W. Chambers on Western Civilization

Whittaker Chambers to William Buckley August 5, 1954

[On Western Civilization] -see Ratzinger at the end.

Dear Bill,

“(…) No, I no longer believe that political solutions are possible for us. I am baffled by the way people still speak of the West as if it were at least a cultural unity against Communism though it is divided not only by a political, but by an invisible cleavage. On one side are the voiceless masses with their own subdivisions and fractures. On the other side is the enlightened, the religious roots of the civilization – the roots without which it is no longer Western civilization but a new order of beliefs, attitudes and mandates. In short, this is the order of which Communism is one logical expression, originating not in Russia, but in the vulture capitals of the West, reaching Russia by clandestine delivery via the old underground centers in Cracow, Vienna, Berne, Zurich and Geneva. It is a Western body of belief that now threatens the West from Russia. As a body of Western beliefs, secular and rationalistic, the intelligentsia of the West share it, and are therefore always committed to a secret emotional complicity with Communism of which they dislike, not the Communism, but only what , by the changes of history, Russia has specifically added to it – slave labor camps, purges, MVD et al. And that, not because the Western intellectuals find them unjustifiable, but because they are afraid of being caught in them. If they could have Communism without the brutalities of ruling that the Russian experience bnred, they have only marginal objections. Why should they object? What else is socialism but Communism with the claws retracted? And there is positivism. What is more, every garage mechanic in the West, insofar as he believes in nuts and bolts but asks: “The Holy Ghost, what’s that?” that he is simply echoing Stalin at Teheran: “The Pope – how many divisions has the Pope?” That is the real confrontation of forces. The enemy – he is ourselves. That is why it is idle to talk about preventing the wreck of Western civilization. It is already a wreck from within. That is why we can hope to do little more now than snatch a fingernail of a saint from the rack or a handful of ashes from the faggots, and buy them secret ly in a flowerpot against the day, ages hence, when a few men begin again to dare to believe that there was once something else, that something else is thinkable, and need some evidence of that it was, and the fortifying knowledge tha there werew those who, at the great nightfall, took loving thought to presaerve the tokens of hope and truth.

Sincerely,

Whittaker

Keep in mind: Ratzinger wrote in 2006: "The essential problem of our times, for Europe and for the world, is that although the fallacy of the communist economy has been recognized - so much so that former communists have unhesitatingly become economic liberals - the moral and religious question that it used to address has been almost totally repressed. The unresolved issue of Marxism lives on: the crumbling of man's original uncertainties about God, himself, and the universe. The decline of a moral conscience grounded in absolute values is still our problem today. Left untreated, it could lead to the self-destruction of the European conscience, which we must begin to consider as a real danger - above and beyond the decline predicted by Spengler" ("Without Roots" Basic Books  (2006) 73-74).