Jeremayakovka

True Whit Day

April 1st is True Whit Day, a day to remember so as not to be made a fool of by history.

Solzhenitsyn For A New Year's Sermon

To usher in the New Year, anti-Communist Titan Alexander Solzhenitsyn's 1979 Harvard Commencement Address. Some excerpts:

A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days. The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society. Of course, there are many courageous individuals, but they have no determining influence on public life.

Political and intellectual bureaucrats show depression, passivity, and perplexity in their actions and in their statements, and even more so in theoretical reflections to explain how realistic, reasonable, as well as intellectually and even morally worn it is to base state policies on weakness and cowardice. And decline in courage is ironically emphasized by occasional explosions of anger and inflexibility on the part of the same bureaucrats when dealing with weak governments and with countries not supported by anyone, or with currents which cannot offer any resistance. But they get tongue-tied and paralyzed when they deal with powerful governments and threatening forces, with aggressors and international terrorists. Should one point out that from ancient times declining courage has been considered the beginning of the end?

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I have spent all my life under a Communist regime and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale than the legal one is not quite worthy of man either. A society which is based on the letter of the law and never reaches any higher is taking very scarce advantage of the high level of human possibilities. The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relations, there is an atmosphere of moral mediocrity, paralyzing man's noblest impulses. And it will be simply impossible to stand through the trials of this threatening century with only the support of a legalistic structure.

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The defense of individual rights has reached such extremes as to make society as a whole defenseless against certain individuals. It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.

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The press too, of course, enjoys the widest freedom. (I shall be using the word press to include all media.) But what sort of use does it make of this freedom? Here again, the main concern is not to infringe the letter of the law. There is no true moral responsibility for deformation or disproportion. What sort of responsibility does a journalist or a newspaper have to his readers, or to his history -- or to history? If they have misled public opinion or the government by inaccurate information or wrong conclusions, do we know of any cases of public recognition and rectification of such mistakes by the same journalist or the same newspaper? It hardly ever happens because it would damage sales. A nation may be the victim of such a mistake, but the journalist usually always gets away with it. One may -- One may safely assume that he will start writing the opposite with renewed self-assurance.

Because instant and credible information has to be given, it becomes necessary to resort to guesswork, rumors, and suppositions to fill in the voids, and none -- and none of them will ever be rectified; they will stay on in the readers' memories. How many hasty, immature, superficial, and misleading judgments are expressed every day, confusing readers, without any verification. The press -- The press can both simulate public opinion and miseducate it. Thus, we may see terrorists described as heroes, or secret matters  pertaining to one's nation's defense publicly revealed, or we may witness shameless intrusion on the privacy of well-known people under the slogan: "Everyone is entitled to know everything." But this is a false slogan, characteristic of a false era. People also have the right not to know and it's a much more valuable one. The right not to have their divine souls [stuffed with gossip, nonsense, vain talk.] A person who works and leads a meaningful life does not need this excessive burdening flow of information.

Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic disease of the 20th century and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press. Such as it is, however, the press has become the greatest power within the Western countries, more powerful than the legislative power, the executive, and the judiciary. And one would then like to ask: By what law has it been elected and to whom is it responsible?

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But should someone ask me whether I would indicate the West such as it is today as a model to my country, frankly I would have to answer negatively. No, I could not recommend your society in its present state as an ideal for the transformation of ours. Through intense suffering our country has now achieved a spiritual development of such intensity that the Western system in its present state of spiritual exhaustion does not look attractive. Even those characteristics of your life which I have just mentioned are extremely saddening.

A fact which cannot be disputed is the weakening of human beings in the West while in the East they are becoming firmer and stronger -- 60 years for our people and 30 years for the people of Eastern Europe. During that time we have been through a spiritual training far in advance of Western experience. Life's complexity and mortal weight have produced stronger, deeper, and more interesting characters than those generally [produced] by standardized Western well-being....

After the suffering of many years of violence and oppression, the human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those offered by today's mass living habits, introduced by the revolting invasion of publicity, by TV stupor, and by intolerable music. There are meaningful warnings which history gives a threatened or perishing society. Such are, for instance, the decadence of art, or a lack of great statesmen.

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The American Intelligentsia lost its nerve and as a consequence thereof danger has come much closer to the United States. But there is no awareness of this. Your shortsighted politicians who signed the hasty Vietnam capitulation seemingly gave America a carefree breathing pause; however, a hundredfold Vietnam now looms over you. That small Vietnam had been a warning and an occasion to mobilize the nation's courage. But if a full-fledged America suffered a real defeat from a small communist half-country, how can the West hope to stand firm in the future?

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Western thinking has become conservative: the world situation should stay as it is at any cost; there should be no changes. This debilitating dream of a status quo is the symptom of a society which has come to the end of its development. But one must be blind in order not to see that oceans no longer belong to the West, while land under its domination keeps shrinking. The two so-called world wars (they were by far not on a world scale, not yet) have meant internal self-destruction of the small, progressive West which has thus prepared its own end. The next war (which does not have to be an atomic one and I do not believe it will) may well bury Western civilization forever.

Facing such a danger, with such splendid historical values in your past, at such a high level of realization of freedom and of devotion to freedom, how is it possible to lose to such an extent the will to defend oneself?

