The Great Liberal Death Wish

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Date:	05 Jan 2006 04:01:19 PM
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The Great Liberal Death Wish
Malcolm Muggeridge
Muggeridge was one of the few western journalists to recognize the evil
of Soviet Communism when most western thinkers were still taken in by
the utopian promises of Marxism. For his honest reporting on the
Stalinist show trials he lost his job and was blacklisted for a time.
He never lost his critical touch.
The Great Liberal Death Wish" is a subject that I've given a lot of
thought to and have written about, and it would be easy for me to read
to you a long piece that I've written on the subject. But somehow in
the atmosphere of this delightful college, I want to have a shot at
just talking about this notion of the great liberal death wish as it
has arisen in my life, as I've seen it, and the deductions I've made
from it. I should also plead guilty to being responsible for the
general heading of these lectures, namely, "The Humane Holocaust: The
Auschwitz Formula. "
Later on I want to say something about all this, showing how this
humane holocaust, this dreadful slaughter that began with 50 million
babies last year, will undoubtedly be extend-ed to the senile old and
the mentally afflicted and mongoloid children, and so on, because of
the large amount of money that maintaining them costs. It is all the
more ironical when one thinks about the holocaust western audiences,
and the German population in particular, have been shuddering over, as
it has been presented on their TV and cinema screens. Note this
compassionate or humane holocaust, if, as I fear, it gains momentum,
will quite put that other in the shade. And, as I shall try to explain,
what is even more ironical, the actual considerations that led to the
German holocaust were not, as is commonly suggested, due to Nazi
terrorism, but were based upon the sort of legislation that advocates
of euthanasia, or "mercy killing," in this country and in western
Europe, are trying to get enacted. It's not true that the German
holocaust was simply a war crime, as it was judged to be at Nuremberg.
In point of fact, it was based upon a perfectly coherent, legally
enacted decree approved and operated by the German medical profession
before the Nazis took over power. In other words, from the point of
view of the Guinness Book of Records you can say that in our mad world
it takes about thirty years to transform a war crime into a
compassionate act.
But I'm going to deal with that later. I want first of all to look at
this question of the great liberal death wish. And I was very delighted
that you should have got here for this CCA program the film on
Dostoevsky for which I did the commentary, because his novel The
Devils[1] is the most extraordinary piece of prophecy about this great
liberal death wish. All the characters in it, the circumstances of it,
irresistibly recall what we mean by the great liberal death wish. You
cannot imagine what a strange experience it was doing that filming in
the USSR. I quoted extensively from the speech that Dostoevsky
delivered when the Pushkin Memorial was unveiled in Moscow, and his
words were considered to be, in terms of then current ideologies, about
the most reactionary words ever spoken. They amounted to a tremendous
onslaught on this very thing that we're talking about, this great
liberal death wish, as it existed in Russia in the latter part of the
last century. The characters in the book match very well the cast of
the liberal death wish in our society and in our time. You even have
the interesting fact that the old liberal, Stephan Trofimovich
Verkovensky, who is a sort of male impersonator of Mrs. Eleanor
Roosevelt, with all the sentimental notions that go therewith, is the
father of Peter Verkovensky, a Baader Meinhof character, based on a
Russian nihilist of Dostoevsky's time, Sergey Nechayef. To me, it's one
of the most extraordinary pieces of modern prophecy that has ever been.
Especially when Peter Verkovensky says, as he does, that what we need
are a few generations of debauchery - debauchery at its most vicious
and most horrible - followed by a little sweet bloodletting, and then
the turmoil will begin. I put it to you that this bears a rather uneasy
resemblance to the sort of thing that is happening at this moment in
the western world.
Now I want to throw my mind back to my childhood, to the sitting room
in the little suburban house in south London where I grew up. On
Saturday evenings my father and his cronies would assemble there, and
they would plan together the downfall of the capitalist system and the
replacement of it by one which was just and humane and egalitarian and
peaceable, etc. These were my first memories of a serious conversation
about our circumstances in the world. I used to hide in a big chair and
hope not to be noticed, because I was so interested. And I accepted
completely the views of these good men, that once they were able to
shape the world as they wanted it to be, they would create a perfect
state of affairs in which peace would reign, prosperity would expand,
men would be brotherly, and considerate, and there would be no
exploitation of man by man, nor any ruthless oppression of individuals.
And I firmly believed that, once their plans were fulfilled, we would
