Witness

All I learned in school about the "McCarthy Era" is that Joseph McCarthy was a belligerent drunk and that extremely famous Hollywood-types were put on trial for their leftwing sympathy. (The number of people silenced by the Hollywood machine for having conservative views out numbers the number of people criticized for leftwing views is probably 100 to 1, but the fact that extremely famous Hollywood types would be censored for left-wing views in still horrific.)

Witness is a long and detailed book by Whittaker Chambers.

Mr. Chambers started his career as an organizer and propagandist for the Communist Party in the 1920s and later moved into the underground to organize cells for the Soviet Union to infiltrate and hopefully overthrow the US government.

He turned against Communism when he began to get a sense of the atrocities going on throughout the world in the name of Communism.

Chambers was really nothing more than a minor operative. The book was interesting in that it shows how deeply the Marxian radicalism had penetrated the US by the 1920s and 1930s.

Mr. Chambers felt that the effort to preserve the American experiment in self-rule had already failed by the 1930s and 1940s.

I found the book extremely depressing because I've been forced to give up my hope of finding people interested in free market health care reform.

If there is not a single person within 700 miles of Salt Lake City willing to give up an afternoon to discuss the most important issue of our day, then is there any hope?

I believe that the American experiment in self rule was one of the greatest achievements in mankind. It is sad that I know of no-one interested in the subject.