Selling Your Soul for a Crisis

I'm in the middle of reading the book, Witness, the autobiography of Whitaker Chambers. The name doesn't resonate with most folks, but for those folks who have a walking-talking knowledge of Alger Hiss and the House Committee for Un-American Activities in the late forties, early fifties, they just might recognize the name.

Amongst liberals and commie-philes, Chambers is a despicable traitor to the cause of what they define as freedom. From the early 1920's to the late 1930's, Whitaker Chambers, by profession a journalist, was an active member of the American Communist Party. The incident--or epiphany--that convinced him to reject communism was quite simple, but utterly profound. One morning in the late 1930's, Chambers was sitting in his kitchen watching his youngest child sitting in his high chair eating. Transfixed by the complexity of the human being, even in child-like form, he realized that this "perfection", as he termed it, could not have happened by chance. There had to be a Creator. A tenet of communism denies the existence of God, so Chambers realized he couldn't be a communist.

I am still in the middle of reading this book, but I've read enough to say that describing it in a couple of sentences is almost two simplistic. Whitaker Chambers was a very intelligent, articulate, and complex man. His writing reflexs this. Reading his story is like reading the playbook of the modern-day Democratic Party, however, because of his insights into the liberal mindset. I say this somewhat circumspectly since so many of the modern-day Republicans seem to want to be like their Democrat counterparts.

Here are some excerpts from Witness:

Page 193
Few Communists have ever been made simpy by reading the works of Marx or Lenin. The crisis of history makes Communists; Marx and Lenin merely offer them an explanation of the crises and what to do about it. Thus a graph of Communist growth could show that in numbers and its power increased in waves roughly equivalent to each new crest of crisis.

Page 194
Under pressure of the crisis, his decision to become a Communist seems to the man who makes it a choice between a world that is dying and a world that is coming to birth, as an effort to save by political surgery whatever is sound in the foredoomed body of a civilization which nothing less drastic can save--a civilization foredoomed first of all by its reluctance to face the fact that the crisis exists or to face it with the force and clarity necessary to overcome it.
Thus the Communist Party presents itself as the one organization of the will to survive the crisis in a civilization where that will is elsewhere divided, wavering, or absent.

This is what we have been seeing in our professional, elitist politicians. This is especially true during election season. The writer of Ecclesiastes said that there is nothing new under the sun. Hearing the promises of either political party are nothing but echoes from the past, vowing to take care of and provide for the citizenry. The citizenry's abdication of personal responsibility is also an echo of past mistakes, and those past mistakes led to the destruction of once-formidable civilizations.

May God have mercy on us.