RED FACES
Three aspects of world communism
An American testimony
Constantine FITZGIBBON
That Soviet communism does not recognise the existence of justice in any form compre- hensible to non-communist Europeans is a truism. Justice is what forwards the domina- tion of the globe by Soviet communism abroad and what preserves the domination within Russia of whichever group of Soviet Communists happens, at any particular time, to be in power there. This fact is one that 'liberals' can never grasp, perhaps for sub- jective reasons, since to grasp it must under- mine their whole attitude towards the world in which they live. For this is the great divide, the one unbridgeable chasm. between the communist world and our own. In the 1930s the Left, rightly horrified by what was going on in Nazi Germany, refused the very full evidence to their senses of what was happening in Russia. It took a work of genius, Darkness at Noon by Chambers' close friend, Arthur Koestler, to show some of those self-blinded people what the great Purge trials were about: many did not accept even that, and had to wait for Krush- chev's 'secret speech' before they would face the facts: a highly educated man, a phil- osopher of deserved repute, told this reviewer only the other day that he could not believe —it is the auxiliary verb that is significant— that those trials were a total, baseless fraud. The Russians continued and continue to use the legal apparatus in their own country and in the European empire that they were allowed to acquire after the Second World War. (We are presumably about to see another such circus in Czechoslovakia.) But they have now evolved, or rather attempted to perfect, another branch of the same tech- nique, by using Western—and particularly American—courts of law for their own political purposes. They had acquired a cer- tain expertise in this in the Sacco-Vanzetti trial of the twenties. By skilful use of the vast propaganda apparatus at the disposal of international communism, they turned a pair of squalid if dignified robbers into martyrs for 'the cause'. But it was only after the War that they really set about 'martyrising' their own spies. If vague doubts are still tenable about Sacco and Vanzetti, there can be none about the Rosenbergs, that miserable pair of traitors who were taking orders about what they were to say until led to the electric chair. The communists managed to organise riots in most of Europe's capitals in favour of the Rosenbergs, that is to say in favour of the communist concept that justice is what helps the Soviets. When Whittaker Chambers de- nounced Alger Hiss as a traitor, and even more so what Hiss was tried and convicted of perjury, the leaders of international com- munism saw an even greater opportunity of using American courts for Russian aims. In this, of course, they were given massive sup- port by the idiotic antics of the late Senator Joe McCarthy, who never 'caught' a com- munist agent and whose crude methods created a very solid, essentially anti-American `liberal' front in the United States.
They had, however, reckoned without the principal prosecutor. Chambers was an ex- communist, ex because of the purges but even more so because he looked back, beyond the materialism of German Marxism and its Russian corrupt misbirth, to a far purer form of revolutionary idealism, to the Narodniks and Dostoievsky. A man of the highest cul- ture and great humility, a writer of the first order and a political thinker remarkable in an age of drought, he has left three books, Witness, an unfinished and posthumous work called Cold Harbour, and now a volume of letters*. The whole, massive venom of American 'liberalism' was directed against him and, probably, killed him: as was intended. That alone makes this book of letters a most important and relevant psy- chological document. Even the rare twinges of self-pity are moving. How does one stand up to the sort of calumny he suffered, year after year, while trying to lead a decent life with one's wife and children on one's little, journalist-haunted farm, while avoiding hatred of the man, the traitor, whom he tries so hard not to see behind the persecution? The linking of Chambers' name with that of McCarthy, whom he despised, was particular gall. In 1954 he wrote:
In sum, what have I to do with Senator McCarthy? What this cause must have is not a leader to lead it to success (historically, that is almost impossible), but a martyr to perpetuate what in it is alone worth pro- posing.
Is there such a quality as heroic pessimism possible today? It certainly existed in the time of the Greeks, whose writing Chambers knew so well. Oedipus, as he wisely points out, went to Colonnos, later. And he says, of his own book, Witness, writing in late 1958:
The thesis implicit in Witness is that, for the West, the struggle is its own solution. Out of the struggle itself, the thesis goes, the West may rediscover in itself, or otherwise develop, forces that can justify its survival. Lacking these, the West is specifically described as 'a dying world,' or 'the losing side.'
Perhaps, for those who have not read his other books, these three brief extracts may give some indication of his powerful and elegant prose style, quite uninfluenced by his years as a senior editor of Time magazine, just as his mind was apparently quite un- influenced by his time as a secret communist. These letters are not only extremely moving, the ideas expressed very interesting, and the viewpoint strangely refreshing and—perhaps because of its acceptance of pessimism— oddly encouraging. They are more. Quite apart from the intrinsic interest of his own story, they constitute a document of the greatest importance to anyone who would attempt to understand the politics of the West and of the East in this age. It is to be hoped that an enterprising British publisher will soon bring out an English edition of a testi- mony that is at least as important on this side of the Atlantic as on that.
• Odyssey of a Friend Whittaker Chambers National Review Inc. (Letters to William F. Buckley, Jr: 1954-1961) New York.
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