One of the most compelling tributes to Alexander Solzhenitsyn that I've read in recent days is one that not only honors how Solzhenitsyn's personal life and writings exposed the unjust barbarism of Communism in Russia, but also hopes that it will set an example to do the same for Latin America. Below are excerpts from Carlos Alberto Montaner's brief commentary in the Miami Herald. Very good stuff....Prison cleaned and cured Solzhenitzyn of communism. All his important works revolve around that experience: A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, The Cancer Ward, The First Circle, and, of course, his monumental The Gulag Archipelago. Prison turned him into a great man forged by his and other people's pain and into a renowned writer...
Of all the documents written against the Communist madness, the most demolishing is TheGulag Archipelago. It is not a great literary work. Because it is very long, it can even be tedious, but that enormous catalog of atrocities inflicted upon prisoners for so long, written down with notarial cold-bloodedness, wipes out any vestige of sympathy that a sensible and reasonable person might have for Marxism-Leninism.
Some months ago, someone wisely suggested that a group of historians write The Black Book of Latin American Communism. It would be a country-by-country account of the crimes and misdeeds committed in the name of Marxism by the gunmen who were seduced by that ideology. All of us democrats know about and repudiate the monstrous excesses of the right-wing dictatorships on the continent -- Somoza, Pinochet, the Argentine generals and a repugnant etcetera -- but what's needed is an orderly and detailed catalog of the barbarities committed by this frenzied sect of the rabid Left.
All the barbarities: from Trotsky's murder in Mexico, the genocide of the Misquitos in Nicaragua, the Cuban firing squads and the stories about the FARC narcoterrorists' cruelty, to the odious assassinations and kidnappings committed by the ERP in Argentina and the Tupamaros in Uruguay.
When the project was proposed, someone asked to whom the book should be dedicated. No question about it: to Alexander Solzhenitzyn. He pointed the way.
