Diana West writes a telling contrast between the courage of the late Alexander Solzhenitsyn and the cowardice of today’s literary establishment, as evidenced by Random House withdrawing at the last minute a book about Muhammad’s 9 year old bride due to fears Muslims will not approve. From Free Speech Jilted by Muhammad Romance Novel ‘Warpath’:
Reading about the late Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, we are reminded of his epic force of will — despite the threat to life and limb posed by the Soviet police state — to bear witness, to document, to record everything he could about totalitarianism in the USSR.
Then, reading about Random House Publishing Group, which called off the publication of a romance novel about Muhammad “for fear of a possible terrorist threat from extremist Muslims,” we should be reminded of something else: How apt was Solzhenitsyn’s much-maligned critique of the West, which he excoriated for, among other things, a decline in “civil courage” that was “particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elites.”
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