Kronstadt 21

Moviefone mixes Whittaker Chambers into Hollywood’s Cold War

David Chambers — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 02:53:28 +0000

Did Whittaker Chambers suffer from a paranoid image of the Cold War?

Read comment here, which link back to Moviefone article.

Red Conspirator, by Thomas Sakmyster

David Chambers — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 04:02:33 +0000

From August 3, 1948, until today, America has had to wait to learn more about the head of Soviet espionage in Washington during the 1930s.

On that day, Whittaker Chambers (my grandfather) told the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) under subpoena…

>Read more

Chambers on Reinsch on Chambers

David Chambers — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 14:15:17 +0000

…I would go further. More than muffling Whittaker Chambers’s intellectual thought, Reinsch strangles it. He narrows Chambers’s vistas to his own private passion: conversion passages in Witness (page 83). Fixation aside, nothing is new… Reinsch ditches insight for personal bias.

>Read more

(Reprint from “Letters: Muffled—or Strangled?,” published in the January 2011 issue of The New Criterion)

Whittaker Chambers, by Richard Reinsch

David Chambers — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 23:59:45 +0000

Reinsch’s treatment falls short… Where Chambers writes with passion and palpability, Reinsch offers fuzz. His prose muffles the screams…

> Read more here

Louis Fischer on Kronstadt

David Chambers — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 21:40:38 +0000

The 1949 book The God That Failed contains Louis Fischer‘s definition of “Kronstadt”: a moment in which communists or fellow-travelers decide not just to leave the Communist Party but to oppose it as anti-communists.

Editor Richard Crossman said in the book’s introduction: “The Kronstadt rebels called for Soviet power free from Bolshevik dominance” (p. x).

After describing the actual Kronstadt rebellion, Fischer spent many pages applying the concept it to some to subsequent former-communists—including himself:

What counts decisively is the “Kronstadt.” Until its advent, one may waver emotionally or doubt intellectually or even reject the cause altogether in one’s mind and yet refuse to attack it. I had no “Kronstadt” for many years” (p. 204)

Where is Kronstadt?

David Chambers — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 12:52:29 +0000

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