The Daily Kos blog also shows that McCain is well aware of Solzhenitsyn, enough to write about him - http://www.nysun.com/opinion/solzhenitsyn-at-work/83117/

Now of course there is no way of disproving this story. The only way one could go about discrediting it is if McCain never told this story to anybody until after he could have reasonably read The Gulag Archipelago.

To go further it would have to be that he never wrote about this story until possibly reading Solzhenitsyn's work, because I'm sure he's wheel out numerous supporters who would all swear that McCain told this story before Solzhenitsyn's story was ever published.

If McCain wrote extensively about his situation in the past, but never mentioned this "cross in the sand" story until adding it much more recently then that would be pretty compelling evidence.

Obama's campaign isn't going to tough this with a ten-foot pole though. If McCain was a Independent running against Rove, this would be in the very least push polled and more than likely ran in a full on "Swift-boat" campaign. There is a lot of POW's who dislike McCain for using his POW stories for political gain.

Poking around a little more at this, your link that should go to Kos doesn't go there, the comments on the second link seem to be parroting the assertion from the Kos story. I could go explore Kos myself, but I have a work shift and household duties on my plate for the rest of Sunday.

The quoted block does not seem like Solzhenitsyn's own voice, it is someone relating the story from Solzhenitsyn. Most of the writing style of Gulag is extended narrative, comparing and constrasting different prisoner's accounts of specific portions of the common arrest-interrogation-prison camp experience, and not like the quoted anecdote at all.

The quoted block would be more like Solzhenitsyn's style in his first, terse novel, _One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich_, which did have more little hopeful takes. But the work they were doing in the _Denisovich_ story was bricklaying, not digging.

There has to be some way to search the text of major books, just as you can search published judicial decisions. Does anyone know? Amazon.com has many scanned pages of books -- there must be versions that can be read on a computer for vision-impaired -- Can Library of Congress microfilms be searched (or are books kept there in some better format now)?

It either is or isn't in Solzhenitsyn's work. If it is in there and wasn't in McCain's early accounts of his captivity, I think that must be known, whowever raises the question. He can make his explanation and people can believe what they want, but it should be known.

and remember the story about Georgia which was coped and pasted from Wiki...So nothing would be surprised...I hope someone is going to dig this story. McBushSame is the definition of evil and he needs to be defeated...
This war lover needs to be defeated. This liar needs to be defeated!!!

There are problems here. The block quote from Rickrocket is credited to
[From Luke Veronis, "The Sign of the Cross"; Communion, issue 8, Pascha 1997.]

The basic story may be in the _Gulag_ somewhere, but certainly not as quoted.

It's the beginning that's all wrong.

"Along with other prisoners, he worked in the fields day after
day, in rain and sun, during summer and winter. His life appeared to be
nothing more than backbreaking labor and slow starvation. The intense
suffering reduced him to a state of despair."

Solzhenitsyn's accounts of his own experiences are much more specific, much more closely related to specific times, places and incidents. The generalizing and time contraction in that "worked in the fields ... in rain and sun, during summer and winter" is just not the way the _Gulag_ is set up. Check it out. Everything is related to specific experiences attributed to specific people or if it's a prison story, he says its a prison story.

I have a strong memory of Solzhenitsyn telling us of watching another prisoner throw himself under the treads of a tank as they were being marched away from the front in WWII, under arrest, and the impact that made on him, but I just do not remember this incident in the 2000 pages of the 3 volumes of _Gulag_.

Anybody ready to track down Mr. Veronis and Pascha ?? More work needs to be done.

The smell of fear. The sound of desperation. As Obama knows, the less said about McCain's service to his country, the better.

Many years ago a scared American prisoner of war in Vietnam was tied in torture ropes by his tormentors and left alone in an empty room to suffer through the night. Later in the evening a guard he had never spoken to entered the room and silently loosened the ropes to relieve his suffering. Just before morning, that same guard came back and re-tightened the ropes before his less humanitarian comrades returned. He never said a word to the grateful prisoner, but some months later, on a Christmas morning, as the prisoner stood alone in the prison courtyard, the same good Samaritan walked up to him and stood next to him for a few moments. Then with his sandal, the guard drew a cross in the dirt. Both prisoner and guard both stood wordlessly there for a minute or two, venerating the cross, until the guard rubbed it out and walked away.

