To Vladimir Putin’s impressive résumé—Russian president, kgb agent, jet fighter pilot, judo champion, shirtless horseman, whale hunter, master of tigers—he can now add New York Times op-ed contributor.

Yes, the one-time top newspaper in America has opened its pages to this one-time officer of the Soviet secret police. With the (now fading) possibility of an American strike on Syria, the Times gave Putin a platform “to speak directly to the American people and their political leaders” (his words)—to plead with us to cool off and forgo an attack.

The Russian president wants to keep Bashar Assad in power. He wants to curb America’s power in the Middle East—and everywhere else—and cement his own. But what a smooth operator he is. He’s presenting himself as the cool-headed statesman. In offering up a sham proposal to help secure Syria’s chemical weapons, he throws a lifeline to Assad—and causes shallow people with no memory nor understanding of human nature to clap their hands with joy.

Putin knows Americans don’t support military intervention. He is playing on the nation’s war-weariness. In his Times article he waxes grandiloquent: Like it or not, we must uphold international law; we must stop resorting to force; we need civilized diplomatic and political settlement and so on. These are bold statements from the man who invaded Georgia just five years ago (without UN permission). The man who has ordered the elimination of tens of thousands of Chechens. The man who has openly supported Iran despite its sponsoring terrorism. The man whose backing of the Syrian regime, in fact, is a major reason Assad has been so willing to slaughter his opposition by the thousands. Don’t be hasty to use force, he tells America. And the New York Times considers his advice sage and fit to print.

Putin also took a sanctimonious shot at President Obama referring to America as “exceptional”: “It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation. There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ, too. We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.” Yes, that’s another quote from Vladimir Putin. In the New York Times.

Apparently the Times editors agree that America is unexceptional. For that matter, even Barack Obama said as much on his first trip abroad as president: Asked if he believed in American exceptionalism, he said he believed in it in the same way that Brits believe in British exceptionalism, and Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism. America’s about as “exceptional” as every other nation in the world, it appears. This passes for enlightened thought today.

I wonder what Alexander Solzhenitsyn would think.

I’ve been reading The Gulag Archipelago this week—Solzhenitsyn’s voluminous record of the horrors of the Russian prison system, a book that helped bring down the Soviet empire. And I wonder what this man, who was trapped in the gulags for 11 years, would think of the New York Times knowingly serving as propaganda organ for a kgb officer.

The Gulag Archipelago exposes you to the realities of the world that spawned the kgb—and the system that shaped the current president of Russia, who is now humiliating America’s president and propagandizing the intellectually addled American public. (It was published in the U.S. in 1973, just a year or two before Putin joined the Soviet police.) This book makes me appreciate just how exceptional America truly is in the context of history—a history in which the vast majority of people have had an experience closer to the nightmares Solzhenitsyn suffered than to the freedoms Americans have enjoyed for over two and a quarter centuries now.

For decades, Russian citizens lived in constant fear that their own government would arbitrarily arrest and imprison them for “crimes” of which they weren’t even aware. Police extracted confessions using countless forms of psychological and physical torture. “Thus it was that the conclusions of advanced Soviet jurisprudence, proceeding in a spiral, returned to barbaric or medieval standards,” Solzhenitsyn wrote. “Like medieval torturers, our interrogators, prosecutors and judges agreed to accept the confession of the accused as the chief proof of guilt” (emphasis added throughout). No corroborating evidence needed.

What a blessing is the Fifth Amendment in protecting Americans from such abuses! It guarantees: “nor shall [any person] be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.” No American can afford to take for granted how wonderful it is not to be subject to the injustice and torment that were forced on the people of Soviet Russia.

Solzhenitsyn described how the Soviet police arrested people without even explaining their alleged offense, and conducted intimidating and coercive interrogations aimed at keeping the accused in total ignorance of the law. “It seems a virtual fairy tale that somewhere, at the ends of the earth, an accused person can avail himself of a lawyer’s help,” he wrote wistfully. “This means having beside you in the most difficult moment of your life a clear-minded ally who knows the law.” That “somewhere” is at this end of the earth: America. What a blessing to have such protection against abusive authorities robbing citizens of their legal rights.

To those who know nothing about the depths to which people in power can descend, these rights seem very cheap. But the man deprived of them—the man rotting away in a Russian gulag, for instance—recognizes their value—and how exceptional is the nation that upholds them!

So much of history trumpets the lesson that unchecked power can unleash unchecked evil. That an unrestrained human heart given power and authority is capable of unspeakable depravity.

America’s founders had a firm, personal understanding of the abuses they wanted to protect people from. In crafting America’s judiciary and other branches of government, at every turn they put checks on officials and constrained their intrusion into citizens’ private lives. At every turn they empowered the individual, creating an environment of personal liberty. The society that resulted was historically unique. To an unprecedented degree and on an unprecedented scale, people were free to own personal property, free from unwarranted search and seizure, free from being subject to the whims of a dictator, free to enjoy the fruits of hard work, free to pursue their dreams within a free economic market.

It was something extremely unusual—altogether exceptional—in human history.

Today, these liberties are being eroded by government officials who see nothing exceptional about them. These powerful men and women view the United States Constitution with contempt. Mr. Obama has disparaged it as being “a charter of negative liberties”—as if such an oxymoron could exist. These intellectuals—influenced by the same poisonous Marxist thought that upended Russian politics, and that Solzhenitsyn spent his life fighting—dislike the fact that the Constitution limits government and safeguards the people’s freedoms. And so they belittle it, sidestep it, ignore it. And they pompously, ignorantly speak of how there is nothing exceptional about the nation it protects.

Then, they offer space in their esteemed paper to the Russian president, whose worldview is one of contempt for what truly has made America exceptional—and who believes the government has every right to silence the press, stamp out dissent, punish political enemies, and exert absolute authority over the people.

Solzhenitsyn quotes a Russian proverb: “Dwell on the past and you’ll lose an eye; forget the past and you’ll lose both eyes.” Americans today, having forgotten even the very recent past, are ignorantly discarding the freedoms that our wise founders devoted their lives to establish. With mystifying exuberance, they are embracing some of the very principles that led to the disaster of communism.

And today they congratulate themselves for being “open-minded” enough to embrace the criticisms of the American way of life penned by a kgb agent.