instead, Torontonians face spiralling costs, deteriorating services, and funerals for teenage victims of violence on our streets. Through it all, our mayor always seems to have someplace else to be. He would rather skip town for a brow-furrowing session over solar power and windmills with Robert Redford than stick around and deal with the issues for which Torontonians elected and pay him.

Here is a simple value David Miller ought to understand -- do the job in front of you before setting off to save the world.

Miller has promised that among his espousal of "Torontonian values" will be some discussion of China's abysmal attitude toward human rights. Not for nothing, what leverage does the mayor of Toronto suppose he can bring to bear upon China's dictatorship? The sheer power of his personality? Having had some years to assess that power, Torontonians may advise Tibetans not to start ringing the bells of freedom just yet.

So far, the trip is going just as one might have predicted. According to Miller's April 14 press release, he has signed a suitably Soviet-sounding "Memorandum of Understanding" to forge a new "culture of partnership" with the mayor of Beijing. Knowing Miller as we Torontonians do, could any of us conceive of a more typically inane gesture for our mayor to undertake? The man continues to defy satire.

The gist of this agreement is that the cities will co-operate to enhance future prosperity (wisely shunning an earlier draft, wherein the mayors would quarrel in order to destroy prosperity of the past), including an exchange of senior staff between Toronto and Beijing. As the arrangement progresses, one wonders who will be schooling whom on the finer points of socialism and state control. If you think the City of Toronto has nothing to teach the Chinese communists about authoritarianism and overreach, try removing a dead tree from your private property or appealing your house taxes.

STICK TO THE BASICS

We don't ask Henry Kissinger to fix our potholes. We expect the mayor to tend to such matters. So the question remains -- what is Miller doing conducting diplomacy in China?

The mayoralty of Toronto may seem too small for a man of Miller's outsized ambitions. But the job is important to those of us who live here. If the basic needs of our splendid city are uninspiring to our current mayor, any number of right-thinking folks, with their priorities in line, would be happy to relieve him of the task in 2010.

What would Eric Liddell do?

The 1924 Olympic Games in Paris are most remembered today because a single athlete made a decision. British runner Eric Liddell refused to run on a Sunday, spurning appeals to his patriotism and sportsmanship, because he would not compromise his Christian faith. Liddell's story was dramatized in the film Chariots of Fire, which won the 1981 Academy Award for Best Picture.

In 2008, the Summer Olympic Games are being hosted in Beijing by one of the world's most brutal regimes, the People's Republic of China. As governments and citizens debate whether and how free countries should participate in this event, Liddell's act of conscience may serve as a guide.

It has been noted that countries whose names begin with "People's Republic" are always neither. China is no exception, and the world has watched for 60 years as the cancer of communism has ruined a magnificent, millennia-old culture. Despite being an economic powerhouse, the PRC remains an enemy to free nations, its own citizens and the ideals of liberty.

Ostensibly, the Olympics are about nations putting aside their weapons and differences for the sake and nobility of pure athletic competition. As the Games have grown into a multi-billion-dollar industry of sponsorships and media rights -- the International Olympic Committee itself having morphed into a notorious cash cow -- it may behoove us to squint a little closer at the Olympics' altruistic pretensions.

But, even if the Games were the idealistic love-in of hand-holding and pole-vaulting that its profiteers purvey, it does little good to beat swords into ploughshares when only one side does the beating. In fact, it can do a great deal of harm.

The Chinese government has given no indication that the warm glow of sport will prompt them to kinder treatment either of its own citizens, or of other countries. Repression, brutality and torture continue apace. China executes far more people than the rest of the world combined. Moreover, as this column is written, Chinese troops occupy two million square kilometres of other nations' land. Does this not offer some perspective on the 1980 U.S. boycott of the Moscow Olympics due to the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan (650,000 square kilometres)?

Parallels have been drawn between Beijing 2008 and the Berlin Olympics of 1936, and they are apt. Both events figure to be international showcases for despotic regimes. If one extrapolates the comparison to include Germany's adventures a few short years after their festivities had ended, it is reasonable to fear for the security of Taiwan from the instant China's last dove is caged.

In general, boycotts are tricky things, often lending themselves to herd mentality. Olympic boycotts are uniquely problematic, as world-class athletes are informed by supremely unathletic politicians that the moment for which they have worked their whole lives will no longer be available to them. It seems, therefore, that the course of action most fitting with the ideals of free nations is to allow athletes to decide for themselves whether and how they will participate in these Games.

As fate would have it, Eric Liddell died in occupied China at the end of the Second World War. He had been working as a missionary there, and succumbed to a brain tumor and typhoid in a prison camp. A supremely talented runner, Liddell chose to use his skill and fame in the service of his most cherished beliefs. One hopes today's athletes will look to Liddell's example in deciding how best to spend their gifts.