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Read the whole thing along with a full-length audio clip of the speech.
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Russian Revolutionary Suicide

Truth ... I love much.
-- final words attributed to a dying Christian pacifist and aristocrat,
Count Leo Tolstoy (1910)
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* Update (8/23) * Comments on and from Fausta's podcast with Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch and with "Siggy" of Sigmund, Carl, and Alfred.

* Update (8/24) * We are interested in knowing the thoughts of the suicide murderer just before he detonates the explosive belt.
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The tactic of suicide (homicide) bombing is not exclusively Islamic. Nearly all of us are familiar with Japanese kamikazes from World War II and, some of us, with other contemporary practitioners like the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka who in 1999 famously assassinated Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi by this tactic.

More obscure and, because it grew out of Western values and Western philosophy, more haunting (therefore more familiar) and more tragic (because the character flaws leading to it are our own, are our inheritance), is that suicide bombing, or an impulse to it, made at least one appearance among anti-Tsarist militants in pre-Bolshevik Russia. Whatever the totalitarian theories that arose in modern history -- about underground parties, managerial distinctions between agitation and propaganda, "the art of insurrection," etc. -- there was also in the Western tradition, as product or by-product, an impulse to suicide on behalf of (even intrinsic to the adherence to) a cause.

Fortunately (if that is the proper adjective for it), when the taking of no other life is at issue, suicide as a soul's clarion call to a wayward society enjoys (if that's the proper verb for it) status as one of the most passionate, ultimate statements possible. Consider the examples of Thich Quang Duc, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk setting himself ablaze in the 1960s, of Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima committing seppuku in 1970, and of vicar Roland Weisselberg setting himself afire last year to lament loudly Europe's spiritual capitulation to secularism and Islamization.

Scarcely known is that an impulse to suicide bombing revealed itself in Russia in 1907. As Whittaker Chambers relates to William F. Buckley in a letter dated August 30, 1954:

One night, a fashionably dressed young woman called at the Central Prison in Petersburg and asked to speak with the commandant, Maximovsky. This was Ragozinikova, who had come to protest the government's policy [as Chambers mentions elsewhere, "systematically beating its political prisoners" (whatever "systematically" means, exactly)]. Inside the bodice of her dress were sewed thirteen pounds of dynamite and a detonator. When Maximovsky appeared, she shot him with her revolver and killed him. The dynamite was for another purpose. After the murder of Maximovsky, Ragozinikova asked the police to interrogate her at the headquarters of the Okhrana. She meant to blow it up together with herself; she had not known any other way to penetrate it. But she was searched and the dynamite discovered. She was sentenced to be hanged [an appropriate sentence, btw]. Awaiting execution, she wrote her family: Death itself is nothing.... Frightful only is the thought of dying without having achieved what I could have done.... How good it is to love people. How much strength one gains from such love. When she was hanged, Ragozinikovka was twenty years old.
-- from Odyssey of a Friend, published privately by The National Review, 1969, p. 77.

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* Updates *

Fausta's recent podcast with Robert Spencer, author of Religion of Peace?: Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn't, makes a point to not confuse the values of Judeo-Christianity with those of Islam. More precisely, to not confuse their ability (or inability) to proffer values, and for a civilization, as a consequence of those values, to develop, to innovate, to progress. In terms of that Russian revolutionary lore quoted above, consider that the impulse to sacrifice other's lives and, if necessary, one's life for a cause -- to presume to become, as Camus phrased it, one of "the just" -- has different sources, impulses, motivations than those which compel jihadist shahid ("martyrs") to their deeds and their ends.

Writes "Siggy": Robert Spencer also reiterates another unequivocal truth. It is the evolution of religion and the evolution of a believers relationship (or non relationship) with his or her faith that has powered human development. It is an absolute truth that modern society cannot exist alongside backward religious expressions. That is why nations predicated on a free and democratic Judeo-Christian ethics are producing nations and why virtually all of the Arab world are only capable of consumption. It is also an unequivocal truth that producing nations and societies are very different than consuming nations.

Eight Theses On Being Jeremayakovka

for Casey Sheehan and Cindy Sheehan, especially

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Fausta tagged me last week in the "8-ball meme" for eight more previously unknown personal facts. The first eight, it seems, only whetted her appetite. So here are eight, not just facts about, but theses[*] on being Jeremayakovka. [Note: It took a week to tweak #1-#4, and it'll be a piece of work to finish #5-#8. Please bear with me....]:
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1. My parents' ages are 19 years apart, with my mother being the older partner. Their coming together defied custom and practicality, even morality. Not surprisingly, it was also short-lived. Each was also (in effect) an only child, which is what I am, unmistakably. When coming of age as a radical leftwing activist, "family values" were something I rejected categorically and conspiratorially (in pride), and ignorantly and jealously (in shame). Despite reexamining leftwing values for some time now, for me to opine from the vantage point of "family values" would be, still, an imposture. "Family values" remain something to be observed rather than experienced, to be understood (if at all) a posteriori, not a priori.