realize an idyllic state of affairs of such a nature. They were good
men, they were honest men, they were sincere men. Unlike their
prototypes on the continent of Europe, they were men from the chapels.
It was a sort of spillover from the practice of nonconformist
Christianity, not a brutal ideology, and I was entirely convinced that
such a brotherly, contented, loving society would come to pass once
they were able to establish themselves in power.
My father used to speak a lot at open air meetings, and when I was very
small I used to follow him around because I adored him, as I still do.
He was a very wonderful and good man. He'd had a very harsh upbringing
himself, and this was his dream of how you could transform human
society so that human beings, instead of maltreating one another and
exploiting one another, would be like brothers. I remember he used to
make quite good jokes at these outdoor meetings when we had set up our
little platform, and a few small children and one or two passers-by had
gathered briefly to listen. One joke I particularly appreciated and
used to wait for even though I had heard a hundred times ran like this:
"Well ladies and gentlemen," my father would begin, "you tell me one
thing. Why is it that it is his majesty's navy and his majesty's
stationery office and his majesty's customs but it's the national debt?
Why isn't the debt his majesty's?" It always brought the house down.
Such was my baptism into the notion of a kingdom of Heaven on earth,
into what I was going to understand ultimately to be the great liberal
death wish. Inevitably, my father's heroes were the great intellectuals
of the time, who banded themselves together in what was called the
Fabian Society, of which he was a member - a very active member. For
instance, Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Harold Laski, people of that sort.
All the leftist elite, like Sydney - and Beatrice Webb, belonged to
this Fabian Society, and in my father's eyes they were princes among
men. I accepted his judgment.
Once I had a slight shock when he took me to a meeting of the Fabian
Society where H. G. Wells was speaking, and I can remember vividly his
high squeaky voice as he said - and it stuck in my mind long afterward
-"We haven't got time to read the Bible. We haven't got time to read
the history of this obscure nomadic tribe in the Middle East."
Subsequently, when I learned of the things that Wells had got time for,
the observation broke upon me in all its richness.
Anyway, that for me was how my impressions of life began. I was sent to
Cambridge University, which of course in those days consisted very
largely of boys from what we call public schools, and you call private
schools. Altogether, it was for me a quite different sort of milieu,
where the word socialist in those days - this was in 1920 when I went
to Cambridge at 17 - was almost unknown. We who had been to a
government secondary school and then to Cambridge were regarded as an
extraordinary and rather distasteful phenomenon. But my views about how
the world was going to be made better remained firmly entrenched in the
talk of my father and his cronies. Of course, in the meantime had come
the First World War, to be followed by an almost insane outburst of
expectations that henceforth peace would prevail in the world, that we
would have a League of Nations to ensure that there would be no more
wars, and gradually everybody would get more prosperous and everything
would be better and better. That rather lugubrious figure Woodrow
Wilson arrived on the scene, to be treated with the utmost veneration.
I can see him now, lantern-jawed, wearing his tall hat - somehow for me
he didn't fill the bill of a knight in shining armor who was going to
lead us to everlasting peace. Somehow the flavor of Princeton about him
detracted from that picture, but still I accepted him as an awesome
figure.
My time at Cambridge was a rather desolate time. I never much enjoyed
being educated, and have continued to believe that education is a
rather overrated experience. Perhaps this isn't the most suitable place
in the world to say that, but such is my opinion. I think that it is
part of the liberal dream that somehow or other - and it was certainly
my father's view - people, in becoming educated, instead of on Sundays
racing their dogs or studying racing forms, or anything like that,
would take to singing madrigals or reading Paradise Lost aloud. This is
another dream that didn't quite come true.
Anyway, from Cambridge I went off to India, to teach at a Christian
college there, and I must say it was an extremely agreeable experience.
The college was in a remote part of what was then Travancore, but is
now Kerala. It was not one of the missionary colleges, but associated
with the indigenous Syrian Church, which you may know is a very ancient
church, dating back to the fourth century, and now there are a million
or more Syrian Christians. In its way it was quite an idyllic
existence, but of course one came up against naked power for the first
time. I had never thought of power before as something separate from
the rest of life. But in India, under the British raj, with a
relatively few white men ruling over three or four hundred million
Indians, I came face to face with power unrelated to elections or any
