Whittaker Chambers---Again an Apostle for the Apocalype?

NRO has Andrew Bostom's article on Whittaker Chamber's importance to America. I just found the book at my in-laws' Residence Home and brought it home. I was going to the pool to read it when I saw Bostom's article which is as true today as it was in 1952 when Chambers wrote the wonderful tragedy of our times.

When, in 1936, General Emilio Mola announced that he would capture Madrid because he had four columns outside the city and a fifth column of sympathizers within, the world pounced on the phrase with the eagerness of a man who has been groping for an important word. The world might better have been stunned as by a tocsin of calamity. For what Mola had done was to indicate the dimension of treason in our time.

Other ages have had their individual traitors — men who from faintheartedness or hope of gain sold out their causes. But in the 20th century, for the first time, men banded together by millions, in movements like fascism and communism, dedicated to the purpose of betraying the institutions they lived under. In the 20th century, treason became a vocation whose modern form was specifically the treason of ideas.

Modern man was challenged to choose between the traditions of a 2,000-year-old Christian civilization and the new totalitarian systems which, in the name of social progress, contended for the allegiance of man’s secular mind. The promise of the new ideas was as old as that serpentine whisper heard in the dawn of the Creation: “You shall become as gods” — for the first traitor was the first man.

Read Bostom's piece to see how the same Fifth Column is trying to use terrorist Islam to leverage common sense out of the "marketplace of ideas."