That statement is from Presidential Candidate, John McCain, on Feb. 28, 2000, who gave a speech at Virginia Beach.>

I does appear that John McCain has now conflated this story to become part of his own personal experiences.

Billy,

To me it sounds like you are fearful that your man may either be embellishing a story or conflating two anecdotes or making this up out of whole cloth. Let the truth come out, right? Of course, the Obama campaign shouldn't touch this with a ten foot poll this is for the netroots to explore and then the MSM to highlight.

"read Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago"

Hey! I just had a thought!

Perhaps that Vietnamese guard (McCain would say “Gook Guard”) was the one that actually read Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago?

That would explain everything!! LOL

That's certainly more palatable than believing McBush actually read Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, is it not?

“Well McCain had just written an article talking about Solzhenitsyn two weeks earlier, he even cited "The Gulag Archipelago" specifically.”

“Cited,” I believe. Actually “read” I don’t believe.

Billy,

I agree with you on that, I didn't get the gist of your first comment, sorry.

I just did a Lexis/Nexis search. The first mention of "McCain /p cross /s dirt" appears in reference to his memoir, "Faith of My Fathers" in 1999.

A search of "Solzhenitsyn /p cross /p dirt" shows no direct references to his writing or speeches. I did a inside the book search at Amazon of the Gulag Archipelago vol. I and there is no reference to the anecdote. What a google search reveals, though, is that the right wing believes the story and there are even preacher websites which suggest using the Solzhenitsyn anecdote in sermons discussing perseverance. In other words, McCain may have lifted a made-up anecdote as his own.

I'll keep you posted.

Actually, if Solzhenitsyn were alive he would care very much. It's interesting that Mark Salter, who authored Senator McCain's books as well as "his" article in The Sun a forthnight ago, should choose this moment, barely weeks after Solzhenitsyn's death, to appropriate the story for McCain. How coincidental can it be that a Russian guard in Solzhenitsyn's Gulag and a Vietnamese guard in McCain's prison both drew a cross in the dirt? If the man who wants to be president is a thief of other people's life stories, that's problematic because you can't go out there and talk about your "faith" (like I'm sure folks like you Bill love to hear or profess) and at the same time, in a forum on faith, be a thief and a liar. You folks must think your God is an idiot or something.

I'm not sure if this is a fruitful discussion. Perhaps if another story is plagiarized, it could be. But McCain will get cut a lot of slack for anything related to POW. If this is all you got, there are better ways to attack the liar hothead McCain.

I agree with CVille Dem. This isn't something Obama supporter bloggers should even push. Obama can't win if this becomes a campaign issue of the lefts doing.

Obama just needs to be able to make the point that while John McCain's Military service is commendable and his POW years heroic, that doesn't mean his policies are right for the country right now, that he is the leader America needs right now.

It NEEDS to be about issues and policy if Obama wants to win. If it's about personality the war hero is going to win out over the African American and his loony pastor 10 times out of ten.

This type of discussion plays right into the hands of the McCain campaign who is trying deperately not to talk about the issues.

The story is not from Gulag Archipelago. It's from an interview conducted by Orthodox Priest Father Luke Veronis in 1997. The story is:

" Along with other prisoners, he worked in the fields day after day, in rain and sun, during summer and winter. His life appeared to be nothing more than backbreaking labor and slow starvation. The intense suffering reduced him to a state of despair.

On one particular day, the hopelessness of his situation became too much for him. He saw no reason to continue his struggle, no reason to keep on living. His life made no difference in the world. So he gave up.

Leaving his shovel on the ground, he slowly walked to a crude bench and sat down. He knew that at any moment a guard would order him to stand up, and when he failed to respond, the guard would beat him to death, probably with his own shovel. He had seen it happen to other prisoners.

As he waited, head down, he felt a presence. Slowly he looked up and saw a skinny old prisoner squat down beside him. The man said nothing. Instead, he used a stick to trace in the dirt the sign of the Cross. The man then got back up and returned to his work.

