This morning, for some reason a song was circling around my head - a song I haven't heard nor thought of in years. It's a song called "Ride Across the River" from the band Dire Strait's 1985 album Brothers in Arms. The first line of the song says, "I'm a soldier of freedom in the army of man" and I was thinking about that as I logged onto the internet this morning. And then as I was checking the day's headlines I saw that one of my heroes, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, died yesterday at the age of 89. Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970 with his famous novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which revealed to the West the horrors of the vast Soviet hard labor prison system (known as "gulags").. He later further documented the horrors of the Soviet labor camps in the 3-volume series The Gulag Archipelago. Alexandr Solzhenitsyn was a champion of human rights in an age of dictatorships and authoritarianism. We would do well to remember his legacy.
I'm a soldier of freedom in the army of man
We are the chosen, we're the partisan
The cause it is noble and the cause it is just
We are ready to pay with our lives if we must
Gonna ride across the river deep and wide
Ride across the river to the other side
- from "Across the River" by Dire Straits
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