other representative device in the great liberal dream that became the
great liberal death wish. However, it was a pleasant time, and of
course the Indian nationalist movement was beginning, and Ghandi came
to the college where I was teaching. This extraordinary little gargoyle
of a man appeared, and held forth, and everybody got tremendously
excited, and shouted against Imperialism, and the Empire in which at
that time the great majority of the British people firmly believed, and
which they thought would continue forever. If you ventured to say, as I
did on the boat going to India, that it might come to an end before
long, they laughed you to scorn, being firmly convinced that God had
decided that the British should rule over a quarter of the world, and
that nothing could ever change this state of affairs. Which again
opened up a new vista about what this business of power signified, and
how it worked, not as a theory, but in practice. We used to boast in
those days that we had an Empire on which the sun never set, and now we
have a commonwealth on which it never rises, and I can't quite say
which concept strikes me as being the more derisory.
That was India, and then I came back to England and for a time taught
in an elementary school in Birmingham, and married my wife Kitty. (I
wish she were here today because she's very nice. We've been married
now for 51 years, so I am entitled to speak well of her.) She was the
niece of Beatrice and Sydney Webb, so it was like marrying into a sort
of aristocracy of the Left. After our wedding, we went off to Egypt,
where I taught at the University of Cairo, and it was there that the
dreadful infection of journalism got into my system. Turning aside from
the honorable occupation of teaching, I started writing articles about
the wrongs of the Egyptian people, how they were clamoring, and rightly
so, for a democratic setup, and how they would never be satisfied with
less than one man one vote and all that went therewith. I never heard
any Egyptian say that this was his position, but I used to watch those
old pashas in Groppi's cafe' smoking their hubble-bubble pipes, and
imagined that under their tabooshes was a strong feeling that they
would never for an instant countenance anything less than full
representative government. That at least was what I wrote in my
articles, and they went flying over to England, and, like homing
pigeons, in through the windows of the Guardian office in Manchester,
at that time a high citadel of liberalism. That was where the truth was
being expounded, that was where enlightenment reigned. In due course I
was asked to join the editorial staff of the Guardian, which to me was
a most marvelous thing. I may say that the work of teaching at Cairo
University was not an arduous job, essentially for three reasons. One
was that the students didn't understand English; the second that they
were nearly always on strike or otherwise engaged in political
demonstrations, and thirdly they were often stupified with hashish. So
I had a lot of leisure on my hands.
Incidentally, to be serious for a moment, it seems to me a most
extraordinary thing that at that time you wouldn't have found anybody,
Egyptian or English or anybody else, who wasn't absolutely clear in his
mind that hashish was a most appalling and disastrous addiction. So you
can imagine how strange it was forty years later for me to hear life
peeresses and people like that insisting that hashish didn't do any
harm to anybody, and was even beneficial. I see that in Canada it is
going to be legalized, which will mean one more sad, unnecessary hazard
comes into our world.
Anyway, these were the golden days of liberalism when the Manchester
Guardian was widely read, and even believed. Despite all its misprints,
you could make out roughly speaking what it was saying, and what we
typed out was quite likely, to our great satisfaction, to be quoted in
some paper in - Baghdad or Smyrna as being the opinion of our very
influential organ of enlightened liberalism. I remember my first day I
was there, and somehow it symbolizes the whole experience. I was asked
to write a leader - a short leader of about 120 words - on corporal
punishment. At some head-masters' conference, it seemed, words had been
spoken about corporal punishment and I was to produce appropriate
comment. So I put my head into the room next to mine, and asked the man
who was working there: "What's our line on corporal punishment?"
Without looking up from his type-writer, he replied: "The same as
capital, only more so." So I knew exactly what to tap out, you see.
That was how I got into the shocking habit of pontificating about what
was going on in the world; observing that the Greeks did not seem to
want an orderly government, or that one despaired sometimes of the
Irish having any concern for law and order; weighty pronouncement
tapped out on a typewriter, deriving from nowhere, and for all one
knew, concerning no one.
We were required to end anything we wrote on a hopeful note, because
liberalism is a hopeful creed. And so, however appalling and black the
situation that we described, we would always conclude with some
sentence like: "It is greatly to be hoped that moderate men of all
shades of opinion will draw together, and that wiser councils may yet
prevail." How many times I gave expression to such jejune hopes! Well,
