Posted on 03/02/2015 8:59:31 AM PST by cotton1706
I mourned the untimely passing of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman for the very personal reason that I hoped he would one day get to play Whittaker Chambers in a film version of Chambers 1952 masterwork, Witness.
Short, heavy set, permanently rumpled, Hoffman would have made a near perfect Chambers to George Clooneys Alger Hiss, the smooth, handsome, establishment golden boy.
Chambers 800-page story of his life and their encounter remains the great political book of the twentieth century. Chambers was a deep thinker, a dazzling writer, and a reluctant participant in the most riveting political drama of the era. No one could have told his story better than he.
On second reading, I find the book even more powerful than on the first. I have seen enough in the years in between to know how eloquently Chambers speaks to the truth tellers who have followed him. As the Rudy Giuliani-Obama contretemps suggest, they face a remarkably similar set of obstacles to those Chambers faced sixty-five years ago.
For those who may not know the story, Chambers, as a young man in the 1920s, signed on to mans second oldest faith, the one that promised, Ye shall be as gods. Communism was in its ascendancy at the time, and Chambers ascended with it. As a writer and true believer, he sufficiently impressed his superiors that they asked him to go underground in Washington D.C. and organize a high level ring of federal bureaucrats working on behalf of the Soviet Union.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
“Witness” is a remarkable book and a real eye-opener. For example, the U.S. media has ALWAYS been kommie since at least the Bolshevik revolution, and such is by no means a recent phenomena.
At any rate, “Witness” is on the must-read short list for all well-informed conservatives.
I have it in my wish list at Amazon.
If I remember correctly, William F. Buckley writes an intro to the book crediting Chambers with galvanizing Buckley’s conservatism beliefs.
That is one of the two or three books I would recommend to every bright high school student.
I wish that the Chambers account would be put to film before they do it.
As you can see from my Freep Page, he has been a hero of my for quite some time. He stood up to be counted.
It was his book that nailed the coffin on liberalism for me.
50+ years difference, exactly the same tactics they use.
Great opening line and the following paragraph is so true!
Bill Buckley also said of Witness that Chambers wrote the book believing that he & the West were on the losing side of history.
The book is not at all dated. It needs to be read by the rising generation of young conservatives.
He also explains where the label Progressive comes from,its the label the Communists gave themselves,this,all took place during the red scare,could not be known as a communist,so they took the label progressive,guess what Hillary calls herself?
A Few Books the must be read:
The Road to Serfdom — Hayek
Witness — Chambers
Radical Son — Horowitz
The Conservative Mind — Kirk
Reflections on the Revolution in France — Burke
The Constitution of Liberty — Hayek
A Conflict of Visions — Sowell
The Vision of the Anointed — Sowell
The Politics of Prudence — Kirk
Freedom and Virtue — Carey
The Roots of American Order — Kirk
Ideas have Consequences — Weaver
I’ll Take My Stand — various
Edmund Burke, A Genius Reconsidered — Kirk
Democracy in America — De Tocqueville (Mansfield edited ed.)
The Quest for Community — Nisbet
Ping.
Thanks for the ping. Whittaker Chambers was right, then and now.
My theory of Bias in the Media explains it. The incentive to be kommie has always inhered in the journalistic enterprise. Why? Because journalists dont do things, they criticize. To be a true liberal, you must believe that It is not the critic who counts . . . the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena. (T. Roosevelt) But if all you do is criticize, you have great incentive to reverse that and to instead say, You didnt build that.My explanation for why the media became notorious for that bias only within our lifetimes is that the media didnt really even begin to coalesce into a single entity until the telegraph (1844). The telegraph, and the Associated Press (started as the New York Associated Press in 1848). After the AP came into full flower after the Civil War, it began claiming journalistic objectivity, and things have gone downhill ever since.
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