“sharp-taloned hawk on the subject of Islamic terrorism”

Pah! Warmongering Trotskyite neo-con would be more accurate. Of course it should also be added that Hitchens is one of the most vicious of the rabid, Christophobic atheists churning out screed after screed these days. He is an anti-Catholic bigot. Shame on any ‘conservative’ who wants to make common cause with him.

BTW, I recently read Utopia, to a person of the late Middle Ages it would seem a happy place, it stuck me as decidely Stalinist.

“When you swallow that dragon dust collectively, you reveal yourself as a chump and a sucker, one of those people P.T. Barnum said was born every minute”

Now we wait in horror to see if our expression of interest in peace is enough to deflect war’s interest in us, and hope that the economy can be grown from the bottom-up, and pray that American jobs can be protected while engaging in an increasingly global economy…

by Malcolm Muggeridge

Men do wrong to lament the flight

of time, complaining that it passes

too quickly and failing to perceive

that its period is sufficiently long;

but a good memory, with which

nature had endowed us, causes

everything that is long past to

appear to us to be present.

LEONARDO DA VINCI

INTRODUCTION

I wrote the last pages of The Thirties in December 1939, in

a barrack hut at Ash Vale, near Aldershot. It was the

depot of the Military Police, to whom at that time we,

the embryonic Intelligence Corps, known then as Field

Security, were attached. The surrounding scrubland country

remains fixed in my mind as particularly desolate and

stale, as though troops had been tramping over it for

centuries past, stunting its growth and drying up its

fertility. Aldershot, likewise, I recall as a place of dull

streets echoing with heavy footsteps from whose sombre

gloom one turned with relief into the lights and sounds

and human throng of public bars.

The Military Police, especially their warrant officers, had

the greatest contempt for us Field Security men. From their

point of view, we were a scruffy, miscellaneous lot, who

wore our uniforms awry, made a pitiful showing on

the barrack square, and nonetheless gained promotion

all too quickly, sprouting overnight with stripes and

other insignia of rank. We had been recruited as a result

of a newspaper advertisement for linguists; in England

the surest way of assembling oddities and delinquents,

ranging between carpet-sellers from Smyrna, travel agency

couriers, unfrocked clergymen, language teachers and

free-lance journalists.

Seated on my barrack-hut bed, one of fourteen, I

scribbled out the last pages of The Thirties; an ageing

private, clad in breeches, puttees, heavy boots and a highnecked

tunic (battledress was not yet on issue), with

thick combinations underneath to protect against the

winter’s cold. At the time, I assumed myself to be an

object of some curiosity among my fellow-privates, who,

as I supposed, took me to be one of those poor creatures

so domestically tied that I felt bound to write interminable

letters home. When I got to know them better, it

turned out that they were nearly all practising or manque

writers themselves, and knew only too well what I was up

to. With the occupational envy of the trade, they hoped, I

am sure that my zealous efforts in such unpropitious cir-

cumstances would soon falter and come to nothing. They

need not have worried. I scarcely wrote another word

from then on till after the war’s end.

It is one of the great illusions of war that, by participating

in it, one will escape from the sort of life one has

hitherto lived and the sort of companionship one has

hitherto found. Not so. As the great process of sorting

everyone out goes on, one necessarily soon finds oneself

back in one’s own milieu. An egghead came I into

this world, and an egghead shall I depart thence. A

chance conversation in the N.A.A.F.I. with a burly lancecorporal

who, in my eyes, bore every mark of authentic

proletarian origins, would, sure as fate, soon get round to

The Waste Land and Virginia Woolf. When I had been at

Ash Vale for some months, and attained the acting local

rank of C.S.M., I was instructed to meet an officer from

the War Office at the local railway station, who was

visiting us on some special mission. I pressed my uniform

until it almost stood up of itself; I polished my belt and

the crown on my sleeve until they shone like the morning

sun; the toes of my boots, treated with a hot spoon,

likewise gleamed. As the officer descended from a first-class

railway carriage I gave him a salute clamorous enough

to be heard a mile away. He nonchalantly returned it

and we got into a waiting motor car; he at the back, and

I in front beside the driver. As we drove along, I

examined him in the driving-mirror, and seemed to find

something familiar in his sensitive, intelligent, vaguely

melancholy countenance. He was doing the same thing

to me. The moment of recognition was mutual and

instantaneous. It was Edward Crankshaw. Afterwards,

he told me that my terrific salute led him to reflect that

old sweats such as he supposed me to be were the backbone

of the British Army. To the consternation of our

driver, we began to fall about in the car in a condition

of hopeless mirth at the unconscious deception we had

practised on one another. I believe I never took the war,

certainly not the army, seriously again.