2. Women usually react with visceral enthusiasm when I inform them that, yes, in fact my mother brought her first, her only healthy child to term at age 45. This is true especially of younger, unmarried, childless women. Standout exclamations include Whoa! and Way go to, mom!. Their enthusiasm smacks of ignorant solidarity, bordering on idolatry, and elicits from me mostly dismay. These daughters (so to speak) of "third wave feminism" -- educated to believe that just about anything subverting "traditional gender roles" (while also trafficking in the mainstream) is curious, virtuous, imperative -- know nothing of the tender travails and miserable dignities that attend a domestic situation such as the one my mother and I knew. These "peers," along with their baby boomer parents (here I include my other, baby boomer parent), often seem to me (as they must have seemed to my mother) to some extent, and in the worst sense, mere children.

3. When very young, about 5 or 6, I inadvertently plunged into the Sailboat Pond in New York's Central Park. I was racing to the opposite side to recover my model boat when the jingle of a far-off ice cream truck distracted me. So much so that, my head craning in one direction and my body running in another, I strode right over the pond's raised cement edge and into its artificial shallows. I forget how I got out -- whether anyone reached for or jumped in after me, or whether if even I pulled myself out. I do remember my father carrying me, soaking and sobbing, not home but to where he lived.

4. When a little less young, about 9 or 10, I nearly got myself swept away into the Gulf of Mexico. A hurricane off the coast of Texas was sending successions of waves -- about twice as tall, fast, and frequent as usual -- into the west Florida beach where my mother and I were vacationing. This monstrous aggregation of briny sights, blustery sounds, salty smells was so enthralling that, with nobody else around, I decided I would test their bounties of touch and taste.... A few minutes later my feet, I suddenly realized, no longer could touch sand. With waves rolling in one upon another, my strokes rectified nothing. The waves lifted me and surged past, leaving me in their hollows where still I could not touch bottom.

In terror, time and language collapse. What remains in the mind (if anything) is the will -- yet even that is often displaced. Bobbing in that excited surf, my body became a constricted concert of heart, lungs, throat, nostrils, a concert bellowing in stark, perfect, physiognomic pitch (which only now I can translate into words): Confront terror with every fiber of your being. If you don't, it will seize you and make off with you. Fight it NOW or succumb forever. My thin, little-boy limbs stroked and kicked in a frantic unison through roller coaster swells. Ignoring whatever lay beneath me, I aimed directly for the line of shore (no longer just a beach). Watching it within reach, and even sensing its approach, brought no consolation until at last all four limbs, surf-slackened, scraped through lapping wavelets the rough but familiar blanket of sand.

Just how long it took to get back I could not measure in time, only distance. Relieved and morose, elated and enervated, I had to concede that I'd washed up hundreds of yards away from the point to which I'd struggled to return. My curiosity had nearly destroyed me. And while my best efforts, I saw, could deliver me, they also could not quite restore me.

On the wobbly walk up the beach, as if obeying an unfamiliar oath in a language yet to be identified (let alone acquired, let alone mastered), I calculated that it would be best never to tell anyone what I'd just come through. Least of all tell either parent. Others would receive my report only as shore-dwellers whereas I would transmit it as both shore-dweller and tempter of the deep. This unsettled purpose made me neither proud nor happy nor secure. It left me only with the sharp sense that, as the poem goes, "East is East, and West is West ..." -- and never the twain shall meet.

All in all it didn't feel like victory against the terror that had gripped me, but merely a draw.
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[*]: Proclaiming "Theses on [a *very important* subject]" is the boldest public undertaking any leftwing intellectual can ever realize (except for the seizure of state power). V.I. Lenin's "April Theses" of 1917 declared openly the Bolsheviks' intention to destabilize Russia's Provisional (reformist) Government. Walter Benjamin followed suit in 1940 with his oft-imitated "Theses on History." It seems to me high time that someone compose Theses for "our brave new, 'neoconservative' 21st Century." --JMK

Before Joseph McCarthy, There Was Robert Stripling

We never won the Cold War as decisively as we should have.
-- blogger "Fjordman," posted at Gates of Vienna

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Before there was Joseph McCarthy there was Robert Stripling.

The chapter whose excerpts appear at the end of this post is found in Robert Stripling's The Red Plot Against America. The Red Plot was published in 1949, but has long been forgotten due to the liberal memory hole that dictates our popular recollections of that era. Having served ten years as Chief Investigator of the bipartisan House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), Stripling provided a substantive primer on the precise nature of the Communist threat against the United States of America -- specifically, the threat from within the United States of America. The Red Plot narrates HUAC's meticulous work -- names and dates, details and wranglings  -- which had been underway since 1938 and in which Stripling had been a prime mover.

