The post-Communist conversion experience

Jack Cashill writes:

“There is one experience which most sincere ex-Communists share,” wrote Whittaker Chambers in his classic conversion narrative “Witness,” and that is the epiphany, the road-to-Damascus moment, the instant they realize the life they have been living is a lie.

Chambers memorably quotes one young woman about her father’s Damascus moment: “He was immensely pro-Soviet … and then – you will laugh at me – but you must not laugh at my father – and then – one night – in Moscow – he heard screams. That’s all. Simply one night he heard screams.”

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My journey from the left has had a number of epiphanies, but one that stands out in my mind has to do with the environmental movement.  When I lived in Nova Scotia, a multi-national company was doing uranium exploration in our area.  I was a brand-new journalist and my hippy-back-to-the-lander friends opposed any exploration and warned of the dire consequences of a uranium mine.

I met the geologists who were doing the exploration;  I covered their public meetings.  These guys were scientists who explained how we are living in background radiation that might increase if we sit on a granite boulder or ride in an airplane.  They gave us gadgets like Geiger counters to measure the radiation.

When I told one of my hippy friends she rejected even science books because they were published by big companies.  

The geologists would ask permission to inspect on private property and would leave little pink plastic ribbons tied in the branches to mark the grid they walked.    When I found out that some of my friends were bragging about taking off those ribbons and moving them to their property so they could complain about tresspassing, that was one of my wake up moments on the left's  "the end justifies the means."

I also ran into a lot of would-be revolutionary types when I went to college---the kind of person who spouted doctrine of a political sort and would not deal with you as an individual human being only as a class of person.  Identity politics were the new expression of Marxism.

I bought into the identity politics of feminism and spent several years feeling resentful and enraged.  But then it dawned on me how wrong it is to resent or to blame anyone.   I stopped resenting.  I forgave.  Lo and behold, my politics began to change merely because I was not projecting my own personal conflict onto the world.