As Solzhenitsyn stared at the Cross drawn in the dirt his entire perspective changed. He knew he was only one man against the all-powerful Soviet empire. Yet he knew there was something greater than the evil he saw in the prison camp, something greater than the Soviet Union. He knew that hope for all people was represented by that simple Cross. Through the power of the Cross, anything was possible.

Solzhenitsyn slowly rose to his feet, picked up his shovel, and went back to work. Outwardly, nothing had changed. Inside, he had received hope.

[From Luke Veronis, "The Sign of the Cross"; Communion, issue 8, Pascha 1997.]
"

The first time this story appears in McCain's life is in his 1999 memoir "Faith of My Fathers." His massive 1973 account of his POW experience never mentioned it.

These two stories are very similar. And the timing suggests that McCain might have stolen it.

You can't prove it, so it's best for liberal bloggers to just throw it out there as a question and maybe have Keith Olbermann push it.

Thank You Elrod for getting that point clear.

It does look like Johnny McLie could have lifted it, especially if the Veronis story was making the rounds after '97.

As an American Leftist who did my best as a budding historian to plumb the depths of the Soviet System, reading a lot of Solzhenitsyn, and a lot of other Russian/Soviet history, I do want to take the opportunity to give 2 rants, one which turned out to be long but one small, which are not exactly off topic, yet probably by-paths.

A: Solzhenitsyn was the crucial figure of the 20th Century, and should become for future generations THE SYMBOL of the field of history, much more than dumb old Herodotus. What the man accomplished with The Gulag Archipelago, was beyond compare with any other human being I can think of. In the midst of system of slow-motion murder, a system that savored psychological torture as it institutionalized physical tortue, he made it his task to record the names and stories of those who suffered under the worst totalitarian system ever known to human misery -- AND HE DID IT WITHOUT BEING ABLE TO OPENLY KEEP A COPY OF HIS WORK.

The stories of humanity, resistance and suffering, as well as the complete pathology of totalitarianism, that come out of The Gulag Archipelago are indeed ultimately uplifting in their totality, including the totality of how Solzhenitsyn's accomplishment of history-making helped overturn what was indeed an even more sick system than the one we're all 'suffering' under -- and S. himself well understood the moral principle that all suffering is equal, whether it's over a consumerist trifle or being literally worked to death in the construction of a useless canal after a completely unjust travesty of arrest and trial, or otherwise cruelly murdered as tens of millions of Russians, Ukranians, Georgians, Latvians, Poles, Chechens, and scores of other nationalities were murdered under the Soviet system.

Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago is a model of diversity and equal opportunity. He goes through every small nationality in Soviet Asia you never knew about and details their contribution to the suffering. In the Gulag and his other major works I studied, I never saw anything that could considered Anti-Semitic or anti-Jewish in any respect. He didn't hide that he was a Russian Orthodox Christian, yet the sufferings of the Soviet Union's Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, etc. are given a good per-capita representation with the suffering of the Orthodox Church's faithful and hierarachy in the Gulag, there's little or no mention specifically of his faith or any prejudices in his major novels, and in his collected speeches there's a remarkable passage arguing that even if Russians and Ukranians are the same people (as some people, many of who are Russian nationalists, argue) Russia has done so much damage to the Ukraine that they should forego any territorial claims for a matter of centuries.

So I still don't understand why the forces of organized Anti-Anti-Semitism and Pro-Irsaeli-ism were so mad at Solzhenitsyn in the '70's, anything bad you ever may heard about Solzhenitsyn came from these folks, not from anything inherent in his major works which establish him as a supreme philosopher of a sort existential empiricism and optimism, and a man of great tolerance and understanding about nationalism and religion.

I do know why my fellow dirty-f-ing hippies and 99.9% of other Americans avoided Solzhenitsyn, avoided reading him, avoided saying his name, and avoided even thinking about him for more than the time that it took to try to pronounce his name:

He's Too Heavy ! He Symbolizes Hard Thought, Difficult and Depressing Topics, and The Worst Bummer Ever !

