- Articles
- Commonweal
- TIME – Reviews
- TIME – Articles
- TIME – Cover Stories
- TIME – Foreign News
- Life Magazine
- Harper’s: A Chain is as Strong as its Most Confused Link
- TIME – Religion
- New York Tribune
- TIME
- National Review
- Soviet Strategy in the Middle East
- The Coming Struggle for Outer Space
- The Left Understands the Left
- To Temporize Is Death
- Big Sister Is Watching You
- Springhead to Springhead
- Some Untimely Jottings
- RIP: Virginia Freedom
- A Reminder
- A Republican Looks At His Vote
- Some Westminster Notes
- Missiles, Brains and Mind
- The Hissiad: A Correction
- Foot in the Door
- Books
- Poetry
- Video
- About
- Disclaimer
- Case
- Articles on the Case
- Hiss Case Coverage: TIME 1948
- Hiss Case Coverage: TIME 1949
- Hiss Case Coverage: TIME 1950
- Hiss Case Coverage: TIME 1951
- Hiss Case Coverage: TIME 1952
- Trial by Typewriter
- I Was the Witness
- The Time News Quiz
- Another Witness
- Question of Security
- Fusilier
- Publican & Pharisee
- Recent & Readable
- Recent & Readable
- Kudos
- Letters – June 16, 1952
- Readable
- Letters – June 23, 1952
- Recent & Readable
- Recent & Readable
- Recent & Readable
- Nominee for Veep
- Recent and Readable
- Recent and Readable
- Democratic Nominee for President
- Recent & Readable
- Recent & Readable
- Fighting Quaker
- Recent & Readable
- Recent & Readable
- Recent & Readable
- Timely Saints
- Nixon on Communism
- People
- Who’s for Whom
- 1952 Bestsellers
- Letters – December 15, 1952
- Year in Books
- Man of Bretton Woods
- Hiss Case Coverage: TIME 1953
- Hiss Case Coverage: TIME 1954
- Hiss Case Coverage: TIME 1955
- Hiss Case Coverage: TIME 1956-1957
- Private
[Marx-Engels-Forum, Berlinerdom (February 8, 2007)]
[This article also appeared in The American Mercury.]
Whittaker Chambers died 50 years ago today at the age of 60. Much in the world has changed since then. What might he think about world affairs today, were he still alive?
Before commenting, he would catch up on history with books like Tony Judt‘s Postwar. Another would be Timothy Snyder‘s Bloodlands, which accounts for millions of deaths during Chambers’ most active years. During the same period covered in Bloodlands, he wrote his first major piece for The New Masses, entered and defected from the Soviet underground, and worked at TIME magazine. Always a historian, he would crave hindsight into his own times. Such books would also help explain the demise of Great Illegals he knew and occasionally admired, including Alexander Ulanovsky, Ignatz Reiss, and Walter Krivitsky.
Today’s map of the world might shock him. He would see no Soviet Bloc. Yet quickly he would find Vladimir Putin‘s Russia very familiar. He might revisit his TIME essay on Yalta, “The Ghosts on the Roof.” This time, he would add the Bolsheviks to the Romanovs, as they admire Putin. Or he might renew efforts on his follow-on to Witness, a book called The Third Rome (never completed, though portions appear in the posthumous Cold Friday). To do so, he would have to face the rise of China. How ironic that this strategic nation—once overseen by Alger Hiss in the State Department’s Far Eastern Affairs section—has survived as the last great bastion of Communism. More ironic, China has turned to Capitalism in the past few decades and come to rival America itself.
He wrote in Witness: “I know that I am leaving the winning side for the losing side, but it is better to die on the losing side than to live under Communism.” 1 Today, with Soviet Communism dead and Chinese Communism alive but capitalist, would he conclude that the Chinese have also chosen the losing side?
Our Information Age would probably have limited interest for him—mostly in greater access to books. (Both his children remain avowed Luddites and live in quiet, remote places.) He might enjoy watching Ninotchka again on the small screen, with its many layered meanings that started in his own home: his wife’s family came from Old Russia. However, he would studiously avoid Facebook and Twitter as so much navel-gazing. (He may have sang like a bird when naming names before HUAC, but he probably could not bring himself to “tweet.”) Besides, whom would he talk to? All the “young men” who knew him in his later years are now dead, too: Henry Grunwald from TIME, Ralph de Toledano from Newsweek, Bill Buckley from National Review. (Veterans like Jeffrey Hart and Garry Wills came after him at NR.)