With America touched by the same totalitarian trends that had been blowing through Europe since the 1920s, HUAC was the premier governmental body to wage what I suggest we  regard as the "culture war" of what (perhaps too hastily) has since been lauded as "the Greatest Generation." More to the point, HUAC was the scene of that generation's most charged political theater. Congress had created the Committee in the 1930s to publicly gather information on, primarily, American Nazis, Klansmen, and other homegrown fascists. Only later, as Communism's wide scope and insidious nature became apparent, did HUAC set out to expose the vast leftwing conspiracy of its American operations, a conspiracy propagated by both card-carrying members and fellow-traveling sympathizers. (Above: Robert Stripling and HUAC member Richard Nixon examine subpoenaed documents)

Then -- as now -- moments of battlefield sacrifice and triumph could not, by themselves, efface grave civilizational uncertainties. On one hand, in 1946 Winston Churchill had delivered his Iron Curtain speech demarcating the line between the free and Communist worlds. Beginning in the summer of 1948 Whittaker Chambers had delivered ("more or less by chance," as Stripling relates) damning testimony about the Communist cell that had operated within successive Roosevelt Administrations and even in the newly-formed United Nations. On the other hand, that same fall breakaway Democrat Henry Wallace's presidential campaign with the "Progressive Party," which fronted for the American Communist Party, had received over 1.1 million votes (more than half, not surprisingly, coming from New York and California). Similar to today's neoconservative priorities -- of overhauling post-Cold War American attitudes to one-time geopolitical partners such as Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, the Palestinian Authority, and the Saudi royal family -- Stripling sensed, during his own era of unsettling realignments, a gap in our discourse vis-a-vis Communism. And he raced to fill it.

Note well that when The Red Plot was being written, the junior senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, was still just a blip on the national radar. Goaded, perhaps, by the force of Stripling's argument -- which voiced frustration at the many obstacles placed in HUAC's way, including those from the Roosevelt White House -- McCarthy went on the offensive in the year following the book's publication, delivering his famous "Enemies Within" speech in February 1950.

Yet The Red Plot Against America contains nothing that is "McCarthyite" and everything that is "Striplingite." It is a substantive rendering in plain, everyday English of the hard, often thankless, often vilified investigation into the American social fabric when European civilization was collapsing for the second time in 30 years. This work was undertaken -- transparently and vigorously -- by a small group of freedom-loving Americans in Washington, DC in order to preserve the integrity, viability, and endurance of the land Lincoln described as "the last best hope of Earth."

Similarities to today's fight against Islamist infiltration and subversion of the West, a fight waged in large part on the Internet -- and just a portion of the Internet at that -- will, or should, be self-evident. (If not, then click through the links in the "Top Shelf Reads" category in the right column, including the brave, trail-blazing online work of Cinnamon Stillwell, Debbie Schlussel, Pamela Atlas and more.) A revival of HUAC in our time, in spirit and perhaps also in form, should be on the table. It's a matter of hard-nosed common sense and good governance. My principal concern, frankly, would be not for the mission of such a federal committee, but for the mettle of the members selected (or who would offer) to serve on it.

Lifetime conservatives (of which I'm not) typically trumpet America's Cold War victory against the Soviet Union, a victory won despite decades of liberal opposition. Such conservatives have bragging rights, I guess. Thus Ann Coulter can pose for a photo at Senator McCarthy's grave and suggest, as she did at CPAC 2007, that student Republicans form "Joe McCarthy clubs" on college campuses. But bragging rights bring with them even bigger responsibilities. During our post-Cold War era there are many parallels to be observed and lessons to be learned from the "culture war" that was underway before the Cold War had even begun.
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From "Conclusions," Chapter 13 of The Red Plot Against America
[emphases and links added to suggest comparisons with contemporary issues]:

In this concluding article of my series I'd like to get a few things off my chest, things I could not say while working for the House Un-American Activities Committee.

I don't regret any of the years I spent with the Committee, though the work was neither easy nor rewarding. It was work that somebody had to do, and from its seed has sprung two tremendous Government programs, the $17,000,000 [1949 dollars] inquiry into the loyalty of Government employees and, directly or indirectly, the multi-billion dollar Marshall Plan....

But the House Committee, pioneers and forerunners in this work, at a meager fraction of the cost of subsequent development, has never known a period when it was not under attack. Vilification from Communists is understandable, for the Committee wields a tremendous weapon against them: exposure. Criticism from honest liberals has hurt the Committee much more. I know the morale of my own staff reached an all-time low when, after we unearthed the "pumpkin papers" which conclusively corroborated the spy-ring testimony of Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley, President Truman repeated his charge that it was all a red herring.

Yet Mr. Truman emphasized in his vigorous Inaugural Address the very differences between Communism and Democracy which the Committee had been revealing -- through the lips of willing or reluctant witnesses -- for more than ten years. Labor leaders who condemned us a decade ago for suggesting that their unions were being contaminated by Communism have since reluctantly conceded that we were correct.

President Roosevelt made at least two determined efforts to wipe out the Committee. Failing, for the simple reason the people want the Committee, he demanded of Martin Dies that the Committee thereafter confine its inquiries to Fascist activities. Committee members who tended to regard Communism with the same cold eye as they regarded Nazism were signaled out for especial scorn by pet columnists and commentators. The Committee was forbidden to reveal, six months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the scope of Japanese subversion in Hawaii and on the Pacific Coast. It is unimportant but relevant that I, after being instrumental in exposing the fact that Joe Lash and other pro-Communist youth leaders were enjoying White House hospitality, was "railroaded" into the Army. I quote the word "railroaded" because it is not mine. It was said by two Army colonels in discussing with me the curious phases of my induction.