I soon grew weary of this, because it seemed to me that immoderate men
were rather strongly in evidence, and I couldn't see that wiser
councils were prevailing anywhere. The depression was on by that time,
I'm talking now of 1932--33. It was on especially in Lancashire, and it
seemed as though our whole way of life was cracking up, and, of course,
I looked across at the USSR with a sort of longing, thinking that there
was an alternative, some other way in which people could live, and I
managed to maneuver matters so that I was sent to Moscow as the
Guardian correspondent, arriving there fully prepared to see in the
Soviet regime the answer to all our troubles, only to discover in a
very short time that though it might be an answer, it was a very
unattractive one.
It's difficult to convey to you what a shock this was, realizing that
what I had supposed to be the new brotherly way of life my father and
his cronies had imagined long before, was simply on examination an
appalling tyranny, in which the only thing that mattered, the only
reality, was power. So again, like the British raj, in the USSR I was
confronted with power as the absolute and ultimate arbiter. However,
that was a thing that one could take in one's stride. How I first came
to conceive the notion of the great liberal death wish was not at all
in consequence of what was happening in the USSR, which, as I came to
reflect after-ward, was simply the famous lines in the Magnificat
working out, "He hath put down the mighty from their seat and hath
exalted the humble and meek," whereupon, of course, the humble and meek
become mighty in their turn and have to be put down. That was just
history, something that happens in the world; people achieve power,
exercise power, abuse power, are booted out of power, and then it all
begins again. The thing that impressed me, and the thing that touched
off my awareness of the great liberal death wish, my sense that western
man was, as it were, sleep-walking into his own ruin, was the
extraordinary performance of the liberal intelligentsia, who, in those
days, flocked to Moscow like pilgrims to Mecca. And they were one and
all utterly delighted and excited by what they saw there. Clergymen
walked serenely and happily through the anti-god museums, politicians
claimed that no system of society could possibly be more equitable and
just, lawyers admired Soviet justice, and economists praised the Soviet
economy. They all wrote articles in this sense which we resident
journalists knew were completely nonsensical. It's impossible to
exaggerate to you the impression that this made on me. Mrs. Webb had
said to Kitty and me: "You'll find that in the USSR Sydney and I are
icons. " As a matter of fact they were, Marxist icons.
How could this be? How could this extraordinary credulity exist in the
minds of people who were adulated by one and all as maestros of
discernment and judgment? It was from that moment that I began to get
the feeling that a liberal view of life was not what I'd supposed it to
be - a creative movement which would shape the future - but rather a
sort of death wish. How otherwise could you explain how people, in
their own country ardent for equality, bitter opponents of capital
punishment and all for more humane treatment of people in prison,
supporters, in fact, of every good cause, should in the USSR prostrate
themselves before a regime ruled over brutal-ly and oppressively and
arbitrarily by a privileged party oligarchy? I still ponder over the
mystery of how men displaying critical intelligence in other fields
could be so astonishingly deluded. I tell you, if ever you are looking
for a good subject for a thesis, you could get a very fine one out of a
study of the books that were written by people like the Dean of
Canterbury, Julian Huxley, Harold Laski, Bernard Shaw, or the Webbs
about the Soviet regime. In the process you would come upon a
compendium of fatuity such as has seldom, if ever, existed on earth.
And I would really recommend it; after all, the people who wrote these
books were, and continue to be regarded as, pundits, whose words must
be very, very seriously heeded and considered.
I recall in their yellow jackets a famous collection in England called
the Left Book Club. You would be amazed at the gullibility that's
expressed. We foreign journalists in Moscow used to amuse ourselves, as
a matter of fact, by competing with one another as to who could wish
upon one of these intelligentsia visitors to the USSR the most
out-rageous fantasy. We would tell them, for instance, that the
shortage of milk in Moscow was entirely due to the fact that all milk
was given nursing mothers - things like that. If they put it in the
articles they subsequently wrote, then you'd score a point. One story I
floated myself, for which I received considerable acclaim, was that the
huge queues outside food shops came about because the Soviet workers
were so ardent in building Socialism that they just wouldn't rest, and
the only way the government could get them to rest for even two or
three hours was organizing a queue for them to stand in. I laugh at it
all now, but at the time you can imagine what a shock it was to someone
like myself, who had been brought up to regard liberal intellectuals as
the samurai, the absolute elite, of the human race, to find that they