Changes in the world beyond the West might overwhelm him. So many new nations; so many realignments! Yet today’s map might also remind him of August 1914. No surprise would come from the decline of American empire (the “losing side.”)
Like any euro-centrist of his day, however, catching up with the “Rest of World” might escape him. For instance, a 1957 National Review article speaks only of Anti-Colonialism (in regional terms of “Arab Nationalism”). 2 What would he make of the Islamic aberration that has become “the basis” (a literal translation of al-Qa’ida) of strong anti-Western cultural reaction in this new millennium?
[Assassination of Von Plehve by Sazonov (July 15, 1904)]
He would soon come to know that American spies since the Hiss and Rosenberg cases have diminished to mere mercenaries (another sign of decline?). Therefore, the return of non-mercenary spies outside the West would very likely catch his eye. Today’s suicide bombers would recall his own earlier models: Felix Djerjinsky, Eugen Levine, and Egor Sazonov. Of Sazonov, he had written that to protest the mistreatment of fellow prisoners, he had “drenched himself in kerosene, set himself on fire, and burned himself to death.” 3 Why would people of today blow themselves up to harm others, as Sazonov, Stepan Balmashov, Ivan Kalyayev, and other Terrorist Brigade members had, a century ago in Old Russia?
As a grizzled veteran of an earlier form of terror, no doubt he would worry: have Americans learned nothing about the motives for treason? If we have not understood the experience of the McCarthy Era and the Cold War, how can we possibly hope to understand challenges from the “Rest of World”—like al-Qa’ida? Yet, what can we hope to understand of challenges like al-Qa’ida when so many of today’s “experts” lazily to compare for us philosophically mismatched apples and oranges—and avoid a recount of history from “Arab eyes” (to use a phrase from writer Amin Maalouf)?
At this point, old glooms might rise up again. Despite publishing the confessional Witness (1952), many Americans, he had felt before, have not understood first why he has served as a Communist spy and then why he defected. Today, he would find many of his (few) admirers appreciate him except for his one-time conversion to Christianity. Most refuse to explore earlier influences, despite the nexus traced in Witness back to the Christian Pacifist movement of the early 20th Century. Nor do many seem to understand his tactical move as an anti-Communist in aligning with Conservatives: they do not see this as political opportunism.
Partly, his old-school Marxist discipline silenced him during the hey-day of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Partly, his early death helped opportunists in the rising Conservative and Neo-Conservative moments to cast about post mortem for intellectual saints like Chambers and Lionel Trilling.
We have missed the chance to hear him grapple with Daniel Ellsberg‘s Pentagon Papers or today’s USA Patriot Act—speaking as a defector from Joseph Stalin‘s totalitarian policies. (Here you will find no speculation: their circumstances are too specific and too complicated for even the simplest surmise.)
[President Eisenhower at farewell speech (January 17, 1961)]
In closing, lurking in Whittaker Chambers’ mind on this day, 50 years after his death, would likely be one of the last major political events of his own time: the farewell address of President Dwight Eisenhower on January 17, 1961:
As we peer into society’s future, we—you and I, and our government—must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without asking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow. (text-PDF/audio/video)
The farmer, the intellectual, the revolutionary, the spiritualist in him all agreed wholeheartedly back then—and would agree now. Just as great doubts would continue to gnaw at his mind about the losing side.
(Whittaker Chambers was born in Philadelphia, PA, on April 1, 1901; he died in Westminster, MD, on July 9, 1961.)
If you enjoyed this article, please consider sharing it!
[…] magazine and to him (in addition to our own observations made the same day and published here as Ghosts and Phantoms): July 9, […]
David,
I have a question about Ralph de Toledano and his authorship of what would presumably be his last book, Cry Havoc!. Your tribute to him portrays him as an erudite intellectual with wide-ranging cultural tastes. You cite the recording of the Garcia-Lorca poem and connect it to your interest in Neruda, Brecht and Kurt Weill.
I have been investigating the proliferation of what can at best be described as a “conspiracy theory” focusing on the Institute for Social Research or Frankfurt School. It might be more accurate to describe it as a preposterous fabrication and calumny along the lines of the infamous forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The origin of this fabricated conspiracy theory would appear to be in Lyndon Larouche’s paranoid cult in the early 1990s.
The confessed Oslo mass murderer, Anders Breivik plagiarized extensively from one version of the tale, published in 2004 by the Free Congress Foundation and edited by William S. Lind. Patrick J. Buchanan replicated the story in chapter four of his 2002 book The Death of the West, in which Buchanan acknowledges the editorial advice of his friend, Bill Lind. I have checked footnotes in Buchanan’s book and found them to be bogus, indicating only a more sophisticated variety of intellectual dishonesty than Breivik’s inept plagiarism.