The legend has grown and has been carefully nurtured by clandestine and well-meaning interests, that the Committee has ignored Fascism to concentrate on Communism. That is a lie, as our records will prove. As the one more familiar with those records than anyone else, I know there are still many Fascists and fellow scum in the country, ready to pollute the American bloodstream. All they lack is a Fuehrer. Martin Dies fought the Ku Klux Klan in the face of six-shooters. My father campaigned against the Klan when it meant that he must face political ruin in his district and danger to himself and his family.

The Nazis lack a Fuehrer and a purpose. The Communists have both, and combine the fanaticism of Hitler's followers with remarkable guile. They are irrevocably charged with fighting almost every ideal which made this country great. In event of a war with Russia they will be infinitely more destructive saboteurs than were the comparatively clumsy Nazi subersives.

It is not easy to fight Communism. Communism, contrary to a popular phrase, IS something new under the sun. Its members and champions, many of them misguided liberals, can infiltrate, contaminate and dominate almost any field -- including the pulpit, though Communism is by rule a Godless calling. Graduates of Russian training schools are the world's leading authorities in the practices of disorder. It is incontrovertible that every key point, strategically, in the United States has been studied faithfully against the day when peaceful-looking American Reds will be called upon to come into the open and fight for Mother Russia. We have shown through testimony that they are past masters at working within the warp and woof of the United States Constitution. We have seen Henry Wallace, their befuddled sympathizer, come within a heartbeat of the Presidency [the Soviet dupe and "spiritual window-shopper" had served as vice president up until three months before FDR's death]. We know from the testimony of ex-Communists Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley that many Communists and distinguished followers have risen high in Government circles.

We further know that between January 1, 1947 and December 16, 1948, 151 State Department people were removed from the Federal payroll, 91 of whose cases were classified as "of acute significance." And that is only one department. Coincidentally or not, it was State Department policy which abandoned China's 400,000,000 humans to the advances of Russian-controlled Chinese Red armies, and it is the considered opinion of men like Gens. Claire Lee Chennault [commander of the Flying Tigers, which included the author of God Is My Co-Pilot] and Patrick J. Hurley that we may one day be confronted by many of these millions, armed and thoroughly indoctrinated [one word: Korea]. Coincidentally or not, it was the State Department -- admittedly contaminated at that time -- which sold Poland, another ally, down the river.

One of the chief criticisms directed at the House Committee is that we have smeared the reputations of good citizens. As I said earlier, I am not the official apologist of the Committee. It has made its mistakes. But whenever I hear anyone use the word "smear" in connection with the Committee's efforts I must ask him to name those persons we have smeared (of the hundreds of witnesses we have heard and the thousands of names introduced).

The name of Dr. Edward U. Condon, director of the National Bureau of Standards, usually is brought up. Beyond his name there is usually silence. As I have pointed out, I made an effort to have Condon called as a witness in answer to his request. That he wasn't called, however, is comprehensible. This friend of many pro-Communists, who was not cleared by the Atomic Energy Commission to share A-bomb secrets at the time he was in charge of the Bureau's atomic scientists, was not heard because the Committee could not obtain from the White House the letter which J. Edgar Hoover had written suggesting that Condon was a poor security risk. I hope the Committee eventually gets that letter. I hope it hears Condon.

If Americans believed all they have read in anti-Committee papers they must believe we used rubber hoses to extract testimony. The Committee is not a judicial body and never will be by law. It cannot operate under the rules of evidence, cannot issue indictments, cannot hand down verdicts. It was established solely to hear witnesses and, from their testimony, to recommend legislation.

The Committee absorbed considerable punishment during its investigation of Communism in Hollywood, where the ideology has taken such a foothold that there are figures to prove that Party collections from members and their followers amount to $32,000 a week [1949 dollars]. It was held in many quarters that we had no right to ask witnesses whether they were Communists. It was said that a man's politics are his own business, as indeed they are.

But we were not asking for information on a political affiliation. We simply asked these people, by asking them if they were Communists, whether they were members of a conspiracy determined to overthrow this form of Government. The fact that ten of them refused to answer on constitutional grounds, knowing, perhaps, that the Committee was in possession of 33 Communist Party cards of Hollywood celebrities, is, I will continue to believe, most significant.

It is equally significant that ten of the 40-odd witnesses we questioned in the Alger Hiss-Whittaker Chambers case stood on their constitutional tights, and that in his own testimony Hiss made 198 uses of the phrase "to the best of my recollection" or its qualifying counterparts.

The Committee hears, by and large, a type of witness completely foreign to other Congressional committees in search of information. More often than not it is faced with subversives and fellow travelers who are superbly well trained and well advised in the incitement of public sentiment. The reactions of some members to their type of testimony have been provoked very artfully.

What the Committee has revealed over the last ten years is hard for many Americans to believe. The average citizen cannot comprehend that one of the top officials of the super-important Board of Economic Warfare was a gamboling nudist whose literary output had to be confined to the pornographic division of the Library of Congress; that his successor was a kind of male strip-teaser dancer; that pressure enough was put on respectable authorities to cause the shipment out of this country of more than 1,300 pounds of uranium products at the time we were attempting to develop the A-bomb; that the chief Russian spy in the A-bomb espionage ring was impervious to arrest....