could be taken in by deceptions which a half-witted boy would see
through in an instant. I never got over that; it always remained in my
mind as something that could never be erased. I could never henceforth
regard the intelligentsia as other than credulous fools who nonetheless
became the media's prophetic voices, their heirs and successors
remaining so still. That's when I began to think seriously about the
great liberal death wish.
In due course, I came back to England to await the Second World War, in
the course of which I found myself engaged in Intelligence duties. And
let me tell you that if there is one thing more fantastical than news,
it is Intelligence. News itself is a sort of fantasy; and when you
actually go collecting news, you realize that this is so. In a certain
sense, you create news; you dream news up yourself and then send it.
But that's nothing to the fantasy of Intelligence. Of the two, I would
say that news seems really quite a sober and considered commodity
compared with your offerings when you're an Intelligence agent.
Anyway, when in 1945 I found myself a civilian again, I tried to sort
out my thoughts about the great wave of optimism that followed the
Second World War - for me, a repeat performance. It was then that I
came to realize how, in the name of progress and compassion, the most
terrible things were going to be done, preparing the way for the great
humane holocaust, about which I have spoken. There was, it seemed to
me, a built in propensity in this liberal world-view whereby the
opposite of what was intended came to pass. Take the case of education.
Education was the great mumbo--jumbo of progress, the assumption being
that educating people would make them grow better and better, more and
more objective and intelligent. Actually, as more and more money is
spent on education, illiteracy is increasing. And I wouldn't be at all
surprised if it didn't end up with virtually the whole revenue of the
western countries being spent on education, and a condition of almost
total illiteracy resulting therefrom. It's quite on the cards.
Now I want to try to get to grips with this strange state of affairs.
Let's look again at the humane holocaust. What happened in Germany was
that long before the Nazis got into power, a great propaganda was
undertaken to sterilize people who were considered to be useless or a
liability to society, and after that to introduce what they called
"mercy killing." This happened long before the Nazis set up their
extermination camps at Auschwitz and elsewhere, and was based upon the
highest humanitarian considerations. You see what I'm getting at? On a
basis of liberal-humanism, there is no creature in the universe greater
than man, and the future of the human race rests only with human beings
themselves, which leads infallibly to some sort of suicidal situation.
It's to me quite clear that that is so, the evidence is on every hand.
The efforts that men make to bring about their own happiness, their own
ease of life, their own self-indulgence, will in due course produce the
opposite, leading me to the absolutely inescapable conclusion that
human beings cannot live and operate in this world without some concept
of a being greater than themselves, and of a purpose which transcends
their own egotistic or greedy desires. Once you eliminate the notion of
a God, a creator, once you eliminate the notion that the creator has a
purpose for us, and that life consists essentially in fulfilling that
purpose, then you are bound, as Pascal points out, to induce the
megalomania of which we've seen so many manifestations in our time - in
the crazy dictators, as in the lunacies of people who are rich, or who
consider themselves to be important or celebrated in the western world.
Alternatively, human beings relapse into mere carnality, into being
animals. I see this process going on irresistably, of which the
holocaust is only just one example. If you envisage men as being only
men, you are bound to see human society, not in Christian terms as a
family, but as a factory--farm in which the only consideration that
matters is the well--being of the livestock and the prosperity or
productivity of the enterprise. That's where you land yourself. And it
is in that situation that western man is increasingly finding himself.
This might seem to be a despairing conclusion, but it isn't, you know,
actually. First of all, the fact that we can't work out the liberal
dream in practical terms is not bad news, but good news. Because if you
could work it out, life would be too banal, too tenth-rate to be worth
bothering about. Apart from that, we have been given the most
extraordinary sign of the truth of things, which I continually find
myself thinking about. This is that the most perfect and beautiful
expressions of man's spiritual aspirations come, not from the liberal
dream in any of its manifestations, but from people in the forced labor
camps of the USSR. And this is the most extraordinary phenomenon, and
one that of course receives absolutely no attention in the media. From
the media point of view it's not news, and in any case the media do not
want to know about it. But this is the fact for which there is a
growing amount of evidence. I was reading about it in a long essay by a
Yugoslav writer Mihajlo Mihajlov,[2] who spent some years in a prison
