Free Republic
Browse · Search
Bloggers & Personal
Topics · Post Article

Skip to comments.

The Republic For Which It Stands
PoliticallyShort.com ^ | 06/08/2015 | PoliticallyShort

Posted on 06/08/2015 3:42:11 PM PDT by PoliticallyShort

“At issue in the Hiss case”, wrote Whittaker Chambers in his autobiography Witness, “was the question whether this sick society, which we call Western civilization, could in its extremity still cast up a man whose faith in it was so great the he would voluntarily abandon those things which men hold good, including life, to defend it.”

In August 1948, Chambers, an editor at Time, identified Alger Hiss, a former assistant to the Secretary of State and former General Secretary of the United Nations, as a fellow member of his underground Communist cell in the 1930s. Hiss was ultimately convicted of perjury for denying his espionage activities and sentenced to five years in jail. Chambers was further vindicated in the mid 1990’s as the Venoma transcripts, secret KGB and GRU messages during World War II, were released and confirmed that Hiss had been a Soviet spy not only in the 1930s, but at least until 1945.

In Witness, Chambers goes on to write that at issue in the Hiss case was whether his “faith could prevail against a man whose equal faith it was that this society is sick beyond saving, and that mercy itself pleads for its swift extinction and replacement by another. At issue was the question whether, in the desperately divided society, there still remained the will to recognize the issues in time to offset the immense rally of public power to distort and pervert the facts?” This is ultimately the question of our time as our society is loosing the power not only to distinguish between reality and unreality, but the ability to distinguish between good and evil.

At some point the fundamental basic question needs to be asked as we take a step back and look at the agenda that is being pushed as blatant lies, delusional insanity, and outright evil have seeped into our society from the influence of a few upon the many who are not naturally corrupt. The agenda behind this push is what Chamber’s defined as “the dimension of treason in our time.” Chambers elaborated, “In the 20th century, treason became a vocation whose modern form was specifically the treason of ideas.”

That movement is embolden within society today acting under the guise of progressivism and liberalism as their chief proponent just so happens to occupy the White House. Yesterday’s fascists, communists, and marxists have shed their labels and evolved their tactics as their ideas now permeate throughout our intellectual and moral foundations and within the institutions traditionally established for the preservation of those foundations. Although the past solutions under this movement to create a social order based on false intellectual doctrines have ultimately failed, liberals today remain steadfast in their pursuit to contaminate and eventually annihilate what remains of our forgotten republic.

We’ve reached this point in time not solely due to the “treason of ideas” that Chamber’s alluded to, but because we have accepted, with little fight, the decay of the principles upon which our republic was founded. In the final days of the Roman republic, Cicero made a statement that today should resonate with Americans who are worried about the decay of our republican institutions. Cicero wrote, “The Republic, when it was handed down to us, was like a beautiful painting, whose colors were already fading with age. Our own time has not only neglected to freshen it by renewing its original colors, but has not even gone to the trouble of preserving its design and portrayal of figures.” The Roman republic fell because few heeded the warnings of those like Cicero and even fewer attempted to preserve its original design. Thus, in the span of a hundred years, Rome was transformed from a republic with democratic institutions into an empire under the control of one man.

“The progressive agenda, writes Jarrett Stepman of Breitbart, “from its early days at the turn of the twentieth century until the modern day, has been aimed at placing a new cornerstone at America’s foundation. Rejecting both the ‘natural law’ ideas of individual rights and the carefully crafted system of federalism codified by the Constitution, progressives have radically increased state power, placed more power in the hands of the executive branch, and created the bureaucratic-administrative state that now runs rampant.” Rome had a few great men in its last days as a republic but no movement to back them, notes Stepman. “In this regard, modern conservatives have an advantage…and should take to heart Cicero’s lament that the republic was dying because few attempted to freshen its original principles.” The disastrous result of the progressive agenda is a populous that upholds mediocrity in the name of relativism with an ever-expanding and centralized government that is unmoored from constitutional limits.

We must turn to the voices of our Founders if we are to ever regain what was once our republic. Speaking about the conditions in which Caesar came to power to Rome, Thomas Jefferson wrote the following; “If Caesar had been as virtuous as he was daring and sagacious, what could he, even in the plenitude of his usurped power, have done to lead his fellow citizens into good government?” Jefferson continues, “Steeped in corruption, vice and venality, as the whole nation was,… what could even Cicero, Cato, Brutus have done, had it been referred to them to establish a good government for their country?” The problems we face today are just as immense, but their solution lies in the education and enlightenment of the people and the emergence of a spirit that will serve as a foundation for independence and self-government.

