WHILE IT CERTAINLY WOULD HAVE BEEN PREFERABLE TO FINISH OFF THE ISMS AFTER WWI....:

Whittaker Chambers: Review of Richard M. Reinsch II, Whittaker Chambers: The Spirit of a Counterrevolutionary (ISI, 2010) (Ray Nothstine, Religion & Liberty)

This pessimist view of the survival of the West against Marxism stems from Chambers’ understanding that the West was abandoning its sacred heritage of Christian thought, and within it, the proper understanding of man. A supposedly free but rampant secular and materialistic society still leads to the same ending as Marxism, outside of God, and unable to explain its reason and purpose for life.

One of the chief takeaways from this book is that there must be more to conservatism than free-markets and limited government. For liberty to be prosperous, it must be oriented toward greater truths. Reinsch points out that Chambers understood that the “West must reject Communism in the name of something other than modern liberalism and its foundation in the principles of Enlightenment rationalism.”

Reinsch delves into Chambers’ prediction of the eventual collapse of the West and his belief that there was a lack of moral fortitude to combat the communist surge. The apparent unwillingness of the free world to sacrifice and suffer for freedom troubled Chambers. He also surmised that the intellectual class possessed a waning ability to articulate a meaningful defense of the ideas and value of the free society.

...and we owe a tremendous debt to men like Chambers, Edmund Burke, Abraham Lincoln, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II, and W who summoned us back to our best, the most remarkable fact about the Long War is not that we flagged at certain moments but that we sustained for two hundred years.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 13, 2010 5:59 AM