I have been unable to locate a copy of Toledano’s book at a nearby library but the promotional blurb from the publisher presents a lurid recapitulation of the Larouchite/Lind slander. So I am curious about what kind of documentation the book contains or if it is yet another raucous production of the vast, resonant right-wing echo chamber — apparently even crediting the Frankfurt School with the rise of the Nazis. Here is an excerpt from the publishers’ blurb:
Apologies for the late reply.
I have read only early works by Ralph de Toledano: Frontiers of Jazz (1947), Seeds of Treason (1950), and Spies, Dupes, and Diplomats (1952).
I am looking for a copy of Lament for a Generation (1960).
His later work I holds no particular interest for me personally, including his final book, Cry Havoc.
To: LH
And your point is??? It is just as possible that Adolph Berle was in CYA mode at having been told things earlier that in retrospect he should have acted on. Could also be that Chambers was conflicted in going to him in the first place and was only ready to reveal what he knew in increments.
Regarding Venona, are you suggesting that ALES was not Alger Hiss? If so, who was he?
Furthermore, I have not read the originaal Venona documents. I am only relying on reports of those who have and have written about it. And from what I can tell, the prevailing view is that ALES was Hiss. You have not offered anything yet to contradict this view.
Thank you. Important reflections, especially of the truly transforming influence of The One, who died and rose indeed for Whittaker.
Critical is this Chambers’ noting of the union of the Bolsheviks and Romanovs behind Putin’s Marxofascist Russia — also the similarities with Marxofascist China, Europe, Brazil — and America. Intramural rivalries have been assuaged in favor of the global insurrection.
Also, the words of Ike shout forward, however…
Would either of these two understand the full extend of the subversion of the followers and comrades of Gramsci, Trotsky, Alinsky and Cloward-Piven?
If so, I think both Chambers and Eisenhower would be compelled to point out the intentional sabotage in the current Soft War against Sovereignty and Freedom, in America and throughout the world. And yes, the central bank complex is behind it all, or the Rothschilds would not have financed both Maurice Strong and George Soros (among others).
With that in mind, I think Whittaker Chambers would have tipped his big fedora to Robert Welch, if Ike wouldn’t.
Let us understand what is being subtly but very forcefully done, in the here and now, thank you.
To: LH
You state that Whittaker Chambers was incapable of telling the truth. Do you agree or disagree that the Venona Transcripts speak to the veracity of Chambers statements? IF you disagree, how do you explain your position which goes against the grain of current historical understanding?
Venona #1822 can scarcely be considered reliable evidence but I’ll get to that later.
But first, look at the grand jury testimonies of Whittaker Chambers and his enabler Isaac Don Levine.
Levine appeared in Feb. 1949 — after Hiss had been indicted. He testified about his presence at the meeting with Adolf Berle and Chambers in Sept. 1939:
Levine jotted down the names he could recall from the Berle meeting after he left. “My notes,” he informed the grand jury, “I want to emphasize here, dealt only with names, not with circumstances or operations….”
Now for Chambers’s grand jury testimony:
This is a brief excerpt of Berle’s testimony:
As for Venona, perhaps you should actually read up on it instead of taking it for granted that it is some sort of smoking gun. If you think this constitutes proof, well…
THE REAL WHITTAKER CHAMBERS [a snippet from a forthcoming book]
As an unwavering Stalinist in 1936 Whittaker Chambers “resolved to obey absolutely its harshest, most fantastic and irrational demands … provided only that Communism would let me collaborate in its central effort. For I found in Communism a rational and dedicated purpose.” He acclaimed “terror [as] an instrument of policy, right if the Communist vision is right, justified by history….” Moreover, Chambers celebrated Stalinism as “the least hypocritical in announcing its purpose and forcibly removing the obstacles to it.” He chose the party line and its cult of personality and discipline even over the pleading emotional objections of his wife.
However, after only a few years of “intensive Communist experience,” Chambers wrote, “inflamed by the great Russian Purge and Show-trials,” in addition to a religious re-awakening, “compelled me to make a rigorous re-examination of Communist belief.” Leaving aside for a moment the matter of his renewed faith in God, it is questionable just how “Communist” or even “intensive” Chambers’s underground experience actually was. His activities were never political, only conspiratorial, and by his own admission he often did not “do” anything. And the Soviet purges and show trials initially compelled Chambers to stridently defend Stalin, not to re-examine his Communist belief.
