by: F.R. Duplantier

In the introduction to Witness, the autobiographical account of his personal repudiation of Communism, Whittaker Chambers told the story of a German diplomat in Moscow whose sympathy for the Soviets turned suddenly sour simply because "one night he heard screams." Most Communists -- and fellow travelers -- learn to live with those screams; but, for some, they are a catalyst to conversion.

"What Communist has not heard those screams?" asked Chambers. "They come from husbands torn forever from their wives in midnight arrests. They come, muffled, from the execution cellars of the secret police, from the torture chambers . . . from all the citadels of terror. . . . They come from those freight cars loaded with men, women, and children, the enemies of the Communist State, locked in, packed in, left on remote sidings to freeze to death at night in the Russian winter. They come from minds driven mad by the horrors of mass starvation ordered and enforced as a policy of the Communist State. They come from the starved skeletons, worked to death, or flogged to death (as an example to others) in the freezing filth of sub-arctic labor camps. They come from children whose parents are suddenly, inexplicably, taken away from them -- parents they will never see again."

Communism is "man's second oldest faith," Chambers affirmed. "Its promise was whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: 'Ye shall be as gods.' It is the great alternative faith of mankind. Like all great faiths, its force derives from a simple vision." According to Chambers, "The Communist vision is the vision of Man without God. It is the vision of man's mind displacing God as the creative intelligence of the world. It is the vision of man's liberated mind, by the sole force of its rational intelligence, redirecting man's destiny and reorganizing man's life and the world."

Most Communists have "accepted the fact that Terror is an instrument of policy, right if the vision is right, justified by history, enjoined by the balance of forces in the social wars of this century," said Chambers. What happens to the convert from Communism is that one day he "really hears those screams."

The Communist can hear those screams, if he listens, "because in the end there persists in every man, however he may deny it, a scrap of soul," Chambers declared. "If he does not instantly stifle that scrap of soul, he is lost [to the Communist cause]. If he admits it for a moment, he has admitted that there is something greater than the [Communist] vision. If the party senses his weakness -- and the party is peculiarly cunning at sensing such weakness-- it will humiliate him, degrade him, condemn him, expel him. If it can, it will destroy him." It reacts so violently, said Chambers, because the vision of the Communist Party, the vision of all socialists, "the vision of Almighty Man," cannot accommodate "the fact of God."