It's your loss, America. If you had read the Gulag Archipelago you might have been smart enough and humane enough to have avoided BOTH Bush Administrations. Yet it is very tragic, America's failure to understand Solzhenitsyn. I remain a dirty f-ing hippie in nearly all respects (though I like camouflaging myself as a middle-aged businessman), yet I do fear that this failure may be a symbol of the Extreme Consumerist Stupidity that will cause American civilization to crash and burn within our lifetimes.

Rant B -- This One's short!

I do agree that in this much of a mixed-up and befuddled haze of possible plaigarism, the official Obama campaign should do its best to fulfill their promise of taking the high road. If we've learned anything in 2008, it is that the Corporate Televised Media is simply NEVER GOING TO CHANGE (until forced by mobs with pitchforks).

They have been able to build this model of talking heads using completely unrealistic assumptions -- and reinforce it with comedy shows, drama shows, and a whole new industry of entertainment industry gossip and news, all of which is built on completely impossible assumptions !! But people haven't turned it off _en masse_, the advertising revenue flows, and it will continue to do everything in its power to elect conservative Republicans and conservative Democrats until the advertising revenue is interrupted.

So I agree with point, the Official Obama camp will only be slimed even deeper if it directly attacks the media myths of POE Hero McLiar.

Yet there is such a thing a an anonymous blog commenter being purposely obnoxious.

Billy Glad has achieved the dubious distinction of having his EVERY COMMENT come off as being purposely obnoxious, ever since we became aware of his tortured and miserable existence this spring.

>>From Luke Veronis, "The Sign of the Cross"; Communion, issue 8, Pascha 1997.]

>>The first time this story appears in McCain's life is in his 1999 memoir "Faith of My Fathers." His massive 1973 account of his POW experience never mentioned it.

Wow. Still go with what I said above (that it wouldn't ruffle a single feather of the believers -- in John McCain -- and would offend perhaps too much), but still ........... You would think it would have been in his earlier work. Was the part about a guard loosening his ropes in there, does anyone know?

Folks:

You are wasting your time and energy by focusing on this question. You will never come up with any concrete proof, and it is not a difference maker.
There is no smoking gun that would change the tide, anymore than there was in 2000 about Bush's military service. Focus on the big issues: Bread and Butter, and War and Peace. There is nothing to gain by chasing after tiny side issues that will not add up to a hill of beans.

We had Senator Clinton dead to rights on her Sniper story, and yet she ran much stronger after she got exposed. Keep you focus on the big issues.

Now, as far as how did Senator Obama do at Saddleback; he did what he set out to do. He showed up, and got his point of view out to the country. Forget about the reaction of the audience in attendance. They would never vote for him.

All you had to do was pay attention to their reaction to when McCain named the three people he looked up to.

When he said the name of the General in Iraq, the audience roared their approval. When he said John Lewis you could hear a pin drop. They could care less about the noble civil rights struggle of a distinguished civil rights hero. Then he mention the name of a business women, and you could still hear a pin drop. That audience may call themselves Christians, but they worship the war makers, and have no time for a distinguished black leader, or a distinguished Republican Woman.

Obama was talking to the more rational middle of the road followers of the Prince of Peace, and not to the Faux Christians in that audience.

Let it go, and keep your eyes on the prize.

And of course, there is no one to corroborate john mccains story. Which is why he told it. Any one who questions him on this will be seen as calling a pow a liar. And while i have no problem doing that (if indeed, the pow really is a liar) but most americans will find that to be in poor taste and downright un-american.

So all we have is his word. We just have to take it on faith (something ive never been comfortable doing, perhaps why i'm an atheist) that McCain would never lie, exaggerate, or stretch the truth for political gain...

Here's another telling in Karol Ladd's "The Power of a Positive Woman":

http://books.google.com/books?id=oF0Lb78Ic_4C&pg=PA225&dq=%22drew+a+cross+in+the+sand%22&ei=wq2pSLqVEYPsswOBhbyJDg&sig=ACfU3U2SNzAf13IpAQ7R7X0IMOyU7kg8Cw

For some reason I'm thinking about this incident now... is it possible McCain's having some trouble keeping his memories of the POW years straight?