As recounted by Allen Weinstein in Perjury, Chambers paid a visit to his close friend Meyer Schapiro (whom Weinstein interviewed) in December 1936. In the early 1930s Schapiro was sympathetic to the CP but now was an anti-Stalinist opponent and actively supported the Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky. The first Moscow Trials had begun a few months earlier. They were Stalin’s treacherous means of eliminating potential challenges to his authority. The ghastly outcomes were predetermined; confessions extracted by way of torture. Yet many Western observers who attended the show trials believed they had been conducted fairly, the defendants justly convicted. In the United States, hardcore Stalinists such as Chambers denounced criticism of the sham verdicts. At their December meeting, Weinstein wrote, Chambers and Schapiro “argued over the question of Stalinist repression.” Chambers “castigated Schapiro as a Trotskyite and an enemy of the … revolution,” and “stormed out of Schapiro’s home.” The two men did not meet again for months.
In April 1937, a “Commission of Inquiry,” led by philosopher-educator John Dewey, held a series of hearings at the Mexico home of Leon Trotsky to investigate the charges of the Moscow Trials against Trotsky and others. The Commission’s findings were published the following September, clearing those accused and exposing the vast fraudulence of the trials. By then Chambers was compelled – mostly by the prodding of his old Columbia friends, particularly Schapiro and Herbert Solow – to face the facts of Stalin’s brutality. But there was no “rigorous re-examination” of Communism on Chambers’s part, just a second round of “intellectual pulverization” by a few of his former classmates – one of whom best summed up Chambers’s mind as: “though certainly not without force, … easily seduced into equating portentous utterance with truth.”
Your antipathy, documented in copious HOAC postings, seems to run unabated and unchanged over the past 10 years — but that does not quell interest in any new facts and arguments that you may make in your book. Who is publishing it, and when does the publisher plan to issue it?
Please note that, as of 2007, I have offered fact-checking for any MSSs near publication that contain references to Whittaker Chambers — and I would welcome yours as I have books like John Fleming’s Anti-Communist Manifestos.
Also, I hope your introduction will include some background on yourself, some insight into your long-term passion for this subject, and a clear statement about your objective(s). What is your connection to the Hiss Case? (Also, are you the Lewis Hartshorn of Sugar Land, TX, currently or formerly associated with Shaw Stone + Webster and currently or formerly associated with Bechtel? One would think the interest comes from something other than recent professional occupations.)
From your support for Svetlana Chervonnaya’s website that was until recently funded by Victor Navasky’s Nation Foundation, one might suspect some tendency toward prejudice–but I for one look forward to any new light with open mind.
Please keep us posted.
I have no emotional or political or professional stake in the Hiss-Chambers controversy. My interest in the story began in the early 1980s after reading Witness, Jowitt’s The Strange Case of Alger Hiss, and Zeligs’s analysis of Hiss and Chambers, a book with perhaps an irrelevant Freudian slant but nonetheless well-researched. For now I will say this about my own book. It’s titled Capturing Alger Hiss, The Case That Ignited McCarthyism. The manuscript is completed and I worked on this project for 10 years. The narrative promotes no conspiracy theories or outrageous interpretations. I freely admit that I’m an observing (not activist) leftist, though I believe the left is completely spent and discredited as a political force. In other words, I have a point of view but I’m confident I’ve written an honest book. Empathy and compassion are important to me, especially when writing about others. But I’m convinced Whittaker Chambers was dishonest through and through, incapable of telling the unvarnished truth about anything. I’ve been unable to find any radicalism in the life of Alger Hiss, a Wall Street lawyer who joined the New Deal at the behest of a former law professor, a technical advisor only at Yalta who was a last minute replacement for another official. Scholarly accounts of Yalta rarely mention his name. At the UN he served basically as a facilitator, and was chosen as president of the Carnegie Endowment by no less a conservative than John Foster Dulles.
My book focuses on the early months of the case, from August to December 1948. The essential story unfolds and the truth emerges during this time. My book will be the first to extensively employ the once secret grand jury records which do not reflect well on the veracity of Chambers and his enabler Isaac Don Levine. Without Levine there would have been no Hiss-Chambers case, rest assured. I also discovered at the FDR library the original notes of the September 1939 meeting between Chambers and Adolf Berle, which show that the term “underground espionage agent” did not apply to Chambers but to someone else. Yet the FBI copy of those notes were altered so as to appear that it applied to Chambers.
