From Witness:
That [haunting fear of being wrong] is the fate of those
who break without knowing clearly that Communism is wrong
because something else is right, because to the challenge:
God or Man?, they continue to give the answer: Man.…
They are witnesses against something; they have ceased to be
witnesses for anything. (13)
External freedom is only an aspect of
interior freedom. Political freedom, as the Western world
has known it, is only a political reading of the Bible.
Religion and freedom are indivisible. Without freedom the
soul dies. Without the soul there is no justification for
freedom.… Hence every sincere break with Communism is a
religious experience. (16)
There has never been a society or a nation
without God. But history is cluttered with the wreckage of
nations that became indifferent to God, and died. (17)
I associated God with ill-ventilated
vestries and ill-ventilated minds. (82)
What I had been fell from me like dirty
rags. The rags that fell from me were not only Communism.
What fell was the whole web of the materialist modern
mind—the luminous shroud which it has spun about the spirit
of man, paralyzing in the name of rationalism the instinct
of his soul for God, denying in the name of knowledge the
reality of the soul and its birthright in that mystery on
which mere knowledge falters and shatters at every step.
(83)
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.… 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 for
whom the executioner waits. (195)
For while Communists make full use of
liberals and their solicitudes, and sometimes flatter them
to their faces, in private they treat them with that
sneering contempt that the strong and predatory almost
invariably feel for victims who volunteer to help in their
own victimization. (202)
No matter how favorable his opinion had
been to an individual or his political role, if that person
fell from grace in the Communist Party, Harry Freeman
changed his opinion about him instantly. That was not
strange; that was a commonplace of Communist behavior. What
was strange was that Harry seemed to change without any
effort or embarrassment. There seemed to vanish from his
mind any recollection that he had ever held any opinion
other than the approved one. If you taxed him with his
former views, he would show surprise, and that surprise
would be authentic. He would then demonstrate to you, in a
series of mental acrobatics so flexible that the shifts were
all but untraceable, that he had never thought anything
else. More adroitly and more completely than any other
Communist I knew, Harry Freeman possessed the conviction
that the party line is always right. (217-218)
About both brief, tidy men [Heinrich
Himmler and Max Bedacht] there was a disturbing quality of
secret power mantling insignificance—what might be called
the ominousness of nonentity, which is peculiar to the
terrible little figures of our time. (275)
He [one of Chambers’s landlords] was one
of those valiantly and vaguely unhappy middle-aging
intellectuals who had spent years not writing the book he
had planned to write as a younger man. (289)
Abortion, which now fills me with physical
horror, I then regarded, like all Communists, as a mere
physical manipulation. (325)
Out of that vision of Almighty Man that we
call Communism and that agony of souls and bodies that we
call the revolution of the 20th century was left that pinch
of irreducible dust: “Who pays is boss, and who takes money
must also give something.” It might stand as the motto of
every welfare philosophy. (414-415)
It is part of the failure of the West to understand that
it is at grips with an enemy having no moral viewpoint in
common with itself, that two irreconcilable viewpoints and
standards of judgment, two irreconcilable moralities,
proceeding from two irreconcilable readings of man’s fate
and future are involved, and, hence, their conflict is
irrepressible. (420)
Counterrevolution and conservatism have
little in common. In the struggle against Communism the
conservative is all but helpless. For that struggle cannot
be fought, much less won, or even understood, except in
terms of total sacrifice. And the conservative is suspicious
of sacrifice; he wishes first to conserve, above all what he
is and what he has. You cannot fight against revolutions so.
(462)
It is surprising how little I knew about
the New Deal, although it had been all around me during my
years in Washington. But all the New Dealers I had known
were Communists or near-Communists. None of them took the
New Deal seriously as an end in itself. They regarded it as
an instrument for gaining their own revolutionary ends.
(471)
The New Deal was a genuine revolution,
whose deepest purpose was not simply reform within existing
traditions, but a basic change in the social, and, above
all, the power relationships within the nation. It was not a
revolution by violence. It was a revolution by bookkeeping
and lawmaking. In so far as it was successful, the power of
politics had replaced the power of business. This is the
basic power shift of all the revolutions of our time. This
shift was the revolution. (472)
To me many of my colleagues at Time,
basically kind and intensely well-meaning people, seemed to
me as charming and as removed from reality as fish in a fish
bowl. To me they seemed to know little about the forces that
were shaping the history of our time. To me they seemed like
little children, knowing and clever little children, but
knowing and clever chiefly about trifling things while they
were extremely resistant to finding out about anything else.
(477-478)
I remembered the saying: “Any fool can
commit a murder, but it takes an artist to commit a good
natural death.” (485)
They [liberal newsmen] were people who
believed a number of things. Foremost among them was the
belief that peace could be preserved, World War III could be
averted only by conciliating the Soviet Union. For this no
price was too high to pay, including the price of wilful
historical self-delusion.… Hence like most people who
have substituted the habit of delusion for reality, they
became hysterical whenever the root of their delusion was
touched, and reacted with a violence that completely belied
the openness of mind which they prescribed for others. (499)
Men have never been so educated, but
wisdom, even as an idea, has conspicuously vanished from the
world. (506)
What I felt [as he was about to testify
before the Congressional committee] was what we see in the
eye of a bird or an animal that we are about to kill, which
knows that it is about to be killed, and whose torment is
not the certainty of death or pain, but the horror of the
interval before death comes in which it knows that it has
lost light and freedom forever. It is not yet dead. But it
is no longer alive. (532)
Experience had taught me that innocence
seldom utters outraged shrieks. Guilt does. Innocence is a
mighty shield, and the man or woman covered by it, is much
more likely to answer calmly: “My life is blameless. Look
into it, if you like, for you will find nothing.” That is
the tone of innocence. (537)
As I struggled to control my feeling,
slowly and deliberately, I heard myself saying, rather than
said: “The story has spread that in testifying against Mr.
Hiss I am working out some old grudge, or motives of revenge
or hatred. I do not hate Mr. Hiss. We were close friends,
but we are caught in a tragedy of history. Mr. Hiss
represents the concealed enemy against which we are all
fighting, and I am fighting. I have testified against him
with remorse and pity, but in a moment of history in which
this Nation now stands, so help me God, I could not do
otherwise.” In the completely silent room, I fought to
control my voice. (694-695)
I am a man who, reluctantly, grudgingly,
step by step, is destroying himself that this country and
the faith by which it lives may continue to exist. (715)
The simple fact is that when I took up my
little sling and aimed at Communism, I also hit something
else. What I hit was the forces of that great socialist
revolution, which, in the name of liberalism, spasmodically,
incompletely, somewhat formlessly, but always in the same
direction, has been inching its ice cap over the nation for
two decades. (741)
To those for whom the intellect alone has
force, such a witness has little or no force. It bewilders
and exasperates them. It challenges them to suppose that
there is something greater about man than his ability to add
and subtract. It submits that that something is the soul.
Plain men understood the witness easily. It speaks directly
to their condition. For it is peculiarly the Christian
witness. They still hear it, whenever it truly reaches their
ears, the ring of those glad tidings that once stirred
mankind with an immense hope. For it frees them from the
trap of irreversible Fate at the point at which it whispers
to them that each soul is individually responsible to God,
that it has only to assert that responsibility, and out of
man’s weakness will come strength, out of his corruption
incorruption, out of his evil good, and out of what is false
invulnerable truth. (762-763) |
