Free Republic

Exclusive: Jack Cashill points out BHO has yet to hear 'Moscow screams' “There is one experience which most sincere ex-Communists share,” wrote Whittaker Chambers in his classic conversion narrative “Witness,” and that is the epiphany, the road-to-Damascus moment, the instant they realize the life they have been living is a lie. Chambers memorably quotes one young woman about her father’s Damascus moment: “He was immensely pro-Soviet … and then – you will laugh at me – but you must not laugh at my father – and then – one night – in Moscow – he heard screams. That’s all. Simply...

Bolshevism combines the characteristics of the French Revolution with those of the rise of Islam… Those who accept Bolshevism become impervious to scientific evidence, and commit intellectual suicide. ...Bolshevism is to be reckoned with Islam rather than with Christianity and Buddhism. Christianity and Buddhism are primarily personal religions, with mystical doctrines and a love of contemplation. Mohammedanism and Bolshevism are practical, social, unspiritual, concerned to win the empire of this world.

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Christina Shelton, a retired US intelligence analyst; she spent the major part of her thirty-two year career (twenty two years) working as a Soviet analyst and a Counterintelligence Branch Chief at the Defense Intelligence Agency. She is the author of the new book, Alger Hiss: Why He Chose Treason. FP: Christina Shelton, welcome to Frontpage Interview. Shelton: Thank you, Mr. Glazov. FP: Let’s begin with you telling us what inspired you to write this book. Shelton: I have always had an abiding interest in both the Soviet Union and the intriguing world of espionage. For...

Here's your daily dose of an indie film in progress; at the end of the week, you'll have the chance to vote for your favorite. In the meantime: Is this a movie you’d want to see? Tell us in the comments."The Whittaker Chambers Story" Tweetable Logline: Feature-length documentary about Whittaker Chambers: journalist, theologian, and writer of the political and spiritual classic "Witness"Elevator Pitch: A feature-length documentary about Whittaker Chambers, whose book Witness is a political and spiritual classic. Chambers had insight into the human condition that transcended his time. He was a member of the communist party in the 1920s...

Whittaker Chambers and Totalitarian Islam Playwright David Mamet recently acknowledged that he had been profoundly influenced by Communist apostate Whittaker Chambers’s 1952 anti-Communist memoir, Witness. Mamet described how reading Chambers’s opus inspired “the wrenching experience” of forcibly reevaluating the way he thought, particularly his confessed leftist-herd co-dependence. Also, echoing the delusive herd mentality of the Left’s ad hominem attacks in the 1950s on Chambers — whose allegations of Communist conspiracies have been entirely vindicated with irrefragable documentation from the captured Soviet Venona cables — Congressman Peter King’s staid initial hearings of March 10, 2011, on American Muslim radicalization engendered similarly...

As pumpkins line the front of my local market and appear on neighbors' porches, I am reminded of the famous pumpkin described in Whittaker Chambers' autobiography, Witness. A moving and beautifully written book containing much more than a tale of espionage and intrigue, Witness has had a profound impact on many conservatives, containing priceless words of wisdom while documenting a massive, tangled web of Communist infiltration into the U.S. government and mainstream media during the Cold War. The key evidence proving Chambers' allegations against Soviet spy Alger Hiss, an important member of the U.S. State Department, became notoriously known as...

A reader just sent me a link, with the explanation: "They're at it again." And so they are. "They" is the National Review, the leading publication of the religious wing of the mainstream right. And "it" is bashing Ayn Rand. There is a long history to this. All the way back in the 1950s, when Ayn Rand's magnum opus Atlas Shrugged—which I have described as "Capitalism's Epic"—was first published, William F. Buckley attempted to kick Ayn Rand out of the right. Her atheism and her ethics of individualism was a threat to Buckley's goal of cobbling together a "fusionist" coalition...

On this day in 1948, Rep. Richard Nixon (R-CA) and his House Un-American Activities Committee questioned Alger Hiss, a State Department officer suspected of being a Soviet spy. Nixon zeroed in on contradictions in Hiss's testimony, revealing that Hiss had lied about not knowing Whittaker Chambers, another Soviet spy. Though never convicted of being a spy, Hiss did go to prison for perjury. For decades, many Democrats asserted that Hiss was innocent and that Nixon had persecuted an innocent man. After the fall of the Soviet Union, de-classified records revealed that Alger Hiss had indeed been a Soviet spy.

If we adopt the compassion of time rather than that of cash, we are not trying to do the same thing as liberals, only a bit more cheaply. Instead, we must ask of every idea that calls itself compassionate, "Does it make great demands on men (and women) to give themselves to their brethren?" Are we offering not coerced silver, but our lives? If we talk of crisis pregnancies, are we actually willing to provide a home to a pregnant young woman? If we talk of abandoned children, are we actually willing to adopt a child? We need to ask...

Columbia was, he declared, “a citadel of the mind swaying in the vertigo of a civilization changing (without admitting it) the basis of its faith from a two thousand-year-old Christian culture to the new secular and scientific culture.” Whereas the Christian culture “placed God at the center of man’s hope,” the new secular faith, which was “exclusively rational and scientific,” replaced God with Man. This was not indoctrination into communism, at least not explicitly. “No member of the Columbia faculty ever consciously guided me toward Communism,” he stated. “Columbia did not teach me Communism. It taught me despair.” That despair...