Though I did not realise it at the time, no conditions

could have been more appropriate for concluding a study

of the Thirties. As a pseudo-warrior in a still pseudo-war

(my family were living near Battle, in Sussex, so that my

leave-pass would be made out ‘for the purpose of proceed-

ing to Battle’; about the only British soldier, as I used

to reflect, then so bent) I was ideally placed to survey the

last phases of the decade which had just passed. At the

time it seemed otherwise. I anticipated an impending

Judgment Day, and even asked myself whether it was

‘ worth while bothering to complete a manuscript which

was bound never to be published, and which in any

case would almost certainly be destroyed in the holocaust

from the air, long prophesied by all the experts, and

expected at any moment. What I failed to realise was

that Judgment Day had corne and gone, unnoticed. When

the holocaust belatedly occurred, it only fell upon what

was already a wasteland; like the bombardment of Pompeii

in the course of the Italian campaign, leaving traces of

bullet marks on walls volcanically blitzed many centuries

before.

However, I did finish the book; rather cursorily, as a

matter of fact, and it was duly published, with, as things

turned out, a certain measure of success, even though its

appearance was swamped by the march of events. By that

time, we had been transferred from Ash Vale to the

Island of Sheppey, where we constituted the sole garrison

against an anticipated Panzer invasion, having been issued

for the purpose with steel helmets, twelve rounds of

ammunition, and rifles which we never had an opportunity

of firing. Our nocturnal prowlings about the coast were

interrupted by the arrival of demoralised French troops,

in variegated uniforms, quite bewildered, to whom we

provided succour in the form of cigarettes (the one reliable

currency of our time; the Fag Standard) and good cheer.

I have a vague memory of marching rather absurdly at

the head of a column of these battered and disheartened

allies whom I had attempted to rally by means of a

spirited but incoherent discourse delivered in bad bombastic

French. These events also fitted in well with what

I had tried to say in The Thirties.

Proposals were subsequently made and entertained for

dealing with the Forties and Fifties in a similar vein.

I even made a start on the Forties, but whether due to

indolence, other preoccupations, or the intrinsic unsuitability

of the material, the result seemed unsatisfactory,

and the project was abandoned. It is, I think, a fact that,

whereas the Thirties fell neatly into one theme, begin-

ning with a phoney peace and ending with a phoney war,

the two succeeding decades had no such clear pattern.

The conduct and ostensibly victorious conclusion of the

1939-45 war under Churchill, followed by the Beveridge

Era—from the stuffed lion to the stuffed sheep; then

two small mice, Attlee and Truman, in labour and bringing

forth a mountain in the shape of atomic raids on

Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Churchill’s inglorious return to

power, followed by the even more inglorious interlude

of Eden; the Cold War and the final emergence of the

two giants, the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R., in whose shadows

the rest of us perforce lived, and live—all this was not

susceptible to arrangement in ten-yearly sections, or to

the kind of treatment I had attempted in The Thirties.

In any case, as far as I am concerned, wars, like rhetoric,

their language, are exciting but not interesting, and no

labour could be more tedious and unrewarding than

sorting out the battles and campaigns of which they largely

consist. Of all Shakespeare’s plays I most dislike Henry V.

By the same token, the Churchill cult is one in which I

did not join at the time, and find even less sympathetic

as the years pass, while recognising, of course, the unique

character of his services in 1940—services whose performance

required the very temperament and characteristics

I find so little to my taste. This, as I am well aware,

is a minority position (though not, perhaps, quite so small

a minority as might be supposed), which would make

the central figure of the Forties as derisory as the comparable

one of the Thirties—Ramsay MacDonald. As I

indicate in The Thirties, MacDonald’s efforts to promote

‘the peace of the worrrld’ soon came to seem merely ridiculous,

leading, as they did, to Neville Chamberlain’s sorry

and disastrous transactions at Munich. Yet both his and

Chamberlain’s performances, surely, pale into insignificance

compared with Churchill’s at Yalta, when he and

the dying Roosevelt, in effect, handed over Eastern and

Central Europe to the most untender mercies of Stalin, the

third man of the ribald triumvirate. Such inclination as

I had to expatiate, in detail and at length, upon all this, in

any case expired when I read the late Chester Wilmot’s

masterly The Struggle for Europe. With an erudition and

historical grasp which I could not hope to emulate,

and a patience and persuasiveness quite beyond my

capacity, he shows how the ostensible champions of

our civilisation themselves blew the trumpets which brought

its already tottering walls crashing down.