in Yugoslavia. He cites case after case of people who, like
Solzhenitsyn, say that enlightenment came to them in the forced labor
camps. They understood what freedom was when they had lost their
freedom, they understood what the purpose of life was when they seemed
to have no future. They say, moreover, that when it's a question of
choosing whether to save your soul or your body, the man who chooses to
save his soul gathers strength thereby to go on living, whereas the man
who chooses to save his body at the expense of his soul loses both body
and soul. In other words, fulfilling exactly what our Lord said, that
he who hates his life in this world shall keep his life for all
eternity, as those who love their lives in this world will assuredly
lose them. Now, that's where I see the light in our darkness. There's
an image I love - if the whole world were to be covered with concrete,
there still would be some cracks in it, and through these cracks green
shoots would come. The testimonies from the labor camps are the green
shoots we can see in the world, breaking out from the monolithic power
now dominating ever greater areas of it. In contradistinction, this is
the liberal death wish, holding out the fallacious and ultimately
destructive hope that we can construct a happy, fulfilled life in terms
of our physical and material needs, and in the moral and intellectual
dimensions of our mortality.
I feel so strongly at the end of my life that nothing can happen to us
in any circumstances that is not part of God's purpose for us.
Therefore, we have nothing to fear, nothing to worry about, except that
we should rebel against His purpose, that we should fail to detect it
and fail to establish some sort of relationship with Him and His divine
will. On that basis, there can be no black despair, no throwing in of
our hand. We can watch the institutions and social structures of our
time collapse - and I think you who are young are fated to watch them
collapse - and we can reckon with what seems like an irresistably
growing power of materialism and materialist societies. But, it will
not happen that that is the end of the story. As St. Augustine said -
and I love to think of it when he received the news in Carthage that
Rome had been sacked: Well, if that's happened, it's a great
catas-trophe, but we must never forget that the earthly cities that men
build they destroy, but there is also the City of God which men didn't
build and can't destroy. And he devoted the next seventeen years of his
life to working out the relationship between the earthly city and the
City of God - the earthly city where we live for a short time, and the
City of God whose citizens we are for all eternity.
You know, it's a funny thing, but when you're old, as I am, there are
all sorts of extremely pleasant things that happen to you. One of them
is, you realize that history is nonsense, but I won't go into that now.
The pleasantest thing of all is that you wake up in the night at about,
say, three a.m., and you find that you are half in and half out of your
battered old carcass. And it seems quite a toss-up whether you go back
and resume full occupancy of your mortal body, or make off toward the
bright glow you see in the sky, the lights of the City of God. In this
limbo between life and death, you know beyond any shadow of doubt that,
as an infinitesimal particle of God's creation, you are a participant
in God's purpose for His creation, and that that purpose is loving and
not hating, is creative and not destructive, is everlasting and not
temporal, is universal and not particular. With this certainty comes an
extraordinary sense of comfort and joy.
Nothing that happens in this world need shake that feeling; all the
happenings in this world, including the most terrible disasters and
suffering, will be seen in eternity as in some mysterious way a
blessing, as a part of God's love. We ourselves are part of that love,
we belong to that scene, and only in so far as we belong to that scene
does our existence here have any reality or any worth. All the rest is
fantasy - -whether the fantasy of power which we see in the
authoritarian states around us, or the fantasy of the great liberal
death wish in terms of affluence and self-indulgence. The essential
feature, and necessity of life is to know reality, which means knowing
God. Otherwise our mortal existence is, as Saint Teresa of Avila said,
no more than a night in a second--class hotel.
1. Sometimes translated as The Possessed.
2. "Mystical Experience of the Labor Camps," included in his excellent
book Underground Notes.
At the time of the original publication, Malcolm Muggeridge was quite
simply one of the most delightful, articulate, brilliant thinkers in
the world. His career has included journalist and Moscow correspondent
for the Manchester Guardian; agent for British Intelligence in Africa
during World War II; Liaison - Officer with the Free French; Deputy
Editor of the Daily Telegraph; Editor of Punch; and Book Reviewer for
Esquire. In addition to several anthologies of his own writings, he is
a published novelist and playwright. His television career began when
television began, and has continued in the United States, the United
Kingdom and throughout the English-speaking world. In England he had
worked extensively with the B.B.C.
.

