Free Republic

American Friends? HardlyBy Gordon LambFrontPageMagazine.com | June 5, 2003 When the first Quakers arrived in America in the late 17th century, they were thought of as heretics, sometimes witches and routinely bizarre. Theirs was a religion based on the ideas the individual is supreme, that the relationship between God and man is a very private affair not to be regulated by government or society, that temperance ("all things in moderation") is a noble way to live one's life. Above all, it prized peace and stated that violence should be avoided if at all possible.The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) has mastered...

...[T]here is no greater Cold War icon than Alger Hiss, the once high-ranking State Department official who went to prison for denying that he'd passed government secrets to the Soviet Union. Nearly 60 years after he was exposed before Congress by Whittaker Chambers, a communist underground operative who later became a senior editor at Time magazine, belief in Hiss' complete innocence remains an article of faith for the political left. For anti-communists, Hiss remains the prime example of how the Kremlin infiltrated the highest ranks of the U.S. government.... Over the years, Davis remained unpersuaded by new evidence of Hiss'...

THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT TUESDAY, AUGUST 3, 1948 Mr. CHAMBERS. Almost exactly 9 years ago-that is, 2 days after Hitler and Stalin signed their pact-I went to Washington and reported to the authorities what I knew about the infiltration of the United States Government by Communists... The heart of my report to the United States Government consisted of a description of the apparatus to which I was attached. It was an underground organization of the United States Communist Party developed, to the best of my knowledge, by Harold Ware, one of the sons of the Communist leader known as...

Informers in his camp, key evidence suppressed by the opposition, tampering with witnesses, fabricated expert opinions-no, it's not the Garrison case. All of the above led to one of the great injustices of modern time-the false perjury conviction and subsequent imprisonment of an innocent man: Alger Hiss. The case could not be more important, for it launched the career that turned into a Presidency for Richard Milhous Nixon. Properly examined, the case reveals that Hiss was framed for a crime he didn't commit, with the full knowledge and complicity of Hoover's FBI. As with the JFK case, latter day FOIA...

The Roman Empire is luxurious but it is filled with misery. It is dying but it laughs – moritur et ridet.                               --- Salvian But Salvian, we learned with a deflecting smile, was an extremist, though, in the hindsight of disaster, his foresight would scarcely seem overstated. What interested me was that men had smiled complacently at Salvian’s words when he spoke them, and men still smiled at them complacently a thousand years later – the same kind of men, I was beginning to suspect,...