To think that Boris and Natasha lived right here in South Dakota, and we didn't even know it! Recently, Walter Kendall Myers and Gwendolyn Steingraber-Trebilcock-Myers - a couple who once lived in Aberdeen - were arrested for spying. The news rocked the nation. Well, actually, the nation immediately forgot the story. Still, South Dakota hasn't forgotten. It's not every day suspected spies are found traipsing through your own neighborhood. The espionage likely started after they left Aberdeen, but you still wonder if that abandoned shopping cart you saw in aisle 8 of Kessler's might have contained a coded message. The...

Clearing the air vs. splitting hairs and distorting Cold War history (Part 1) Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter whitewashed Since the downfall of the Soviet Union, volumes have been written about that late superpower's penetration of American Society and its institutions before and during the Cold War years. It can be said without credible contradiction that what we now know about Soviet spying and infiltration of the U.S. for seven decades vindicates the much-maligned anti-Communists (in and out of Congress) of that era. If anything, they didn't know the half of it. It was they who warned — often to...

I am on a long needed vacation, and have already put 3000 miles on my car. Part of me says I wanted to see the country before it disappears...:) One of the things I have been doing while putting all these miles on my car is to listen to the unabridged audiobook version of "Witness" by Whittaker Chambers. I think it is a total of 36 hours or something along those lines. I read the book for the first time in 2002 (inspired by Ann Coulter to do so) and it changed my political life. To me, it was the...

Lefties commonly say there is something wrong with Rand’s use of fiction as a vehicle for Objectivist beliefs. In a 1957 review of ‘Atlas Shrugged’, Whittaker Chambers, who had no idea how successful Atlas Shrugged would be, said, “The mischief here is that the author, dodging into fiction, nevertheless counts on your reading it as political reality.” Lefties have been using that same approach ever since. Using fiction is ‘mischief’ and ‘dodging’. Rand was trying to make an otherwise dull subject interesting, and she also wanted to show what might happen in a world where businessmen really did go on...

...The news about this book seems to me to be that any ordinarily sensible head could possibly take it seriously, and that apparently, a good many do. Somebody has called it: "Excruciatingly awful." I find it a remarkably silly book. It is certainly a bumptious one. Its story is preposterous. It reports the final stages of a final conflict (locale: chiefly the United States, some indefinite years hence) between the harried ranks of free enterprise and the "looters." These are proponents of proscriptive taxes. Government ownership, Labor, etc. etc. The mischief here is that the author, dodging into fiction, nevertheless...

0n March 27, 1962, the U.S. Communist newspaper The Worker exuberantly reported the following story: Attorney General Robert E Kennedy admitted, in effect, in a press conference in Los Angeles on Saturday, that the persecution of the Communist Party reflects a monstrous hoax perpetrated on the American people. He declared at the press conference that the Communist Party of the U.S. is no danger to the security of the U.S . For the CPUSA, such a statement from the then-highest official of the U.S. Justice Department (as well as the brother of the U.S. President) was astonishing and unexpected. Especially...

Whittaker Chambers: Man of Courage and Faith by Lee Edwards, Ph.D.Executive Memorandum #735 April 2, 2001 The wave of publicity about Robert Hanssen, a veteran FBI agent who became a master spy for the Russians, brings to mind a far different man--Whittaker Chambers, a veteran Soviet spy who became, in William F. Buckley Jr.'s words, "the most important American defector from Communism." This April marks the 100th anniversary of Chambers' birth. In August 1948, Chambers, an editor at Time, identified Alger Hiss, a golden boy of the liberal establishment, as a fellow member of his underground Communist cell in...

Editor's note: The following commentary is excerpted from Jack Cashill's eye-opening new book, "Hoodwinked: How Intellectual Hucksters Have Hijacked American Culture," where he shows how, over the last century, "progressive" writers and producers have been using falsehood and fraud as their primary weapons in their attack on America."I am not and have never been a member of the Communist Party," Alger Hiss said under oath on Aug. 5, 1948, and calmly refuted the accusation of former Soviet agent Whittaker Chambers. The House Un-American Activities Committee had subpoenaed Chambers two days before. Then a senior editor at Time magazine, Chambers had...

Communism is alive and well, says "The End of Time" author David Horowitz. And he should know. The son of Communist parents and a former Communist himself, he has crusaded against the Marxist left on college campuses and written books exposing the influence of the left on America's political culture. In an exclusive interview with NewsMax.com, Horowitz spoke about his new book and the Marxist domination of today's Democratic party. In his book, Horowitz writes about his views on life and death, and explains his belief in the destructive nature of Utopia-driven ideologies, noting: "The desire for more than is...

While the media have been focusing on the flap at Harvard growing out of its president's statement about the reasons for the under-representation of women in the sciences, a much worse and more revealing scandal has unfolded at the University of Seattle, where a student mob prevented a military recruiter from meeting with those students who wanted to meet with him. At first, the university president said that the student rioters should apologize. But the storm this created forced the typical academic administrator's back-down under pressure. One of the student rioters explained that she didn't want anyone to be sent...