The solution is in the reformation of the American mind, according to Jefferson this reformation of the mind is “to be informed by education what is right and what wrong; to be encouraged in habits of virtue and deterred from those of vice by the dread of punishments proportioned, indeed, but irremissible; in all cases, to follow truth as the only safe guide, and to eschew error, which bewilders us in one false consequence after another in endless succession.” These are the inculcations necessary to render the American people a sure basis for the structure of order and good government.

We face a daunting task in restraining and reviving the sturdy virtues required for self-government while at the same time restoring the principles of America’s Founders to their proper role in the public and political discourse. With all the crises and chaos that consume us throughout each day, we have all but forgotten that the real heart of our own government depends upon the heart of the people. It is from that source that we must look for all genuine reform. It is to that cause that we must ascribe all our results.

In his Speech on the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Calvin Coolidge eloquently defined the history in which we ourselves must rediscover. Coolidge stated that, “governments do not make ideals, but ideals make governments…Of course the government can help to sustain ideals and can create institutions through which they can be the better observed, but their source by their very nature is in the people. The people have to bear their own responsibilities. There is no method by which that burden can be shifted to the government. It is not the enactment, but the observance of laws, that creates the character of a nation.” It is only through the observance of the principles laid out by our Founding Fathers in the Constitution that can save the character of our nation and restore the republic for which it stands. One nation, under god, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.


TOPICS: Education; Government; History
KEYWORDS: america; government; republic; rome

1 posted on 06/08/2015 3:42:11 PM PDT by PoliticallyShort
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | View Replies]

To: PoliticallyShort

I have no respect for Chambers. He swore off communism like a drunk swears off booze and joins the Salvation Army. Whatever core belief permitted him to betray his country and condone human slavery was still operative, but rationalized, when he wrote the book.


2 posted on 06/08/2015 3:50:33 PM PDT by Misterioso (Islam is un-American.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: PoliticallyShort

The answer to the question posited at the end of the first paragraph is,
“Ask that of a military veteran. For they have done so.”


3 posted on 06/08/2015 3:52:31 PM PDT by Terry L Smith
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Misterioso

Correct spelling is Venona.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venona_project


4 posted on 06/08/2015 4:02:51 PM PDT by kruss3
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 2 | View Replies]

To: sauropod

.


5 posted on 06/08/2015 5:00:30 PM PDT by sauropod (I am His and He is mine.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: kruss3

just caught that, thanks!


6 posted on 06/08/2015 5:13:13 PM PDT by PoliticallyShort
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 4 | View Replies]

To: Misterioso

I assume you never met Chambers. I did. He lost faith in Communism and sought out another “faith” as many people who become “true believers” (Eric Hoffer) do.

It mentally/psychological sustains their existence to believe in something that has a purpose (good or bad), and gives them structured guidance.

Once one sees the fatal flaws in the dangerous “isms” (fascism, communism, racism, etc), those who have the mental capability to analyze these flaws will eventually reject them, and leave that cause.

However they will often look for a new, better, and more ethical cause. Such was the life of Whitaker Chambers, Phil Luce, Max Yergan, Jay Lovestone, “The God Who Failed” group of writers, and the No. Vietnamese/VC defectors I interviewed in So. Vietnam.

[The No. Vietnamese POWS in Cambodia were too young to have any real ideology. They were either brainwashed or shanghaied into the PAVN forces, often at gunpoint).

Please, if you are going to write about a person, learn a little about their emotional/psychological history and makeup before you criticize their actions.

I’ve know many of the top Communists and white racists in the country (as a journalist), and have learned that they are the “true believers” of the psychopathic world of fanaticism. Very few ever leave it because it is a pathological addiction to utopianism, power, and for some, the path to killing people.


7 posted on 06/08/2015 5:58:24 PM PDT by MadMax, the Grinning Reaper (madmax)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 2 | View Replies]

To: MadMax, the Grinning Reaper
Please, if you are going to write about a person, learn a little about their emotional/psychological history and makeup before you criticize their actions.

How much do I have to know about Obama's irrational mindset to critique his actions? Chambers was a committed altruist by all indications. It you know what that means I'll be surprised.

