«Do not forget your lineage, your past, study what concerns your grandparents and ancestors, do your best to strengthen his memory": This is how Pavel Florenskij wrote about the importance of memory and the past a few years before he died, shot by the Soviet regime for alleged "counter-revolutionary activities". From Florenskij's reflections emerges the importance of remembering what has been, as in the case of the centenary of his birth, which took place on December 11th 1918, of the life and thought of Alexander Solzhenitsyn That, because of his experience and his works, he can be considered in all respects one of the last Western authors, today almost completely extinct, not just genuinely free, but defenders of authentic freedom. First of all, it is necessary to note the indifference with which the Western world in general and Europe in particular has approached such an anniversary, thus proving at least two characteristics of the current cultural scenario to be quite worrying: first of all a general disregard for history, neglect which entails the possibility of repeating the mistakes and even horrors of the past; secondly, in the face of a continuous exaltation of freedom, a lack of knowledge of its real nature and of its greatest masters, among whom Solzhenitsyn can and must be included, is demonstrated.
Solženicyn, Indeed, with his work he reminded the Western world in general, and European in particular, the importance of freedom, especially when this may be lost to tyranny, as was the communist one.
Having personally suffered communist persecution, being sentenced to eight interminable years of detention in Stalin's gulags, Solzhenitsyn can be held, Indeed, as the most credible and concrete witness of the atrocities of the socialist utopia. Among Solzhenitsyn's many intellectual merits, not by chance, it is appropriate to remember at least three of them, precisely in reference to communism on whose tragedy and inhumanity European culture has not yet developed an adequate and organic reflection. First, Solzhenitsyn contributed to demystifying communist ideology, in its claim to guarantee a paradise on earth, had established itself as a new form of religion with its own eschatology and its own orthodoxy, soon finding itself in total conflict with nature and human reason.
In his story entitled “Ego”, not by chance, This is how Solzhenitsyn summarized his description of life during the Bolshevik regime:«Human life had completely gone out of its usual course, sensible, as an activity of beings endowed with reason; under the Bolsheviks it had hidden itself, deviating into small streams with a tortuous and deceptive path". Secondly, Solzhenitsyn revealed the danger of a social system, political and juridical such as the socialist one in general and the communist one in particular, for in such a system law is understood so formally and abstractly, and the State conceived so totalitarianly, to allow the most inhuman injustices to be perpetrated precisely through the law and the courts.
In this sense the conclusion of his “Gulag Archipelago” is profoundly indicative:«The only thing that is immutable is Derzhavin's verse, understandable only to the heart of those who have tried it on themselves:“An unjust tribunal is worse than a brigand”. This yes, it is immutable. Today as in Stalin's time, as throughout the years described in this book. Many Fundamental Principles have been promulgated and printed, Decrees, Laws, contradictory or in agreement, but they are not the ones who govern the life of the country, it is not on the basis of them that one is arrested or judged, who carry out appraisals[…]. The same wicked hypocrisy continues to permeate the air we breathe, the same fog of injustice continues to envelop our cities, denser than the smoke from the chimneys. For more than fifty years this immense state has stood held together by circles of steel: the circles, and their grip, There are, but there is no law".
Finally and in conclusion, Solzhenitsyn's last great merit, for which he should be remembered and commemorated, consists in having warned the West, in a completely prophetic way considering the times that long anticipated those we are experiencing today, from the illusory hope of salvation by taking refuge in the energies of a social and human model marked by a capitalism without limits which, in its deepest essence, it is based on the same type of materialism that communism is based on, thus representing an equally dangerous threat to humanity and freedom. Here's how to understand it, so, his reflections made in 1978 in a speech at Harvard University that today's European political class would do well to remember:«I, who have spent my whole life under communism, affirm that a society where there is no impartial legal balance is a horrible society. But not even a society that has only the legal balance at its disposal in all respects can be said to be truly worthy of man. A society that has established itself on the terrain of the law, without wanting to go higher, it uses only feebly the highest faculties of man[…]. When all of life is permeated by legal relationships, an atmosphere of spiritual mediocrity is created which stifles man's best impulses.[…]. In the first democracies, including the American one at its birth, all rights were recognized to the human person only as a creature of God; in other words, freedom was conferred on the individual only under conditions, presuming his permanent religious responsibility: the legacy of the previous millennium was still deeply felt. Only two hundred years ago, but also fifty, in America it would have seemed impossible to grant the human person unbridled freedom, Like this, for the satisfaction of his passions. However, since then, in all Western countries these limits and conditioning have been eroded, we have definitively freed ourselves from the moral legacy of the Christian centuries with their immense reserves of piety and sacrifice and social systems have taken on increasingly complete materialistic connotations. Ultimately it can be said that the West has defended itself successfully, and even with width, human rights, but that in the meantime man's awareness of his responsibility before God and society has been completely extinguished. During these last decades the legalistic egoism of Western philosophy has definitively prevailed and the world finds itself in an acute spiritual crisis and a political dead end. And all the technical successes, including the cosmos, of the much celebrated Progress have not been able to redeem the moral misery into which the 20th century has fallen.".
source: https://www.loccidentale.it/articoli/146849/in-memoria-di-aleksandr-solzenicyn-testimone-dimenticato-delle-atrocita-dellutopia