“I know that I am leaving the winning side for the losing side,” Soviet spy-turned-anti-communist hero Whittaker Chambers famously declared, “but it is better to die on the losing side than to live under communism.”
The kind of communism to which Chambers was referring is not quite what threatens the free world today. The Soviet Union was defeated in the Cold War, but the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is proving to be a more sophisticated adversary, in what might best be called a “Cowed War” against us, corrupting and destroying free society from the inside, often by intimidation.
An apropos symbol for mainland China’s society is not, as in Soviet Russia, an endless line of people extending across Red Square to buy inferior consumer goods at Moscow’s infamous GUM Store; It could instead be any typical American store with shelves filled with Chinese-made junk; or a simpering Hollywood studio flunky looking over the shoulder of an editor in the cutting room so as to remove or doctor all allusions to even the subtlest offenses against the CCP in new American movies.
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