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Book Reviews
• WITNESS by Whittaker Chambers
• WHITTAKER CHAMBERS - A Biography by Sam Tanenhaus
• INDOCTRINATION U (The Left's War Against Academic Freedom) by David Horowitz
• PROPHET OF INNOVATION by Thomas K. McCraw
• THE LAST VALLEY by Martin Windrow
BLACKLISTED BY HISTORY The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy
by M. Stanton Evans
Evans' thoroughly researched and documented retelling of the Joe McCarthy story is a must-read for every serious conservative. This book, launched in the Autumn of 2007, has been shunnned by every MSM publication, including the supposedly conservative Wall Street Journal. Since the book is an academic work which covers not only an important period of modern political US history, but also deals with a topic (McCarthyism) that resonates to this day, one would have expected a great debate to ensue. The silence has been deafening for the book has been shunned. Leftist academics, ever ready to earn a buck writing propaganda for the ruling Class, have not put pen to paper. The reason is obvious. Evans thesis, that McCarthy is an American hero who has been smeared with lies and distortions, is unarguable. Not only that, but in the telling of Mcarthy's campaign to unmask the Communists who infested the US Government services, Evans also reveals how so many of the traitors who were driven from Government were placed in influential and well-paid sinecures in the United Nations, the World Bank and other international bodies where they were able to continue advancing Socialism. When McCarthy's reputation ultimately has been publicly restored, we will know that the Media Class has been removed from power.
WITNESS
by Whittaker Chambers
Chambers published this book in 1952, but I recommend the paperback 50th Anniversary edition of 2001 which has forewords by the late William F. Buckley and Robert D.Novak. We include a recommendation of this book from the past for several reasons.Conservatives, Nationalists and Traditional Christians are not well-served these days with intellectually important books. This is not surprising, given that most serious and well-researched books have to be written by academics who have the (publicly paid-for) time and who are almost all busy rewriting modern history to fit a Leftist agenda. So a book that sets the record straight on US politics in the decades 1930/40/50's is like a tree on the prairie (and lucky to find a publisher). If the above three beleaguered and overlapping groups are to have stamina in tough times, they need access to their predeccessors beliefs and to know the truth about their struggles.
Chambers certainly knew about struggle in the same way that Joe McCarthy knew about it for he changed political sides and became a conservative, patriot and Christian just when these things came under attack from anti-American Leftist forces both with-in the US and across the world.
"Witness" was not 'ghost-written' for Chambers was a true intellectual and a good writer and this is the searingly honest story of his dysfunctional upbringing, his conversion to Communism, and his traitorous descent into the Soviet spy network as a link and recruiter between US government employees and the Soviet agents who worked for Stalin. After several years of this, Chambers 'deserted' for he had concluded that Communism was evil. His defection co-incided with that of a few other comrades in the US and he knew from the 'accidents' some suffered, that he and his family were in danger.
The valuable lesson for us today is the response to Chambers and other defectors from US politicians, bureaucrats and the liberal MSM. It took years for Chambers and others to arouse the US to the infiltration of Government by Communist traitors. Chief of these was Alger Hiss, a highly placed Civil Servant with an Ivy League background who fed the USSR crucial information. Hiss was eventually tried and found guilty, but the US Left and Liberal Establishment treated him as a victim and Chambers as a liar and worse. The information in Eastern European secret police archives revealed in the 1990's that Hiss was indeed a traitor and that Chambers account was wholly truthful, but the Media and Academia continues to ignore the facts. There is a lesson in the Chambers experience for all who care about the survival of the West and care about truth.
WHITTAKER CHAMBERS - A Biography
by Sam Tanenhaus
Published in 1997, this 520 page study of Chambers is an essential supplement to the Chambers autobiography which has already been reviewed on this website. Tanenhaus has had the many years since 1952, when ”Witness” was completed and published, to cover Chambers’ post-trial years until 1961 when he died, and to be aware of many more facts. These include the later confessions of other ex-Communist spies and the revelations from the archives of former Iron Curtain countries.
Readers should be aware that Tanenhaus is a Leftist and he cannot resist down-playing the red menace of the postwar years and impugning base motives to almost all of those who led the attempted purge of Communists from government. He is especially uncharitable to Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon. However, to do justice to Tanenhaus, he is too objective to attempt to cast doubt over Alger Hiss’s guilt and will not have endeared himself to that great army of Leftist academics who care nothing for facts and who rewrite history for propaganda purposes.
