Tragedy in Culture Wars Defined --Whittaker Chambers

"Crime, violence, infamy are not tragedy. Tragedy occurs when a human soul awakes and seeks, in suffering and pain, to free itself from crime, violence, infamy, even at the cost of life. The struggle is the tragedy--not defeat or death. That is why the spectacle of tragedy has always filled men, not with despair, but with a sense of hope and exaltation... [T]his tragedy will have been for nothing unless men understand it rightly, and from it the world takes hope and heart to begin its own struggle with the evil that besets it from within and from without, unless it faces the fact that the world, the whole world, is sick unto death and that, among other things, [the Hiss] Case has turned a finger of fierce light into the suddenly opened and reeking body of our time."

Whittaker Chambers, Witness, New York: Random House, 1952, 4-5.

"I have testified against [Mr. Hiss] with remorse and pity."

Cf. whittakerchambers.org