abolitionofman.com

Sixty-nine years ago, right here in the city of Baltimore, Whittaker Chambers and his family slipped away from their apartment at 2610 St. Paul Street, leaving behind an empty flat and taking with them vacant lives. It was the most terrifying decision Chambers had ever made. Certainly, it was no light thing to leave the underground of the American Communist party in 1938; even here in Baltimore, Stalin’s GPU had reach. Indeed, Chambers had made a list of what he needed to make the break; the very first thing on that list - a weapon.

His autobiography Witness , tells this story and the events that led up to the Alger Hiss case. But the book is so much more than this, it is, in fact a defense of the West. Back then it was a defense against Communism and Nazism, two God-less philosophies which challenged from the left and the right. Now, of course, we have a far different enemy, but no less frightful and deadly. This is how Chambers described the struggle then:

[Communism] is in fact, man’s second oldest faith. Its promise was whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil: “Ye shall be gods.” It is the great alternative faith of mankind. Like all great faiths, its force derives from a simple vision. Other ages have had great visions. They have always been different versions of the same vision: the vision of God and man’s relationship to God. The Communist vision is the vision of Man without God…[indeed]…if man’s mind is the decisive force in the world, what need is there for God? Henceforth man’s mind is man’s fate.

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That is why Communism is the central experience of the first half of the 20th century, and may be its final experience__will be, unless the free world, in the agony of its struggle with Communism, overcomes its crisis by discovering, in suffering and pain, a power of faith which provided man’s mind, at the same intensity, with the two certainties: a reason to live and a reason to die. If it fails, this will be the century of the great social wars. If it succeeds, this will be the century of the great wars of faith.

That last bit certainly was prophetic; although I’m not sure it was fully meant to be. But indeed, we are in war of faiths, between a death culture which has an unbounded passion in its beliefs and a Western world which at best is disinterested in its own peril and at worst self-flagellates itself as the cause of all evils. Somewhere in this fog we must find a reason to live and die, and we must find it quick and with passion, or this war will be our last.