Ten years ago Joe Curran, of the Maritime Union, denounced the Committee vitriolically when we tried to bring out that his union was saturated by Communism. In 1946 he had to fight for his life against he Communists he had nurtured. We have seen the same things happen in many unions. But when one of our first witnesses warned against that peril, [HUAC member Martin] Dies was called to the White House and castigated by President Roosevelt for picking on the CIO on the eve of an election.

Leon Josephson, one of the few witnesses we've had who was prosecuted by the Justice Department and imprisoned for the contempt he displayed for Congress, once said to an American consular officer, "I consider the orders of the Central Committee of the Communist Party above the laws of the United States, and I would do anything short of murder to carry them out." Many others the Committee has heard might have been as frank.

The Committee, as constituted, is not equipped to deal with Communism. Communism has brought into being new techniques and tactics never envisioned by the founders of our Government. It may well be necessary to streamline even our judicial processes if we are going to cope with the menace. Gerhart Eisler's case is pertinent. He functioned for 20 years in this country, carrying out some of the most treasonable acts imaginable. The most closely organized group ever to appear on the American scene was at his command. He traveled back and forth to the U.S.S.R. on false passports; defied Congress. Yet he is still out of jail, and travels extensively over this country making speeches under the auspices of various front organizations whose leaders are dedicated to the destruction of this Government. [He would flee the U.S. clandestinely in 1950.]

Committee investigators were long encouraged by the White House to exterminate Nazis by exposing them, which we did to a great extent. But when two of our men raided Communist headquarters in Philadelphia and seized records of great concern to the interests of the people, they were arrested on the orders of a Federal judge and the Committee was ordered to return the files.

The F.B.I., if left alone, could clear up Communism in this country. I'd trust my life and the lives of my family in the hands of the F.B.I., if no political considerations were involved. It should be an independent bureau. Instead, it is hitched to the Department of Justice whose top men, politically appointed, are sometimes guided by political considerations. As extensive as are the files of the House Committee (files consulted by 20,000 accredited Government agents in the last decade) the F.B.I. files are of much greater magnitude. J. Edgar Hoover's men could round up at least 25,000 potential Communist saboteurs in short order, if war broke out with Russia. Some F.B.I. men, however, have discovered that their most comprehensive investigations of Communist subversives have been ignored when recommendations were urged for their prosecution. We know, for these men have come to us for support, and so have Civil Service Commission investigators, State Department men and others -- their morales cracked by frustration....

Personally, I seem to have committed the crime of attempting to expose people who seek to destroy our way of life. It is a job for which I was hired by chosen representatives of the people of the United States; a job to which I attended to the best of my ability. It is not a very good job, really, for the simple reason that it is now unfashionable, if that is the word, to be primarily interested in America and the preservation of its liberties. Apparently it is bad taste to expose the fact that Government documents of great importance are being stolen; that a President demanded the admission to this country of Mrs. Earl Browder [Earl Browder: socialist anti-draft agitator during World War I; Communist Party candidate for president of the United States, 1936 and 1940; imprisoned for passport violations, 1939; sentence commuted by FDR, 1942; died, 1973], over the protests of the State Department, because he did not want to be embarrassed by Joe Stalin's questions; that a number of Government officials, by their admission or refusal to answer, have been mixed up with a gang of cold-blooded subversives; that choice military secrets, including A-bomb data, have been passed on to the leaders of a country which since V-E day has overrun Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Finland, Albania and most of China.

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FTR, like almost every single book that has been decisive in my political maturation, no one and nothing in our contemporary American experience pointed me to The Red Plot Against America -- not one friend (many of whom are former friends), not one relative, not one teacher or college professor, nothing in popular or intellectual culture nor in the MSM -- nothing except my own disillusionment with leftwing politics, and my consequential efforts to come to terms with their legacy.

Gettin' Down With Dostoevsky

Each of us hangs always upon the cross of himself.
-- Whittaker Chambers

Fyodor Dostoevsky is one of the most astonishing minds ever to have travelled the long road from youthful revolutionary socialism to chastened conservatism. In his case it was a wickedly brooding, often suffering, always passionate conservatism. A death sentence for belonging to a socialist organization commuted at the last minute to eight years' hard labor in internal Siberian exile, during the prime of his manhood, was the beginning of the high price Fyodor paid for his knowledge and eventual wisdom. That price -- which James Baldwin called "the price of the ticket" -- was higher than the one paid by most who undergo "second thoughts," although not that ultimate price paid by so many dupes, dissenters, and martyrs.

Rather than a shabby, pathetic substitute for what should have been the most vital, most potent season of any man's life, Fyodor's years of exile, imprisonment, and soul searching eventually furnished the gestation of a heroic Western intellect. Upon his return to cosmopolitan Russia, the poverty and general ignominy through which he toiled proved no obstacle to -- indeed, proved a kind of preparation for -- the realization, in the novel form, of a kind of secular, born-again Christianity. Those years brought forth Fyodor's greatest works and rank among the most influential works of all modern literature, influencing to this day partisans of the Left and Right alike: Notes From the Underground, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons, and his masterpiece The Brothers Karamazov.

