WHITTAKER CHAMBERS
411
Albigensian Crusade and the practices of the Holy Inquisition can be
deduced from the Sermon on the Mount. Chambers denies that there is
any phase or single event in the history of Bolshevism, like the Kronstadt
rebellion for example, that can be taken as a turning point in its de–
generation. Its fascist character, he writes, was "inherent in it from the
beginning." That is true in a sense, but scarcely in a meaningful way.
It is equally true that besides the totalitarian potential a good many
other things were inherent in the Revolution which came to nothing
by reason of the power in the hands of certain men and the irreducibly
tragic nature of the circumstances under which they exercised
it,
such
as Russia's isolation and ruinous poverty and the fusion of the absolutist
element in the Marxist dialectic with the caesaro-papist heritage of
the Russian mind. Chambers is so obsessed with the "atheistic ques–
tion" that he is willing to absolve the very worst men of responsibility
for their crimes in ordcr all the morc justifiably to implicate the values
and ideas they profess. He forgets
thu~
men in general, not only the
worst among them, tend to honor such values and ideas more in the
breach than in the observance. At one time Lenin warned his followers
that there is no idea or movement that cannot be turned into its exact
opposite.
If
that is true, it is because ideas and movements have no
reality except insofar as they derive it from living men. No ideology,
whether secular or religious, exists in some ghostlike fashion apart from
the men who believe in it or merely use it for their own ends; and since
its one lodging place is in the power-mongering human mind, it can
never be immune to corruption.
Though disappointing in its character as a work of ideas,
Witness
is still of the first importance as an authentic expression of historical
crisis and as a presentation of crucial facts. And by far the most crucial
is the fact that the Soviet Military Intelligence, by winning to its service
men of the type of Harry Dexter White and Alger Hiss, came very
close to penetrating the top headquarters of the U. S. Government:
"It was not yet in the Cabinet room, but it was not far outside the
door." The stealing of secret documents was, of course, of little con–
sequence compared to the power that the infiltrators acquired to influ–
ence policy. This infiltration was not simply the exploit of clever spies;
the spy-thriller aspect of their performance is of negligible interest. What
is of commanding interest is the lesson it enforces; and that lesson is
that the infiltration, which was more extensive, probably, than we shall
ever know, was intrinsically the result of the political attitudes that
prevailed in this country for a whole decade, if not longer, at the very
least between 1938 and 1948.
