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Caleb Mills
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12/13/2002
14:02:19
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 Subject: Muggeridge on Liberalism
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In the mid-1960s Malcolm Muggeridge wrote a column or essay which was published on both sides of the Atlantic. He argued, even then, that in the grand scheme of things, liberalism had been and would continue to be more destructive to Western Civilization than communism, National Socialism, fascism, etc. He was writing only about twenty years after the end of WW II, and given the human slaughter resulting from the war and achieved by the regimes of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, his contention seemed preposterous. Even American conservatives at that time, e.g., WFB, although savoring the attack on liberalism, thought that MM had indulged in the journalist's prerogative for exaggeration. Given the comments frequently made at VFR, was MM exaggerating?
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Jim Newland
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12/13/2002
21:10:31
| RE: Muggeridge on Liberalism
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Clearly not, if "destruction" is measured by something more than a mere body count. Of course, even then he may have been right, given the promotion of abortion, activities which lead to AIDS, and etc. that has come from the liberal left.
But there again, we'd have to be clear about what he meant by "liberalism." I haven't read the essay in question, so I don't know. If it's more or less what we conventionally mean by the term then I can't see that he was exaggerating. Our civilization seems to be on its last legs and it wasn't Communism or Nazism that put us there.
(That said, it's true that many features of modern liberalism are shared by Communism and other totalitarian schemes, but if Muggeridge himself was making a hard distinction between these ideologies, then I can only follow his lead in answering the question posed.)
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