Solzhenitsyn Biographer: Cross-In-Dirt Gulag Story Never Happened

TPM ^

[flyfree]

There's been a ton of buzz on the web for the last day or so -- beginning with this Daily Kos diary -- suggesting that John McCain patterned his story about a Vietamese captor drawing a cross in the dirt before him on a similar episode from Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn's time in the Soviet gulags.

But it turns out that this episode probably never happened to Solzhenitsyn at all, and according to a Solzhenitsyn biographer it appears nowhere in his published writing. Columbia University professor Michael Scammell, the author of Solzhenitsyn: A Biography, says the episode "never happened," and didn't appear in Solzhenitsyn's book, Gulag Archipelago, either.

[flyfree]

So now we know, this never happened to Solzhenitsyn, and there’s no way McCain could have picked it up from his works.

[mnehring]

Not to mention McCain mentioned this seven years before Solzhenitsyn’s first book was in the US.

[Steamburg]

Where we must go to find someone to create a smear. The paranoia of the Left has spawned more than one industry designed to harm anyone who would dare have truck with Christians or Patriotic Americans for that matter.

[mkjessup]

The leftist 'Rats and their liberal fellow-travelers slobber like Pavlov's dogs at any and every opportunity to somehow ridicule or discredit the Christian faith of anyone.

[JWinNC]

So it’s a “made up” attack on McCain using a “made up” story about Solzhenitsyn. I guess for the leftists it’s hard to keep up with the lies.

[T. Buzzard Trueblood]

The leftist 'Rats and their liberal fellow-travelers slobber like Pavlov's dogs at any and every opportunity to somehow ridicule or discredit the Christian faith of anyone

Especially when it collides with their own faith in the dictatorship of the proletariat.

[Brookhaven]

Plus McCain doesn’t need to make stuff like this up. Unlike Clinton (and Obama) who was a empty suit so he had to make up stories, McCain has plenty of background to draw on.

There is a lot I don’t like about McCain, but making up stories isn’t one of his shortcommings.

[bcsco]

Oh, those silly KOmmies won’t let a little fact get in the way of a good conspiracy. This will hang out their in their alternate universe forever; just like Bush being wired during his 2004 election debates. Some things never end...

[HD1200]

The left wingers are complaining that McCain never talke about this guard in the 1970’s.

Why WOULD HE ENDANGER THE LIFE OF THE GUARD?

The guard would have been tracked down and shot by the Communist North Vietnamese for 1) being a Christian and 2) helping an American POW survive prison camp!

No man or woman would want that on their conscience, leastways anyone with a conscience and the left appears not to have one.

[tobyhill]

The King Rat Obama lost big time in the debate and his fellow Rats know it so they will try to distract by use of any means necessary from the debate. I'm surprised Obama hasn't gone to the country of Georgia yet.

[jerod]

Nice try... But like so much of the muck they try to throw McCain’s way, it ain’t true. McCain is though and Barry obviously isn’t and everybody is finding that out.

Unfortunately for the Democrat party, they’re finding it out way too late, and now have to live with their mistake, but I’m sure Hillary will spend the next 4 years explaining it to them over and over and over again.

[flyfree]

Orson Swindle, who was held as a prisoner of war along with McCain, tells the McCain Report that he heard this particular story from McCain "when we first moved in together." That was in the summer of 1971, Swindle said, though "time blurred" and he couldn't be sure. He said it was some time around then that the Vietnamese moved all "36 troublemakers" into the same quarters, where they "talked about everything under the sun."

http://www.johnmccain.com/mccainreport/Read.aspx?guid=181471d0-5456-4434-9f78-2f30ffc39459

[bcsco]

'm surprised Obama hasn't gone to the country of Georgia yet.

According to another thread his campaign was just in Georgia doing some voter registration training.

...Oh, you mean THAT Georgia. Maybe they were there? By mistake, kinda? I wouldn't put it past them...

[Brilliant]

“It doesn’t necessarily rule out the possibility that McCain or his biographer, Mark Salter, picked up the tale that this happened to Solzhenitsyn elsewhere and embellished it for their own purposes.”

Unless the lefties can prove that this happened to Solzhenitsyn, I would assume that it is they who are lying—not McCain.

[jimbobaby]

Daily Kos aint worth 2 bits to me. Bunch of stupid left wing wackos that should be deported to a gulag. Most will once Obama becomes president.

[colorado tanker]

The guard would have been tracked down and shot by the Communist North Vietnamese for 1) being a Christian and 2) helping an American POW survive prison camp!

Not true. Over years in prison, McCain would have been guarded by hundreds of NVA. It would be impossible to figure out who it was with no more description than this.

Insofar as the issue is a Christian in the NVA, it's not far fetched at all. After a long period of French rule, there was a substantial Christian minority in Vietnam.

[Hacklehead]

Next we’ll hear that McCain never was a prisoner of war, he was a guest of the NV govt. After all he stayed in the Hanoi Hilton, and we all know Hiltons are very nice hotels. And how could he afford staying in one for years on a pilot’s salary? Only if he was working with the commies could McCain stay there that long. Now that it’s been proven fact that McCain is a traitorous commie, I expect Andrea Mitchell and Chris Matthews to push this story right up to election day.

[Spok]

Obama has been nailed in ‘Obama Nation’ on a lot of stuff he wrote in his book, like his supposed story in Life magazine about the black man who tried to whiten his skin. Total fabrication. Now the Obama-cons are desperate to accuse McCain of the same thing, even if they have to make it up themselves.

[Mike Fieschko]

Not to mention McCain mentioned this seven years before Solzhenitsyn’s first book was in the US.

The Gulag Archipelago was published in the West in 1973 or 1974. I remember reading it at that time. 'Seven years before' would have been 1966 or 1967, before or while McCain was a POW. Do you mean a different book by Solzhenitsyn?