Even so, it seems reasonable, now that The Thirties is

being reissued some quarter of a century after its first

appearance, to consider how far its general account of our

times has stood up to what has actually happened. Here,

one must make a corrective, in a way that comes more

easily to the old than to the young, for the play of one’s

own natural, but not necessarily well-founded, predilections.

I have always felt myself, perhaps to an abnormal degree,

a stranger in a strange world. In my earliest recollections

of life (actually, of walking down a suburban street in

someone else’s hat) I was consciously a displaced person

—an expression which, doubtless for that very reason, has

always filled me with a mixture of rage and heartache; of

rage that it should ever have been devised, and of heartache

that it should ever have been required.

This sense of being a stranger in a strange land induced

the related feeling that the whole life of action, one’s own

and the society’s or civilisation’s to which one happened

to belong, is theatre; a lurid melodrama or soap-opera

with history for its theme. Such an attitude of mind is,

of course, common enough, both among the ever increasing

number of the mentally deranged with lost identities, and

among mystics and religious exaltes—the Kierkegaards and

Kafkas down to the crazier specimens like Black Moslems

and Jehovah’s Witnesses. Politically, its commonest manifestation

is one version or another of anarchism.

As it has afflicted me, I have been unable to take

completely seriously, and therefore to believe in the

validity or permanence of, any form of authority. Crowns

and mitres have seemed to be made of tinsel, ceremonial

robes to have been hastily procured in a theatrical costumier’s,

what passes for great oratory to have been

mugged up from the worst of Shakespeare. Feeling thus,

I could not but assume that everything pertaining to this

aspect of life must shortly come to an end. It was too

absurd, too threadbare, too moth-eaten to endure. George

Orwell similarly was liable to break off a conversation

to. make statements like: ‘Eton’s doomed’, or, ‘Soon there

won’t be any more state openings of Parliament’.

Such a disposition made one ostensibly irreverent, pes-

simistic, disloyal, and—the commonest accusation—destructive

in attitude of mind. In the war, when I was with V

Corps at Salisbury, I was turned out of a mess by the

A.P.M., a Northern Irishman named McNally who happened

to be Mess President, on the ground that I talked.

When I pressed him to be more specific, he refused to

be drawn. ‘It’s just your talk,’ he said. I mention this

temperamental incapacity to accept the pretensions, or

even the reality, of power in any of its manifestations

(which, incidentally, has made me a hopeless failure as an

executive, and unsatisfactory in all roles which require

ardour and decision, like citizen and lover), because it

obviously affects one’s view of what is going on in the

world’s affairs. If, as I often think, power is to the

collectivity what sex is to the individual, then journalists

like myself are, as it were, power-voyeurs, whose judgments

will necessarily reflect our own quirks and peculiarities.

We look through a keyhole at the strange contortions

and capers of those who have become addicted to what

Blake called ‘the strongest poison ever known . . . from

Caesar’s laurel crown’.

Thus, for instance, the assumption throughout The

Thirties is that the capitalist system is irretrievably doomed,

and that some form of collectivist economy, whether or

not called communist, is inescapable everywhere. When

in the early years of the decade I surveyed the ravages of

the great depression from my editorial perch in the

offices of the Manchester Guardian, I was entirely convinced

that the economic arrangements which had produced

so tragic and lamentable a state of affairs were bound

to be discarded for ever. In the U.S.S.R., I considered, an

alternative system was in process of construction, and

gave every promise of being the wave of the future. By

the time I came to write The Thirties, a stint in Moscow as

a newspaper correspondent had cured me of the latter

assumption, but the former remained intact.