I explain why Chambers hid papers and films in 1938 implicating Hiss and others and HOW he obtained those papers and films.
Few people know that in November and December 1948 the Justice Dept. initially sought a perjury indictment of Chambers, not Hiss. They went after Hiss almost at the last minute because Chambers was their star witness, their only witness. Had Hiss’s legal appeals reached the supreme court his guilty verdict would certainly have been overturned because the law requires TWO witnesses in a perjury case or one witness and INDEPENDENT corroborating evidence. But Chambers was of course the only witness and he provided the evidence, suspect as it was.
In brief, to quote George Kennan, “It is the greatest error to suppose that historical myths cannot be actually created by design.”
I should add that I think Whittaker Chambers was a powerful and fantastic writer, truly incapable of crafting a bad sentence. One of my favorite passages of his is from a letter he wrote to Ralph and Nora de Toledano on Dec. 27, 1955:
“It occurred during the first Hiss trial, when it looked as if we should be borne down and destroyed, and could not dream of leaving our children in a world where such things were possible. We used to get up before dawn, in those days, to milk. One morning, my wife and I sat together, drinking coffee in the pre-dawn, and, somehow, I explained to her that it might be necessary for us soon to kill, first our children, and then ourselves. Somehow, she told me that she had reached the same conclusion. Then she placed on my hand her own hand which was as cold as if she were already dead. That is the kind of woman I am married to. That is the kind of people we are: we plan to kill our children, but not to let them fall to the mercy of the enemy world.”
And your interpretation of that passage?
My interpretation of that passage is that the couple’s conversation perhaps never occurred yet the truth of the matter is that Chambers would rather have died than hear testimony about his homosexual encounters. He had confessed to the FBI (but never to anyone else and certainly not in his autobiography) weeks before the first Hiss trial to numerous homosexual encounters over a 5 year period in the 1930s (coinciding exactly with his purported years in the Communist underground)and ending when he broke from communism. “I tell it now,” Chambers told the FBI, “only because in this case I stand for truth. Having testified mercilessly against others, it has become my function to testify mercilessly against myself.” “I have said before that I am consciously destroying myself. This is not from love of self-destruction, but because only if we are consciously prepared to destroy ourselves, in the struggle … can the thing we are fighting be destroyed.”
But Chambers was “telling it now” only because, as he told the FBI, Hiss “obviously intends to press the charge that I have had homosexual relations with certain individuals.” Chambers had learned that a man whom he’d had a sexual encounter with in the 1930s had recently told his story to Hiss invesitgators. But Hiss pressed no such charges against Chambers in court, perhaps because his stepson was a homosexual and he was afraid the young man would be exposed if he testified as a witness for Hiss. Such was the sexual politics of the time. The Hiss-Chambers case was mostly about chance and error. Chambers had most of the luck and Hiss made most of the mistakes.
Yes, I have the FBI’s photostatic copy of the letter to which you refer.
The original of this incontrovertible evidence has gone quite missing at the FBI. I have gone beyond petition there and have received active support, but the answer from the FBI remains a dead-end. Would you like to add your weight to that request?
The offer to fact check vis-a-vis Whittaker Chambers still stands.
Ideology can contribute to most discussions so long as it, first, receives acknowledgment and, second, relies on evidence. If you are clearly admitting your viewpoint in the book, then it should serve to organize and present your findings clearly.
Honesty, empathy, and compassion are also strong ingredients, but frankly your HOAC and other postings have exhibited such strong wording (e.g., “Whittaker Chambers was dishonest through and through,” above) that I am curious to see where and how you demonstrate these convincingly to readers.
Will you make your new sources (e.g., Berle Notes at the FDR Library) publicly available, if documentary, and how?
My offer to fact-check the MSS still stands.
I don’t think “dishonest through and through” is all that heavy. But I don’t mean to be offensive. I’ve looked for the truth and believe I’ve found it, so obviously judgments must be made. You’ve chosen to defend your grandfather in ways similar to Tony Hiss defending his father. Chambers and Hiss have each been vilified beyond belief. Yet the case remains surrounded by misconceptions, factual errors, chauvinism and triumphalism. Granted, the historical consensus at the moment favors Chambers. My goal is to illustrate that in a case long considered closed and picked clean, history may not always be what we so confidently believe.
no offense taken — the hiss case should make any family member thicker skinned than that. still, “dishonest through and through” probably passes for “heavy” (as in accusation or even summary of another person) in pretty much anyone’s book.
the “truth,” well, for me that’s a higher plane i contemplate and strive for but am loath to say i’ve ever found. however, you would indeed tend to fast judgement indeed if you think i’ve set out to defend my grandfather or if you think to compare our family’s approach to the hiss case with any counterpart in that family. (comments and replies on a recent nr article bear me out on this, i hope. also, my assessment of the majority of books related to the case is on record in the us and australia, including the new criterion.) me, i’m looking for facts and understanding — both rare commodities if judging by the books and articles written on the topic. so, regardless of how or even what you present, i’ll be interested to read your book.
