This has been an incredible book, and I think it will stay with me for a long time to come.  I was amazed at how much this book was a testimony to Chambers faith.  I expected an  inside look into Communism in the United States.  I didn’t expect a description of Chambers conversion from Communism to Christianity.

I think there are two messages that we should take from this book.  The first is that Communism isn’t the opposite of Capitalism.  Communism is the opposite of Christianity.  Christianity believes that man is made in God’s image.  We are required to treat one another as we want ourselves to be treated.  We, as Christians are required to follow the Commandments.  Communists are not only free of these requirements, they look at them as a weakness. Communists believe that men are simply another form of beast.   As such, there is no higher order they have to respect.  Any action, any betrayal, any lie is OK, provided it helps or protects Communism.

The other lesson is to remember just how far inside our own government communism had penetrated.  Alger Hiss was instrumental in the United States involvement at both the Treaty of Yalta and the formation of the United Nations.  With the collapse of the Soviet Union, and a resurgence of Russia, it’s hard to know how far Communism may have penetrated our current government.  However there can be no denying that communists “fellow travelers”  of socialism, Marxism, and statism are deep in our government.  The current administration and the current Congress have used these as their guiding principles for the last two years.

For Next Week: Let’s start Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis.  I plan on covering through the end of Book 2, Chapter 2 “The Invasion”.  For those of you keeping up with the reading, do you want to have an assignment for Christmas week or not?

For this weeks book notes, I covered up to chapter Four of Witness.  I want to focus in on the third chapter.  I thought this chapter was very interesting because Chambers explains why people become communists and why he became a communist.  Some of the reasons are still out there today.  While we don’t think of Communism as a threat in today’s world (we are more concerned with Islamic terrorism) I think we should be worried.

Towards the end of chapter three, Chambers describes the scene where he consciously accepted communism.  Below is a partial excerpt of his choice.  This is important because Chambers made a conscious decision to become a communist, no one held a gun to his head.  As you read this ask yourself if these paragraphs apply to today’s world:

The dying world of 1925 was without faith, hope, character, understanding of its malady or will to overcome it.  It was dying but it laughed.  And this laughter was not the defiance of a vigor that refuses to know when it is whipped.  It was the loss, by the mind of a whole civilization, of the power to distinguish between reality and unreality, because, ultimately, though I did not know it, it had lost the power to distinguish between good and evil.  This failure I, too, shared with the world of which I was a part.

The dying world had no answer at all to the crisis of the 20th century, and when it was mentioned, and every moral voice in the Western world was shrilling crisis, it cocked an ear of complacent deafness and smiled a smile of blank senility — throughout history, the smile of those whom the executioner waits.

Only in Communism had I found any practical answer at all to the crisis, and the will to make that answer work.

I think this is a very important passage.  How many young activist might sit down and think these same thoughts?  How many young environmentalists might yearn for a strong government that could simply force global warming solutions on the country?  Remember, Chambers says that he had also failed to see the difference between good and evil.  I think many who think of themselves as socialists or environmentalist have fallen into this trap.  They believe anything is acceptable if it “saves the planet” without recognizing the dangers that road is fraught with.

While the Soviet Union has collapsed, a communist Russia and a communist China are on the rise.  I think the book notes project has shown us that socialism eventually leads to communism.  Who can argue that socialism isn’t on the rise in the West and here in the United States?  We as conservatives must arm ourselves against this.  We must look for those who make the same arguments Chambers did and who begin to draw the same conclusions.  Then we must step in and show those lost souls where they are going wrong, and why conservatism does offer a solution to these problems.

For Next Week. I plan on reading up to section X X I V of Chapter 4.  Have a good week!

Marxist, socialist, communist, Leninist, Stalinist, Trotskyite are all being thrown around fast and loose and often wrongly.  So, let us get our communists sorted out.  I only know the broad strokes and bright colors about the old time, hard line communists of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.  In that era you have the inheritors of Marx and Hegel and lots of talk of dialectic materialism and the like.  Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin all are of that ilk.  Trotsky and Stalin parted company over Stalin’s “bureaucratization” of communism.  Stalin set the pattern for the authoritarian communist state by harnessing the apparatus of the state to the Party.  He and Hitler were cut from the same cloth in this regard.  Trotsky was more the free-wheeling revolution for the sake of revolution type.  Cuba and North Korea are today’s inheritors of the Stalinist mold.   Mao was some of both; the enduring revolution and the Stalinist bureaucratic state.  Trotsky with a dash of Mao was more the model for today’s home grown communists in the US.

Obama and HRC, and most of their minions and handlers/backers are the incarnation of the Saul Alinsky model of stealth radicals.  Alinsky was more of the Trotskyite and was once aligned with the Socialist Workers Party, the Trotskyite wing of American communism.  Alinsky was not, however, a doctrinaire Soviet-style communist.  Alinsky took a lot from the Italian communist thinker, Gramsci, and turned to organizing institutions and recruiting “clean and articulate” young disciples who could “pass,” to use an old Black term, in business, education, media, and government and could get to positions of power as stealth communists.  It is no accident that Hillary Clinton wrote her thesis on Alinsky; she’s a prime example of the Alinsky model stealth communist.  She and Slick Willie would have been just as crazy left as Comrade Obama is if they hadn’t overplayed their hand leading to the Republican takeover in ’94, which act thwarted the Revolution for the remainder of Clinton’s terms, leaving him nothing much to do but play with interns.

Only the fact that the MSM are fellow travellers allowed Comrade Obama to reach power; he has too much of a record as a radical, too many radical associations, and has said too much, particularly in his first book, to be a true stealth communist as Alinsky envisioned one.  But, we on the right could not yell loud enough for a deaf, dumb, blind, and stupid voting public to hear what kind of person they were poised to elect.  And that idiot McCain was too interested in being liked by his “friends” in DC.  So, we have a practicing communist as President and he is surrounded by practicing communists, some more stealthy than others, and some not stealthy enough, e.g., Van Jones.  Shuffling HRC off to State is a Stalinist touch, sort of a kinder, gentler version of the axe that Stalin had put in Trotsky’s head.

Taking a lesson from WJC’s failure, communists are good at learning from their failures, Comrade Obama would, I’m sure, liked to finesse things a lot more, but he has lost control of things to the unions’ greed for power and to the Democrat crazies in the House.  Hopefully, he won’t be able to rein them in and they will so disgust even the stupid members of the res publica that we can wrest one body away from them in ’10.  If we don’t, welcome to the Peoples’ Republic of America.