Well, as things have turned out the capitalist system, as

amended by the agile brain of John Maynard Keynes,

would seem to be in a more flourishing condition than ever

before. In the U.S.A., where in theory at any rate its

exigencies are the most respected and its operations the

least impeded, far and away the richest, and technologically

speaking the most resourceful, human community

in the history of the world has come to pass. It is true

that there are aspects of this prosperity, such as its

ever-increasing accumulation of indebtedness, which give

rise to doubts about its permanence, and that in baleful eyes

like mine it can seem nothing more than a glorified

trough set about with erotic squalor; a place of barbiturate

sleep, benzedrine joy and vitamin well-being. Equally,

it may be argued that it, too, has in reality become a

collectivist society, whose rulers’ nominal championship

of free-enterprise economics and representative institutions

is as empty as the equivalent Soviet championship of

Marxist economics and People’s Democracy. Even so, the

fact remains that to-day American prosperity, and the way

of life based on it, are the envy of the greater part

of mankind, and the focus of most of their dreams and

much of their endeavour. This is an outcome I certainly did

not foresee, either on rny Guardian editorial perch, or in

my Ash Vale barrack-hut.

Again, at the end of The Thirties a curtain falls. The

so long dreaded war has begun, the assumption being that

the last act of our tragedy is upon us, and that when it

has been played out the stage will be darkened and the

audience depart. It never so much as occurred to me that

anything would be salvaged; with a kind of exaltation,

which reached its height going about the streets of London

in the blitz, sometimes in the company of Graham Greene,

a kindred spirit, I felt I was present at the last bonfire

of the last remains of our derelict civilisation. Nor at

the war’s end, when the Nazis were defeated, and the

church bells rang out, not to proclaim an invasion, but

to celebrate a victory, did I suppose for a moment that

the past as we had known it could ever be reconstructed.

The rubble of Berlin, piled in strange heaps like a landscape

in the moon, represented, as I thought, an irretrievable

extinction; as the people groping about in the

rubble, constructing out of it little caves for themselves,

exchanging their bodies for cigarettes and tins of Spam,

or just yielding them before the rough importunities of

their liberators from the east, were troglodytes fated

never to emerge from their twilight. Yet emerge they did,

to sit in the sunshine consuming huge beakers of hot chocolate

mil schlag. From the rubble there sprouted a new

city, many mansions, mansions of chromium and glass. Was

it really a city? Or just an ingenious arrangement of lights?

Even now I am not quite sure.

Be that as it may, it is an indubitable fact that when

the dust and smoke of war finally cleared, there unmistakably

were the props and players whose disappearance

for ever I had taken for granted—a House of Commons

soon restored to Honourable Members; black coats and

umbrellas making their way down Whitehall as though

Hitler had never existed; the Athenaeum furbished up,

The Times coming out, even the Almanack de Gotha

resurrected; the House of Lords, the College of Arms,

Sir William Haley, all going strong, or at any rate going.

What I had assumed to be the end of the performance was

only, after all, an entr’acte; the curtain had fallen, certainly,

but only to rise again, disclosing the scenery,

actors and costumes just as they had been before. Actors

a shade tireder, perhaps, a shade more dependent on their

prompter, lines mumbled a bit and mechanically delivered,

costumes crumpled and shabby in the glare of the footlights,

the pace of the whole production noticeably slowed

down, yet indubitably the same old play and the same

old performers.

Up to a point, then, on Armistice Day I stood confuted.

The public rejoicings, recalling childhood memories

of an earlier version in 1918, seemed to contradict the

sombre shape of things to come envisaged in The Thirties.

There had been a glorious victory; this time there really

was to be a new and better world, on a basis of the Four

Freedoms, the Atlantic Charter and other enlightened

instruments, under-written by our three men of destiny,

Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin. Where the League of

Nations had failed the United Nations would succeed;

with the Beveridge Plan to ensure that wartime sacrifices

had not been in vain, the new dawn would surely usher in

a bright day.

In the event, this mood of hope proved even more transient

than on the previous occasion. Roosevelt’s Four

Freedoms were no more durable than Woodrow Wilson’s

Fourteen Points had been; the United Nations outdid the

League in confusion and fatuity, and the cheques drawn

on the Beveridge Plan were honoured in inflated currency.