8 posted on 06/08/2015 6:33:57 PM PDT by Misterioso (Islam is un-American.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 7 | View Replies]

To: Misterioso

Obama is a psychopathic Marxist ideologue with tinges of Islam mixed in.

Chambers came from a different era in which Marxism/communism had not yet been exposed for the genocidal tyranny that it is (The Moscow Trials were only in 1938 and many American leftists and Marxists called them fair. Only later, I believe it was the Dewey Commission, was the real truth revealed).

There was no excuse for Obama to be a Marxist other than he was inculcated with it from the day he was born (by his admiring his abandoning father, Obama Sr (a Luo-related Kenyan), his leftist mother, and hardcore left grandfather.

Chambers came up through the Depression where Marxism was still viewed (and Russia as its leader), as the answers to the problems of the Depression and capitalism in general.
Yet Chambers finally saw through the smoke and mirrors of Communist propaganda, deception, and espionage, so he turned away and found a new faith in Catholicism.

He was altruistic, as were hundreds of thousands of American liberals who became temporary Marxists/leftists during the 30’s when a claimed Communist Party USA membership ran as high as 300-500,000 persons. After the Moscow Trials, the Hiss/Rosenberg cases, the Hungarian Revolution, and the final straw for hardcore CPers with a little conscience, the Soviet invasion of Czechslovakia in 1968 (i.e. Dorothy Healey), the Party’s numbers were less than 5,000, but with tens of thousands of supporters and sympathizers of varying degrees.

However, many leftists got into academia and poisoned it with Marxist propaganda, doctrine, and texts (Chomsky, Zinn, Aptheker, Foner, etc. This is the environment that Obama was raised in though most other students, including liberals, never really bought into the Marxist crap out there. However, enough did to the point that we are reaping the successes of their propaganda today, esp. in our schools and even in politics (i.e. progressives).

Once Chambers left the Party, he never returned to its influence. Others who left the Party found out that the Party never really left them (i.e. Howard Fast, Scott Nearing, Joseph Papp, etc.).

Some reds, like most of the Hollywood 10 stayed with the Stalinist CPUSA until the day they died (Trumbo, Cole, Lawson; Hollywood actors/actresses John Randolph and wife, Will Geer, “Professor” Irwin Corey, Eli Wallach, etc).

True liberals with altruistic goals, like Hubert Humphrey, Whitney Young (Urban League), Sen. Pat Moynihan and even the leftist Justice Earl Warren, never joined the Communists. In fact Humphrey was a very strong anti-communist in his day.

I’ve met altruistic people, many of whom were actually rational and sane, while others were leftist wackjobs who had no idea of what reality was, but they weren’t traitors, just fools.

For your information, I was one of the first journalists to openly proclaim that Obama was both raised and influenced by the Marxist environment in which he was raised, May 22, 2008, Wash. Post. page 2. A few other journalists and internal security scholars agreed with me at that press conference (we had about 170+ years of experience in internal security affairs amongst us).

We all had met both Marxist fanatics and altruistic people over the courses of our careers, and pretty much knew how to tell them apart. Chambers was altruistic but he also had an inquisitive mind, which is why he saw through the ideological falsehoods and fallacies of Marxism.

Obama has no such mind and he never allowed himself to develop it, esp. given his Marxist handlers and mentors who kept him in check throughout his life. Obama might have been altruistic for a minute but he made choices for careers in Chicago that took him to the communist Left, not Social Democrats or Henry Jackson liberals.

Obama is “irrational” only because his view is so skewed that sane people view it as “irrational”. In his mind, he is doing just what a good Marxist should do, and he is succeeding due to the stupidity and cupidity of the mass media, our educational system, and the general low political IQ of the American people, esp. of the liberals who are often just one can short of a Marxist six-pack of ideological affinity/allegiance.


9 posted on 06/08/2015 7:37:07 PM PDT by MadMax, the Grinning Reaper (madmax)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 8 | View Replies]

To: MadMax, the Grinning Reaper

“From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” He thought it was just. He couldn’t see that it wouldn’t work. Reality poked him in the eye, though. He turned to the other altruist philosophy, Christianity, and devoted his life to saving souls, so to speak. No personal integrity there.


10 posted on 06/08/2015 11:27:57 PM PDT by Misterioso (Islam is un-American.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 9 | View Replies]

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

Free Republic
Browse · Search
Bloggers & Personal
Topics · Post Article

FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson