Orson Scott Card is The Ornery American and writing about Alexander Solzhenitsyn in Nobody Was Listening.
Let me quote just one passage from Solzhenitsyn's speech: "A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days. The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party and of course in the United Nations.
"Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society. Of course there are many courageous individuals but they have no determining influence on public life."
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Alexandr Solzhenitsyn died last week. For the last thirty years of his life he was almost unheard-of. He was dismissed by our media elite as a has-been, a grumpy old man who dared to criticize them as scathingly as he criticized the Communists. They declared him No Longer Interesting.
But he is as important as he ever was. He was mostly right about the Soviet Union; he was mostly right about us.
In the Soviet Union, he was seen as dangerous.
In America, he was rendered powerless by sheer inattention.