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	'WITNESS' by Whittaker Chambers 15 July 2008 Some time around 1952, I was confined to bed with one of the regular attacks of asthma that kept me home from school. Being a voracious reader of boys' adventure stories, I had exhausted my favorite reading materials and turned to a batch of old Readers Digests that a neighbor had passed to my parents. I discovered that the Digest was a much more interesting read than its cover suggested and I was at that point introduced to adult non-fiction, an addiction that has lasted to the present. One article in the Digest that I read that day had a profound effect on me both immediately and some years later. It was a piece about an American man called Whittaker Chambers and his denunciation of another American with the odd name Alger Hiss. I don't remember how biased the piece was, indeed if it was biased at all, but I know that I found myself feeling sympathetic to Hiss and unsympathetic to Chambers. At the same time I remember that I nursed an uncomfortable feeling that Chambers was telling the truth. This was the time of the great trial of Hiss, a very highly-placed Federal Government employee. He was accused of being a Communist spy who had been passing information to the Soviet Government for many years. Chambers, portrayed as a grubby, fat, unhealthy nobody, claimed to have been the Communist agent who, for years, collected the secret information from Hiss and passed it on to Russian agents. The case read like a Greek Tragedy, and as a budding Socialist with a mother who thought that Stalin was a hero and the Russians all heroic, I think I managed to conclude that Hiss was both innocent of the accusations and noble for working for the Communists! Many years later, after having spent several years in and around the British Marxist movement and finally realised that Communism and Socialism led to Orwell's 1984 nightmare world, I revisited the case of Hiss versus Chambers. I was not prepared for the facts, for in the meantime I had not only been exposed to the Communist view of Chambers (a despicable renegade who sold himself to Capitalism), but to the Media's equally dishonest reporting. Indeed, as the years went by and the Media became ever more Leftist, it relentlessly rewrote the history of Hiss and Chambers, just as it rewrote the histories of the Rosenbergs, the Hollywood Ten, HUAC and Senator Joe McCarthy. When I eventually read 'Witness', I discovered that Chambers was not a nobody but a well-read intellectual who, after the trial, contributed many profound articles to conservative journals and was admired by heavyweights like William F Buckley and Robert D. Novak. 'Witness' is a long and often depressing book, for Chambers came forth from a highly dysfunctional family. His father was a homosexual and Chambers himself had same-sex relationships in his early life before happily marrying, having children and discovering religious faith. His miserable childhood and sexual confusion surely led to his embrace of Marxism, but his experiences must also be set against the depressing background of 1930/40's politics and the descent of the European world into totalitariansim and war. Chambers, like Joseph Schumpeter (see our book review of 'Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy') and other anti-Communists such as Arthur Koestler, believed that freedom and private enterprise were doomed and that totalitarianism would conquer even the USA. When he defected from the Communist movement, Chambers not only took his life in his hands but assumed that he was joining the losing side. His lack of confidence in the people and government of the USA during his later years is not surprising for he had experienced the reluctance of US politicians to confront the Communist threat, the anger of the intellectual elites at his unmasking of Communism and the hostility of much of the Media. In today's world, where Hollywood provides the nation with its history lessons, where the Media Class has replaced news with Leftist propaganda and where that same class is able to portray sex between a man and his dog as normal and worthy of marriage (not quite yet but surely not far off!), who can be confident about the future. On this website, we do not wish for the economic and social collapse of the West in the way that many European Nationalist Movements do, but equally we cannot share the sunny optimism of a Rush Limbaugh or the late Tony Snow. Totalitarianism has emerged often enough in modern history to suggest that when family life becomes dysfuntional or there is great economic turmoil, many people are willing to exchange freedom for certainty. The Christian bulwark that has long supported the concept of freedom and real family life is surely fast loosing ground and Islamic Imperialism is on the march in Europe and other parts of the world. We recommend readers of this website to get a copy of 'WITNESS' and read it carefully, for it is only in such honest accounts as this (and Stanton Evans' 'BLACKLISTED BY HISTORY') that modern history can be separated from Media lies. Knowing the truth about the recent past enables us to better understand the present. Hiss, the smooth talker, slim, touting his Ivy League background, full of arrogant confidence, lying through his teeth, and committed to the politics of 'change' might well remind readers of a current politician.
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