The following is excerpted from a little-known short story Fyodor wrote during that great, almost superhumanly productive period. "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man" [*] is part science fiction (if you can believe that), part confession, and part barbed commentary on modern Western spirituality that, rather than transcendental, is instead as pretentious as it is naive. Frankly, I turn to it for clues as to what goes on in the wayward, fanatic intellects of the American, all-too-American John Walker Lindhs, Adam Gadahns, and Rachel Corries (and even the more rhetorically "moderate" conversos to Islam such as "Hamza Yusuf" (Mark Hanson)). Further, I turn to it because it presents me with clues as to what went on in my intellect when I tried to justify to myself (and occasionally to others) some vague, eventual good that would, in theory, result from Hamas's suicide bombing operations during the 1990s.

Like everything he wrote from Notes forward, "The Dream" is a record of Fyodor's prickly, often painful intellectual clash with -- and at the same time of his intellectual dependence upon --  a contemporary liberalism that is untested and unproven while at the very same time tried and failed. (The embedded links comment on a number of contemporary topics -- some worldly, some personal, some both.)
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At last these people grew weary of their senseless labours and suffering appeared on their faces, and these people proclaimed that suffering was beauty, for in suffering alone was there thought. They glorified suffering in their songs. I walked among them, wringing my hands and weeping over them, but I loved them perhaps more than before when there was no sign of suffering in their faces and when they were innocent and -- oh, so beautiful! I loved the earth they had polluted even more than when it had been a paradise, and only because sorrow had made its appearance on it. Alas, I always loved sorrow and affliction, but only for myself, only for myself; for them I wept now, for I pitied them. I stretched out my hands to them, accusing, cursing, and despising myself. I told them that I alone was responsible for it all -- I alone; that it was I who had brought them to crucify me, and I taught them how to make the cross. I could not kill myself; I had not the courage to do it; but I longed to receive martyrdom at their hands. I thirsted for martyrdom, I yearned for my blood to be shed to the last drop in torment and suffering. But they only laughed at me, and in the end they began looking upon me as a madman. They justified me. They said that they had got what they themselves wanted and that what was now could not have been otherwise. At last they told me that I was becoming dangerous to them and that they would lock me up in a lunatic asylum if I did not hold my peace. Then sorrow entered my soul with such force that my heart was wrung and I felt as though I were dying, and then -- well, then I awoke.
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And that, Gentle Reader, is not even the conclusion of the story.

[*]: from Great Short Works of Fyodor Dostoevsky. David Magarshack, trans. (Harper & Row, 1968).

True Whit

Today, April 1st, is the birthday of Whittaker Chambers, a man who deserves to be commemorated -- and studied -- as nothing less than the spiritual father of modern American conservatism.

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Chambers's confessional autobiography Witness is a modern classic and should be required reading in college level American history cirricula, as well as in courses on the history of Christianity in America. The title derives, first, from him being the federal government's most authoritative witness during Congress's investigations of Communist spies and sympathizers within the federal government during and after World War II. These investigations, conducted by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), were meticulous, overdue, and -- as a republic's exercise in the preservation of the integrity of its highest institutions -- above all honorable. As a result, one of HUAC's members, the young Congressman Richard Nixon (R-CA), was catapulted into the nati0nal spotlight, going on twice to land the vice-presidential nomination of the Republican Party's victorious national tickets of 1952 and 1956. (Click here for a short list of some of America's unsung HUAC heroes.)
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The most wrangling (and partisan) consequence of HUAC's anti-Communist investigations was the Alger Hiss perjury trials of 1948-50. In these Chambers's testimony was pitted repeatedly against that of his former Communist Party "comrade" Alger Hiss. With degrees from Johns Hopkins and Harvard, Hiss enjoyed a stellar, if behind the scenes, career in government. Since the 1930s he had held several high-ranking posts within the State Department and after World War II was a founder of The United Nations. At first it seemed that Chambers, a college dropout and self-confessed political subversive, couldn't hold a candle to the career public servant. Yet Hiss's eventual conviction in a court of law -- on charges of perjury, not treason (and therefore subject to a risibly soft sentence) -- vindicated Chambers's HUAC testimony. The court of public opinion, on the other hand, would remain sharply divided for decades, with Hiss being hailed as a hero for the rest of his life, and even afterwards, by nearly all liberals and leftists. Post-Soviet archival discoveries of the 1990s prove beyond considerable doubt that Hiss had spied for the Soviet Union and against the United States of America.
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It should be noted that Nixon facilitated Chambers's HUAC testimony years before the Army-McCarthy hearings. Therefore the two should not be confused. The latter (often referred to as "a witch hunt") were conducted in the Senate at the strenuous behest of Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI). They both of course shared important traits, but were and remain separate investigations. Their differences, in fact, were not lost on Chambers who, after publishing the account of his life, his HUAC testimony, and the Hiss trials in Witness, confided privately to William F. Buckley that he sensed McCarthy's theatrical tactics would, on balance, hurt the American anti-Communist movement. Above all, what the House and Senate investigative committees shared was to soldier on in the face of what was probably the most orchestrated obstruction and obfuscation ever brought to bear against the pursuit -- by the elected officials of a representative democracy -- of the unvarnished truth concerning native agents and abettors hard at work in the service of that democracy's sworn, mortal enemy. The obfuscation continues to this day: in the media, academia, professional letters, and popular culture.
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Alger Hiss had been an advisor to President Roosevelt at the Yalta Conference of early 1945. Whatever else it accomplished, Yalta is notorious for being where the liberal democratic West ceded influence over Eastern Europe to Communist tyranny. Yet during this time, as the American-Soviet alliance was drawing to a close, Chambers had become America's truest and highest-placed anti-Communist journalist. With a resume that included having written for and edited the Communist Party USA's leading journal New Masses, Chambers in 1939 had been brought on to the editorial board of Time magazine. There he quickly and habitually found himself at odds with a staff that was largely conciliatory towards the Soviet Union. Haunted by his past but undaunted by his present, he toiled to a tune he'd heard from a German ex-Communist: Hit them hard! This he did. Chambers emphatically lamented the Yalta Conference in his penetrating, prophetic essay, "Ghosts on the Roof." "Ghosts" broke the mould for editorial commentary when it appeared in Time's March 5, 1945 issue. In haunting tones it posited that the undead ghosts of Russia's assassinated Romanovs had gathered at Yalta to note, with wry brooding from beyond unmarked graves, the achievement by Soviet power of the fallen dynasty's own, long-coveted ambitions -- imperial domination over as broad a swath of humanity as possible.

