Originally published at crisis magazine
At the beginning of his autobiography, Witness, which tells of his intellectual, spiritual, and political passage into communism and then out of it, as by a hair’s breadth escape from Hell, Whittaker Chambers addresses his children directly, trusting that someday they will read about their father and understand him, even if he is gone. He writes with deep affection, but also with warning. For he has pierced through to the heart of communism. It is not, he says, the state’s ownership of the means of production. It is not the dictatorship of the proletariat. These may be its expressions for the age. Communism, he says, is none other and no less than the prime temptation to which man fell in the beginning: “Ye shall be as gods.”
What is its expression for our age now? To drop Karl Marx’s name now is to focus upon the economic sphere, as if you could raise up human life by utilitarian means alone. It is also to recall a battle royale that has long been won. The Soviet Union is no more. The old communist puppet-states of eastern Europe have been free at last to ruin themselves in their own ways rather than to