User: "Paul Duca"
Title: Re: The Great Liberal Death Wish	05 Jan 2006 09:14:02 PM

` I thought is was the GODLIEST of people who yearned for death,
as it would be the only time something good will ever happen to them.
Paul
.

User: "tg"
Title: Re: The Great Liberal Death Wish	05 Jan 2006 06:16:09 PM

"words of truth" <truth760@lycos.com> wrote in message news:1136498399.514341.53810@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com...

http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/articles/MuggeridgeLiberal.php

The Great Liberal Death Wish

Malcolm Muggeridge

<snip>
christ talk about long winded waffle.
err....what exactly was the point you were trying to make?
put it in a couple of sentences this time.
.

User: "Spartakus"
Title: Re: The Great Liberal Death Wish	05 Jan 2006 05:04:21 PM

"words of truth" <truth760@lycos.com> wrote...

http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/articles/MuggeridgeLiberal.php

The Great Liberal Death Wish

Malcolm Muggeridge

Muggeridge writes beautiful, eloquent remininces of his life, but his
arguments concerning the existence of a "liberal death wish" don't make a
lick of sense. Try to get out of the habit of mistaking rhetoric for
reason.
.

User: "Bonfire of the Deities..."
Title: Re: The Great Liberal Death Wish	05 Jan 2006 05:18:27 PM

"Spartakus" <no.spam@this.address> wrote in message
news:dpk8lm$emi$0@pita.alt.net...

"words of truth" <truth760@lycos.com> wrote...

http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/articles/MuggeridgeLiberal.php

The Great Liberal Death Wish

Malcolm Muggeridge

....has been dead since 1990. Can't this idiot find *anything* on his side
that's not rotted away to nothing...?
Bonf.
.