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Decades later, when Harvard historian Richard Pipes set out (in his hefty study of the first years of Communist state power) to shift the public's understanding of those years from one of a popular revolution to one of a coup d'etat, he was granting, if only indirectly, an academic imprimatur to Chambers's long under-appreciated -- indeed, often scorned -- voice in the wilderness.
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Tolstoy or Dostoevsky?

A few years ago, helping a friend throw a party, I came up with some conversation-starters. Among which:

Who is the greater novelist, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky?

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Couldn't come up with a definitive answer, but the following did come to mind:

Tolstoy was animated by what men can become, whereas Dostoevsky was animated by what men are.

Do you prefer one or the other? If so, Why?

The West On The Ropes

We never won the Cold War as decisively as we should have....
-- from Fjordman's "Political Correctness -- The Revenge of Marxism"

JMK Supports Federal Funding For the Arts ...

... when it's this kind of federal funding for these kinds of arts: during the height of the Cold War the CIA reportedly funded the publication, in Russian, of Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago. For once the manuscript had begun to circulate, a terrible intrigue pursued this novel along its harrowing high-brow itinerary -- straight through the KGB, the CIA, the Nobel Prize Committee, and points in between. Thank G-d for the CIA!

According to WaPo:

A CIA role in printing a Russian-language edition has been rumored for years. [Here is] the first detailed account of what would rank as perhaps the crowning episode of a long cultural Cold War, in which the agency secretly financed literary magazines and seminars in Europe in an effort to cultivate anti-Soviet sentiment among intellectuals.

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Dr. Z. is a tale of great sensitiveness and great sadness by one of the few, true literary survivors of the Russian Revolution. It chronicles, in the life of one man, the spiritual collapse of an entire society, through his imperfectly realized romantic needs and poetic output. Pasternak's attempt at the 20th Century's Great Russian Novel offers clues to what went wrong in the USSR and wherever any society comes under the sway of totalitarian dictatorship.

Another concern of mine is to what extent did Pasternak, as a thoroughly assimilated Jew who lent his bookish genius to the production and propagation of Western literature (including employing specifically Christian imagery), may have indirectly left behind traces of the spiritual collapse of one who has abandoned Judaism....?

A Dying Spy's Words

What remains of a life is, in essence, intangible. Actually, what exists during a life is, in essence, intangible, too (though that's a matter whose expounding is best left up to poets, mystics, and lovers.... ).

Here is the full text of the statement dictated by Alexander Litvinenko who, on the one hand, died by occupational hazard, and, on the other, was murdered at the behest of his former boss, former spy chief, Russian President Vladimir Putin:

I would like to thank many people. My doctors, nurses and hospital staff who are doing all they can for me; the British Police who are pursuing my case with vigour and professionalism and are watching over me and my family.

I would like to thank the British Government for taking me under their care. I am honoured to be a British citizen.

I would like to thank the British public for their messages of support and for the interest they have shown in my plight.

I thank my wife, Marina, who has stood by me. My love for her and our son knows no bounds.

But as I lie here I can distinctly hear the beating of wings of the angel of death. I may be able to give him the slip but I have to say my legs do not run as fast as I would like. I think, therefore, that this may be the time to say one or two things to the person responsible for my present condition.

You may succeed in silencing me but that silence comes at a price. You have shown yourself to be as barbaric and ruthless as your most hostile critics have claimed.

You have shown yourself to have no respect for life, liberty or any civilised value.

You have shown yourself to be unworthy of your office, to be unworthy of the trust of civilised men and women.

You may succeed in silencing one man but the howl of protest from around the world will reverberate, Mr Putin, in your ears for the rest of your life.

May God forgive you for what you have done, not only to me but to beloved Russia and its people.

Alexander Litvinenko
21 November 2006

(via Free Thoughts)

Islamic Russia

One of the most "advanced" European nations, which suffers from perhaps the very worst health and demographic trends (AIDS, heart disease, alcholism; miniscule birthrate), is ripe for Islamic takeover:

Russia is going through a religious transformation that will be of even greater consequence for the international community than the collapse of the Soviet Union....