The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Godless Commies: ‘The Concealed Enemy Against Which We Are All Fighting’

Posted on | August 17, 2018 | Comments Off on Godless Commies: ‘The Concealed Enemy Against Which We Are All Fighting’

“The story has spread that in testifying against Mr. Hiss I am working out some old grudge or motives of revenge or hatred. I don’t hate Mr. Hiss. We were close friends, but we are caught in a tragedy of history. Mr. Hiss represents the concealed enemy against which we are all fighting, and I am fighting. I have testified against him with remorse and pity, but in a moment of history in which this nation now stands, so help me God, I could not do otherwise.”
— Whittaker Chambers, testifying before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Aug. 25, 1948

One reason I become so frustrated with politics in the 21st-century is that so many young people — and, alas, not a few old people, too — know next to nothing about the history of the previous century. You cannot speak intelligently about public policy if you don’t know history, and far too many Americans simply cannot pass that test.

Some years ago, when my oldest daughter was a teenager, I was driving her and a friend to a Christian music festival in Pennsylvania. Trying to make conversation to while away the time, I began to talk about Communism, and the decades-long ordeal of the Cold War, which young people can scarcely imagine. At one point I shouted, “Godless Commies!” in a vehement tone, which phrase has since entered into family lore.

The point I was trying to make in that rant was that the reason Americans so strongly opposed Communism was because we are a Christian people, and Marxism is an atheist ideology, whose adherents have persecuted God’s people wherever the specter of Communism has gained power.

My generation grew up with the fear of nuclear Armageddon, citizens of a nation leading what President John F. Kennedy called a “long twilight struggle” to save the world from the Communist menace, and our children’s generation knows almost nothing about what that meant.

America’s triumph in the Cold War, which consigned the Soviet Union’s “evil empire” to the “ash heap of history,” to quote Ronald Reagan, has been followed by a sad retreat from the values that enabled freedom to prevail in that long ordeal. We are today less of a Christian nation than we were when the Berlin Wall collapsed in 1989, and part of the reason for this loss of values is that our nation’s education system is now to a shocking extent controlled by godless Commies. Although they generally do not identity themselves as such, we should be under no illusions about the ideological loyalties of our nation’s university faculties, and the Democrat-controlled public-education bureaucracy. Recall that Sen. Elizabeth Warren — who now wants to “nationalize everything,” as Kevin Williamson says — once taught at prestigious Harvard University, and this should give you a general idea of what sort of latter-day Bolsheviks are now teaching America’s impressionable youth.

It is easy to joke about this. When a Red State blogger writes an article entitled “Why The Left Hates Western Culture,” Ed Driscoll quips, “You’re gonna need a bigger blog,” but it’s not really funny. Our nation’s youth are being quite literally indoctrinated with an anti-Christian, anti-capitalist, anti-constitutional worldview that threatens to destroy the legacy of liberty bequeathed to us by our patriot forefathers.

Yet there is still hope. At least one young man has kept the faith, and studied the history that our schools don’t generally teach. Only 26 years old, and an alumnus of Hillsdale College, Caleb Whitmer has taught at Sacred Heart Academy in Michigan, but now lives in the D.C. suburbs. He has written an excellent article for The Federalist:

Seventy years ago this month, Washington politicians were trying to sort out a case involving dodgy characters and Russian collusion. One man involved described it as “a tragedy of history” (Following Marx’s maxim, Paul Manafort’s trial would be the farce). Like today, it was a time of growing sympathy for harder leftist ideology, one that provides some clarity to our own socialist moment.
In early August 1948, a senior editor of Time magazine was subpoenaed for testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. That editor was Whittaker Chambers, a former member of the Communist underground who had coordinated the infiltration of various government agencies by Soviet sympathizers in the mid-1930s.
Among others, his testimony unmasked Alger Hiss, a former senior State Department official. Their subsequent legal showdown, recorded by Chambers in his 1952 memoir, “Witness,” would become a classic saga of the Cold War, a minor epic in the larger struggle between the United States and Soviet Russia.
At first glance, in the eyes of this millenial born six months after Mikhail Gorbachev’s resignation dissolved the U.S.S.R., “Witness” appears dusty. On my copy, Regnery brands the book a “Cold War Classic,” a true, if limiting, title. Part of the appeal of “Witness” is undoubtedly historical: Chambers drops us into a world of fedoras and smoke-filled rooms. On cold nights, the oblivious drivers of Ford Model-Ts pass plotting Soviet agents tramping in the rain between Manhattan street lamps, and the voice of a relatively unknown congressman from California, 35-year-old Richard Nixon, crackles with mid-century professionalism in packed and sweltering D.C. court rooms.
Just barely predating Ian Fleming’s first Bond novel, Chambers’ story shows us 1930s Soviet espionage unpolluted by either cliche or nostalgia. . . .

You definitely should read the whole thing. I’m going to print out copies for my kids. This should be required reading for all young people, lest they fall prey to the indoctrination of those godless Commies.



 

 

Category: Education, History

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