— and my offer to fact check the MSS still stands.
What’s Chambers homosexuality got to do with Hiss’s guilt? The issue isn’t whether Chambers was gay, bisexual, communist, etc. The issue was did Hiss spy for the Soviets?
As for the Moscow show trials, anyone with half a brain knew that they were a sham. The Dewey commission may have exonerated the victims with regard to the trumped up charges by Stalin but that misses the bigger picture, all the Leftists, including Trotsky, were bloodthirsty murderers who had no compunction at stopping at anything to promote the Leftist world view. By any sober measure of morality, Trotsky warranted the death penalty for his actions (approved by Lenin) well before Stalin came to power. Trotsky’s crimes were as ghastly as any of the Nazi’s, who were justly given death sentences at Nuremberg
The Moscow show trials were the manifestation of the power struggle between two viscous bands of leftist thugs. The only good thing Stalin ever did was assassinate his fellow leftist enablers.
Your charge against Chambers seems to be based on the assumption, that being a flawed man he was incapable of good. No one suspected the Cambridge five, they had impeccable backgrounds, and yet they betrayed.
Slumlord made a good connection: Whittaker as Solzenhitzyn. Both told the hard, cold truth about their preferred systems without really apologizing or condemning.
Neither actually could bring themselves to reject the underlying evils of Communism, however. It just needed to be perfected, don’t you see?
I don’t quite understand — but am most willing to listen further.
One of my pet intellectual curiosities is trying to understand why the Left was so successful during the 20th Century.
It’s my opinion, that traditional conservative society contained many structural “faults” which were exploited by the left. The allure of Communism in the early 20th Century was in part motivated by the social problems of that time, social problems that were intrinsic to traditional conceptions of society.
Chambers is clearly on the record as stating that communism was the embodiment of evil, he wanted no perfection of it. Anyone who claims that he wanted its perfection has no understanding of Chambers whatsoever.
However Chambers was not some Aspergy libertarian either. Chambers clearly saw that some of the social problems could only be solved by “socialistic type actions”. His analysis of the cost vs benefits of government support to farmers in Cold Friday showed that he understood the problems at a deeper level than most of his detractors.
Chambers understood that technological innovation impacted on social structure and as such, the old solutions would not work anymore. His genius was in seeing the big picture, his critics were always small picture men.
My goodness, did you even read Witness? If his condemnation of the spiritual vacuum which animates the ideology isn’t a rejection of the underlying evil of communism what else is it?
Tim: May I ask whom are you addressing in your comment and what more specifically prompted it?
If your grandfather were alive today he would be affirmed in his assumption that he was on the losing side, and that all hope was lost.
Your grandfather has been on my mind a lot these last few days, as I had the chance to read Cold Friday. This book has unsettled me in a way that very few books ever have.
I think of him as America’s Solzhenitsyn. You need to understand that the American Gulag operates differently to the Soviet one, yet in the end the aim is the same, the political obliteration of its opponent. In many some ways the American version is worse. Had he been persecuted by the soviets he would have been killed and made a martyr for truth. The soviets in hating the truth at least in some way acknowledged it in fear.
The modern Western man has no such fear, for him there is no absolute truth and hence your grandfather is not a threat as much as he is irrelevant to western man. The communists feared his message, the western man doesn’t care at all. Your grandfather is not a witness anymore, just a historical curiosity. I understand him completely when he remarked of how he “heard the screams in the night”
Still his diagnosis of the spiritual problem of the West is as pertinent now as it was then and of more practical relevance, he was quite on the ball with regard to the failure of conservatism as a political force.
Should the world ever emerge from this dark age future generations will see him for what he was, one of the intellectual giants of the 20th Century, a prophet in the wilderness.
fyi, a national review commentator saw your comment and wrote:
07/11/11 08:34
My favorite thing in the link offered by David Chambers is the response by slumlord
kudos
[…] began reading Whittaker Chambers book, Witness. Here is a blogpost by his grandson. I have no use for Communists, and I am sure they are still active today in US […]