User: "Mimi Cohen"
Title: Re: The Great Liberal Death Wish	05 Jan 2006 06:14:36 PM

'Bonfire of the Deities...' wrote:

"Spartakus" <no.spam@this.address> wrote in message
news:dpk8lm$emi$0@pita.alt.net...

"words of truth" <truth760@lycos.com> wrote...

http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/articles/MuggeridgeLiberal.php

The Great Liberal Death Wish

Malcolm Muggeridge

...has been dead since 1990. Can't this idiot find *anything* on his side
that's not rotted away to nothing...?

Bonf.

Apparently not, but what can be expected from a person who falsely
advertises himself as "words of truth"?
.

User: "Christopher A. Lee"
Title: Re: The Great Liberal Death Wish	05 Jan 2006 05:30:51 PM

On Thu, 05 Jan 2006 23:18:27 GMT, "'Bonfire of the Deities...'"
<Bonfire@tert.com> wrote:

"Spartakus" <no.spam@this.address> wrote in message
news:dpk8lm$emi$0@pita.alt.net...

"words of truth" <truth760@lycos.com> wrote...

http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/articles/MuggeridgeLiberal.php

The Great Liberal Death Wish

Malcolm Muggeridge

...has been dead since 1990. Can't this idiot find *anything* on his side
that's not rotted away to nothing...?

I always found him ptetentious and shallow.

Bonf.

User: "Bonfire of the Deities..."
Title: Re: The Great Liberal Death Wish	05 Jan 2006 05:37:19 PM

"Christopher A. Lee" <calee@optonline.net> wrote in message
news:tvarr111jiq6srejgc2vhrsj6d0uo2p85u@4ax.com...

On Thu, 05 Jan 2006 23:18:27 GMT, "'Bonfire of the Deities...'"
<Bonfire@tert.com> wrote:

"Spartakus" <no.spam@this.address> wrote in message
news:dpk8lm$emi$0@pita.alt.net...

"words of truth" <truth760@lycos.com> wrote...

http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/articles/MuggeridgeLiberal.php

The Great Liberal Death Wish

Malcolm Muggeridge

...has been dead since 1990. Can't this idiot find *anything* on his side
that's not rotted away to nothing...?

I always found him pretentious and shallow.

Me too! And I originally intended to write:
'...has been dead since 1990 -- and was pretty fucking useless even before
then.'
But I was just in too a good a mood...!
Bonf.
.

User: "Mimi Cohen"
Title: Re: The Great Liberal Death Wish	05 Jan 2006 06:15:18 PM

'Bonfire of the Deities...' wrote:

"Christopher A. Lee" <calee@optonline.net> wrote in message
news:tvarr111jiq6srejgc2vhrsj6d0uo2p85u@4ax.com...

On Thu, 05 Jan 2006 23:18:27 GMT, "'Bonfire of the Deities...'"
<Bonfire@tert.com> wrote:

"Spartakus" <no.spam@this.address> wrote in message
news:dpk8lm$emi$0@pita.alt.net...

"words of truth" <truth760@lycos.com> wrote...

http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/articles/MuggeridgeLiberal.php

The Great Liberal Death Wish

Malcolm Muggeridge

...has been dead since 1990. Can't this idiot find *anything* on his side
that's not rotted away to nothing...?

I always found him pretentious and shallow.

Me too! And I originally intended to write:
'...has been dead since 1990 -- and was pretty fucking useless even before
then.'
But I was just in too a good a mood...!

Bonf.

:)
.

User: "kathryn"
Title: why is words of truth such a troll	06 Jan 2006 11:33:27 AM

Mistreatment by his parents perhaps?
.

User: "Kurt Nicklas"
Title: Re: why is words of truth such a troll	07 Jan 2006 09:24:30 PM

"kathryn" <nospam@here.com> wrote in message
news:dpm9l7$8p4$1@nwrdmz02.dmz.ncs.ea.ibs-infra.bt.com...