Witness: Cold War Classics

Whittaker Chambers’s foreword takes the form of a letter to his children. He warns them that Witness reveals the ugly realities of the titanic global struggle between Communism and freedom, of which his legal showdown with Alger Hiss is merely one example.

The Cold War has placed the conflict between Communism and freedom at the center of world politics. There is a serious danger that liberal societies will succumb to the allure of political Marxism. Very few people break entirely with Communist ideology once they have embraced it. They might break with the Communist Party, out of base disillusionment or frustration with its internal politicking. But even then, they often hold on to its fundamental tenet: that human reason alone is sufficient to remake the world.

Those who break from Communism entirely, as Chambers has done, have a crisis of conscience. They tend to realize that human reason is not, by itself, a powerful enough force to create a good society. All ex-Communists want to be free. Chambers insists that true freedom requires a belief in God and in the immortality of the human soul. The conflict between Communism and freedom is thus a religious one: It must end with one faith vanquishing the other.