One point that Tanenhaus, along with all commentators, misses is the significance of Chambers’ homosexuality. It seems wholly possible that Chambers’ embrace of Communist underground work in the 1930’s enabled him to indulge his craving for sodomy with anonymous partners. He was able to enjoy a secret life in more than one sense. Chambers’ breaks with both Communism and homosexuality and his subsequent shame about both fuelled his commitment to marriage and family and to his native country and its Christian-based freedom. In his last years (Tanenbaum reveals) Chambers increasingly viewed the struggle with Communism as a moral/religious one and not as an economic struggle between free markets and Socialist planning. The divide between religious conservatives and economic conservatives remains and greatly weakens the current struggle against the Leftist Media Class.
INDOCTRINATION U (The Left's War Against Academic Freedom)
by David Horowitz
Many conservative books are long on rant and short on cool and reasoned facts. This book, detailing Horowitz's campaign to remove ALL political indoctrination from public education and restore the role of impartial enquiry, is well written and highly informative. I think he is overly optimistic that Academia can be reformed without cutting off public funding and starting again without the multitude of Leftist subjects (social work, women's studies etc) and a weeding out the dedicated Leftists in both the faculties and the administrations. However, the chronicle of his efforts to engage in a civilized dialogue with Academia, and its response, will convince any objective reader that the Left now controls the educational system and boldly uses it to engage in continual propaganda.
Prophet of Innovation
by Thomas K. McCraw
Anyone who has read this website regularly, will have found occasional references to the economist Joseph Schumpeter, who died in 1950. He was a trail blazer in the defense of free market capitalism and political freedom and wrote at a time when Communism and worldwide state control of economic life seemed inevitable. He belongs in the same pantheon of thinkers and writers as Milton Friedman, Hayek and Hannah Arendt - intellectuals who laid the postwar foundation for opposition to totalitarianism. I read Schumpeter's "Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy" almost by accident, when I was a teenager much impressed by Trotskyism and Marxism in general. I did not become an immediate convert to free markets, but his rational and stimulating arguments set off niggling doubts in my mind about the superiority of central planning by government. I have since read it several times. Until McCraw's book, I knew nothing about Schumpeter's life and the tragedy and hardship he experienced. This book should be on every conservative's bookshelf alongside "Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy".
THE LAST VALLEY
by MARTIN WINDROW
Subtitled 'Dien Bien Phu and the French defeat in Vietnam', this hugely researched and detailed book covers a war and battle that many young people will know little or nothing about. A pity, since those who know nothing of the past are doomed to repeat mistakes and this harrowing book incidentally describes how the USA became embroiled in its own Vietnam war and also lost.
IndoChina had been a French colony until the 2nd World War, when the Japanese Imperial Army invaded Vietnam. After the war, the defeated and demoralized French were given permission by the US/UK victors to reclaim IndoChina. The war had however awakened rebellion in colonial peoples and a Vietnam nationalist movement began resistance. The Vietminh nationalist rebellion was soon infiltrated and taken over by Ho Chi Minh, a dedicated Communist intellectual with a Stalinist history. Together with Communist General Vo Nguyen Giap, Ho Chi Minh led a guerilla war from bases inside Communist Chinese territory. Minh, using techniques borrowed from Mao Tse Tung, combining terror with promises of land reform gradually dominated the countryside of northern Vietnam and also threatened the French control of neighboring Laos.
The French Government in Paris was divided and weak with a large Communist/Socialist presence and whilst not wanting to lose an Empire was nevertheless unwilling to abandon IndoChina. The French military in Vietnam, always starved of resources and political direction from Paris attempted to draw Giap's guerrilla force into a direct confrontation, believing that air superiority and French military skills would win. A valley near the border with Laos was turned into a fortress with 10,000 French-led troops and artillery. However, the Communist victory in neighboring China enabled Giap to acquire the necessary heavy weapons and using terror he was able to put together a vast army of porters and troops. The French fortress became a trap for the troops within, and for those subsequently parachuted in as replacements for the dead.
Soon the air support was minimal and some 15,000 very brave soldiers were sacrificed by lack of supplies and political indifference. Many of the Paras and Legionaires fought to the death in horrendous circumstances before the 'fortress' was overun by Giap's masses. Few survived when captured. As Windrow reveals, a little more support and determination from French politicians and top brass could have produced a very different outcome, for Giap's losses were staggering - probably as many as 100,000 casualties.
The lessons for us are clear. When fighting an opponent who has no compunction about the losses of his own forces and who is driven by a revolutionary doctrine, wars must be fought with every means available. Western politicians have little stomach for a war that drags on and Western nations are infested with defeatists, pleasure-seekers and enemy-lovers. Unless the 'War Party' and its leaders are prepared to motivate the civilian population day in and day out, the troops at the sharp end are eventually sacrificed.
In the end, the US trod the same disastrous path as its French predecessor in Vietnam and surrendered. The cost of defeat was millions of our Indo-Chinese allies and neutral innocents killed, tortured and starved, a newly invigorated Fifth column at home and an emboldened set of new enemies around the world.
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