“We hope they die,” chanted a crowd of leftists in front of the emergency room entrance of St. Francis Hospital in Lynwood, California.
Some attempted to block the ambulance that was bringing two police officers into the hospital to be treated after they were shot in a terrorist attack.
A crowd of white “Black Lives Matter” terrorists approached diners at a restaurant in Washington D.C., raising their fists and demanding they follow suit. When one of the diners refused to raise her fist, the crowd surrounded her and yelled in her face, accusing her of violence.
A similar scene erupted in Rochester, N.Y. This time, the crowd smashed plates and glasses on patrons’ tables.
Whether they support the social causes these protesters claim to represent or not, onlookers grapple with these acts in bewilderment.
What could possess a normal person to commit apparently mindless acts of mob madness like these?
Does anyone sincerely believe that blocking an ambulance or terrorizing diners will help bring about justice or a more perfect union?
An earlier generation of Americans wondered the same thing about the supporters of communism.
What was the appeal of a movement that brought famine, oppression, and death around the world?
Americans could not understand the appeal of communism to the soul, and therefore could not understand the acts it produces.
The answer that Whittaker Chambers gave in 1952 still applies today.
Chambers was a devout communist in the 1930s, spying on the U.S. government with others, including State Department official Alger Hiss.
After Chambers defected from communism and converted to Christianity, he denounced Hiss as a fellow spy, resulting in a salacious libel trial that defined and reflected American attitudes toward communism in the 1950s as much as McCarthyism did.
Due to his attraction to communism, Chambers saw what many Americans failed to grasp.
Man, he said in his autobiography “Witness,” seeks two things: “a reason to live and a reason to die.”
Communism, Chambers argued, gave its adherents what the post-Enlightenment West had not: a moral crusade.
Never mind that the actual results of communism were death and oppression – the idea of communism offered something to fight for, in a way that men will not fight for science or reason or academia or postmodernism.
Of communism’s disciples, Chambers wrote: "The tie that binds them across the frontiers of nations, across barriers of language and differences of class and education, in defiance of religion, morality, truth, law, honor, the weaknesses of the body and the irresolutions of the mind, even unto death, is a simple conviction: It is necessary to change the world".
That last line could have been written about some of today’s protests.
It doesn’t apply to all – there exist selfishly motivated looters who have no interest in a moral cause, as there are protesters who aim to improve justice without dunking into blind fanaticism.
It’s no coincidence that we’ve seen a rise in “social justice warriors” as the postmodern West has taken away historic reasons to be noble warriors.
Communism, Chambers suggested, is a religion, plain and simple, in which man was the measure of all things.
Likewise, some today have a faith-like devotion to the gospel of "fighting systemic racism" in America.
A person does not block an ambulance with critically injured people inside for a mediocre political belief.
He does so – if I can be presumptuous enough to guess – because he sincerely believes that cops are evil and that it is better if they are dead.
In his mind, he fights for a greater moral order, no matter how divorced from reality that order may be. That kind of man is not one onlookers should ignore.
https://thefederalist.com/2020/09/22/a-1930s-communist-spy-can-help-explain-whats-motivating-the-riots/
