![]() The rags that fell from me were not only Communism. Whittaker Chambers would ultimately defect (at great peril to his and his family’s lives) from the Communist Party after he came to grips with an enduring Truth, What I had been fell from me like dirty rags. Communism was never a good idea badly applied. Free thinking would be guarded by draconian orthodoxy. Freedom would be protected by barbed wire. Instead of ushering in universal land, peace and bread, or fostering eternal brotherhood and comradeship, Communism created empty shelves, endless queues, paranoid informants and crushed dissidents. Instead of bringing man dignity, these regimes would violently disregard it. At the cost of millions and millions of lives, Lenin and Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China, Castro’s Cuba, Pol Pot’s Cambodia and Chavez’s Venzuela (among many others) would crush the individual in “the name of the collective”. In fact, it would fail on a catastrophic level. ![]() However unsavory, however frightening, Chambers felt that Communism’s beatific end would justify its bloody means.Īs Chambers would learn, the ultimate goal of Communism, like all other ideologies bent on “immanentizing the eschaton” (bringing heaven to earth), would never be achieved. And that answer required a dictator to control it and terror to enact it. ![]() In the wreck of his life and the desperation of his civilization, Chambers felt that Communism was the answer. But I have never known a Communist who was not acutely aware of the crisis of history whose solution he found in Communism’s practical program, its vision and its faith… ![]() I have met few Communists whom I thought knew more than the bare rudiments of Marxian economics, or cared to. I have met few Communists who were more than fiddlers with the dialectic (the intellectual tool whereby Marxist theoreticians probe and gauge history’s laws of motion). This was how it worked… Marxists dialectics or Marxian economic theories have much to do with the reason why men become and remain Communists. In a simple strong prose, it described a day in the life of a local soviet. What their theories could not do, the crisis did… One day by sheer chance, there came into my hands a little pamphlet of Lenin’s. They had devoted a great deal of time, tact and patience to winning me to their views. During my years at Columbia College, I had known a number of socialists, including two or three extreme left-wingers. And so Whittaker Chambers would become a Communist. What have we become and what are we to do?, he wondered. was the loss, by the mind of a whole civilization, of the power to distinguish between reality and unreality, because, ultimately, though I did not know it, had lost the power to distinguish between good and evil. Still reeling from the conflagration of World War I and nearing the abyss of the Great Depression, the world’s answer to unparalleled angst was found in either the rabid rise of Mussolini’s Fascists and Hitler’s National Socialists or self-forgetting hedonism. It is dying, but it laughs.įor Chambers, this phrase epitomized the crisis of Western Civilization in the Roaring ’20s. The Roman Empire is filled with misery, but it is luxurious. As the glorious Roman Empire burned under the assault of the Goths, historian Savinus observed, Sitting on a bench on Columbia’s campus, a phrase learned from his history studies turned in his mind again and again. Chambers would leave home and vacillate between poverty and back-breaking, dangerous labor until he found his way to college at Columbia University in the 1920s.Īt college, Chambers’ acute mind began to process his own sordid upbringing and the despair of the post-war world. If he wasn’t scavenging for food in unsavory places and gathering loose kindling to warm his unheated house, he was furiously resuscitating his self-destructive brother whom he pulled out of a natural gas filled shed. Whittaker Chambers was raised in a broken home inhabited by an unfeeling father, a lonely mother, a suicidal brother and a demented grandmother.
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