Though few college commencement speakers these days dare to defy conventional wisdom or the secularism that undergirds it, on June 8, 1978, Solzhenitsyn’s stunning address not only made those assembled there uncomfortable, it provoked many of them to boo him.Why would an audience boo a moral giant like Solzhenitsyn who had stared down a brutal Communist dictatorship’s Gulags and won the Nobel Prize in literature? Those who booed had expected him to celebrate the West and to direct his condemnations only at Communism. Instead, he condemned Communism and the West. In the process, Solzhenitsyn had the courage to speak of something that was reviled at the time by elites on both sides of the Atlantic, which was truth.
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