Besides Alexander Solzhenitsyn, lots of people in America and elsewhere have been very friendly with Vladimir Putin over the years

 

Things were different in 2007, and Solzhenitsyn would live only until the next year, but he did support Vladimir Putin at the time

 https://archive.boston.com/news/world/articles/2008/08/05/toward_end_solzhenitsyn_embraced_putins_russia/

Here's the lede:

MOSCOW - In the last years of his long and stubbornly contrarian life, Alexander Solzhenitsyn finally found a political system he could embrace: Vladimir Putin's Russia.

"Putin inherited a ransacked and bewildered country, with a poor and demoralized people," Solzhenitsyn told Der Spiegel in a 2007 interview. "And he started to do what was possible, a slow and gradual restoration. These efforts were not noticed, nor appreciated, immediately."

 

 

 

Nyet to Richard Spencer, libertarian, and his "Individualism unites societies"

Rush Limbaugh perverts conservatism, says there's no other kind of conservatism than "ideological"

Earlier today on the show.

Actually, conservatism is nothing if it is not at bottom suspicious of ideology, as Theodore Dalrymple reminds us here:

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said of William Shakespeare, the 400th anniversary of whose death has just passed, that he was capable of writing tragedies only about individuals, or small groups of individuals, because he lived at a time without ideology. The latter was necessary for killing on a mass scale, Solzhenitsyn said. Two years after Shakespeare died, the Thirty Years’ War broke out, which reduced the population of Germany by about a third. The war was ideological.

Solzhenitsyn also said that the dividing line between good and evil ran through every heart. This is not a contradiction: Ideology encourages or makes easier the commission of evil.

The propensity to do good or evil no doubt varies between individuals for inborn reasons; but that propensity follows, or at least can be conceived as following, a normal distribution, a bell-shaped curve. At the extremes of the distribution are saints and monsters, the vast majority of us lying somewhere in between; but the whole distribution can be shifted in the direction of good or evil by circumstances, among which is the prevalent ideology. When the bell-shaped curve shifts in the direction of evil, disproportionate numbers of monsters emerge who do things that, at other times and in other places, they would not do.

The West will eventually need Russia as an ally

Natalia Solzhenitsyn, quoted here.

Everything You Need To Know About Gerald R. Ford

"Reagan’s uncommon good sense extended to sound judgments about controversial people who were similarly outspoken and principled—and thus unpopular if not under constant fire. He was an early supporter of Pat Moynihan’s courageous efforts to end decades of hypocrisy at the United Nations—at a time when even many Republicans still viewed the institution as a sacred cow. Jeanne Kilpatrick’s contentious, but insightful distinctions between Stalinists and right-wing dictators abroad won over an unabashedly supportive Reagan. He praised Soviet dissidents—even as a cautious Gerald Ford refused to meet with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. When William Bennet was taking a beating for his unsettling honest talk about the corruption in our schools and universities, Reagan brushed off worries that his Education Secretary was becoming a political liability."

-- Victor Davis Hanson, here

Liberty Shmiberty: The Thin Gruel Offered by The Tea Party

"[T]he proper solution would be to get us back to liberty."

-- Rep. Michele Bachmann, self-appointed leader of the Tea Party Republicans in the US House, in New Hampshire today, here

"Merely freedom does not in the least solve all the problems of human life and it even adds a number of new ones."

-- Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 1978, here