Before the 1939-45 war had long been over, the line-up

for another began, with the additional horror of being

against the backdrop of a mushroom cloud. The development

of nuclear weapons opened up, for the first time in

human history, the prospect of blowing the human race

and the earth itself to smithereens. It was in a war-scarred

and war-weary world, with this weird and macabre doom

seemingly so near at hand, that a Welfare State was

constructed to keep us all healthy, wealthy and wise for

evermore. By a strange irony—stranger than any I had

envisaged in The Thirties—a moment of unique tragedy

coincided with some of the most shallow and fatuous

hopes ever to be entertained by mortal men. Prosperity was

to broaden down from hire-purchase payment to hire purchase

payment; the birth-pill would safeguard the

pursuit of happiness against all impediments, and with

the Gross National Product continually expanding, a

dazzling prospect of everlasting felicity opened before

mankind. As the psychiatric wards went on multiplying,

suicide and crime increasing, the consumption of pillsfor-

all-purposes mounting, there was proclaimed with

ever greater fervour the coming to pass of a kingdom

of heaven on earth, richer, more easeful and blissful

than any hitherto known.

So now, looking back from the second half of the sixties,

I feel that, after all, the assumptions and prognostications

of The Thirties were not so wide of the mark as might

previously have seemed to be the case. Though we were

technically among the victors in the 1935-45 war, our

participation in the victory was purely nominal. It was

our positively last appearance in a major role on the stage

of history, as Churchill was our last international star.

He and our imperial destiny expired together; at his

funeral, both were interred, making of it a great national

occasion. As everyone realised, consciously or unconsciously,

for us as a people it was the end of such

occasions. There would never be another at all comparable.

So the most was made of it.

The Empire, which theoretically emerged larger and

stronger than ever from the 1914-18 war, was in fact even

then in an advanced state of decomposition, and went on

subsequently decomposing fast. Victory in 1945 did not

invalidate my observation in The Thirties that the sun

seemed to be setting on the Empire on which it never set.

Churchill proclaimed indignantly that he had not been

appointed by King George VI to be his principal Secretary

of State in order to preside over the dissolution

of his Empire. Had he but known it, this, precisely,

was to be required of him in his confused and inglorious

premiership in the post-war years under George VI’s

daughter, Elizabeth II. Now the Empire has gone, and the

Commonwealth—a holding-company formed to realise the Empire’s dwindling residual assets—has almost

disappeared likewise. Figures like Redeemer-Emeritus Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta and Dr. Banda provide a perfect cast for playing out the farce to the end, until England once again blessedly exists as a small island off the coast of Europe.

Ironically enough, it is in the field of economics, where

scientific accuracy is supposed to prevail, that prognostications,

mine included, have proved particularly fallacious.

With great joy I described in The Thirties how MacDonald

formed his National Government to ’save the Pound’,

which then was permitted to slither off the gold-standard.

God save our gracious Pound! Yet the economies which

MacDonald went to such pains to institute with a view

to persuading New York bankers that we were sjill

credit-worthy would scarcely have sufficed to finance for

a single day the war which broke out in 1939, and

continued for some five years, without evidently reducing

us to bankruptcy. For most of my lifetime we have

been living, economically speaking, in the red, to the

accompaniment of dire warnings from bankers, financiers,

and, between elections, from politicians, while all the

while, to the outward eye, growing ever more prosperous.

How this has come about, and what will be the outcome,

I have no idea. MacDonald was fond of saying,

with great emphasis, that you cannot put a quart into

a pint-pot. It seems that you can. He was likewise given

to remarking that we must cut our coats according to our

cloth. Apparently, we are under no such necessity.

‘They ever must believe a lie who see with, not through,

the eye,’ Blake wrote. It was, for me, a key-thought when

I was writing The Thirties, though then, of course, television

had not provided a third eye for us to see with; one,

moreover, which cannot be seen through, however hard

the seer tries. Blake’s saying has gone on echoing in my

mind ever since. Such lies believed! Never, surely, has there

been credulity like it. African witch-doctors and makers of

love-potions must look with sick envy at the impositions

of our advertisers and psychiatrists, reflecting that their

clientele, though black savages, would never for an instant

countenance deception so gross and palpable. When people

cease to believe in God, G. K. Chesterton has pointed out,

they do not then believe in nothing, but—what is far

more dangerous—in anything. The Christian religion required

us only to believe in certain specific dogma and

supernatural happenings like miracles; the religion of

Science which has succeeded it, as I indicated in The

Thirties, bestows its imprimatur upon any proposition,

however nonsensical, which can be stated in terms of the

requisite statistical-scientific mumbo-jumbo. Thus a condition

of moral, intellectual and spiritual confusion has

been created in which not only faith, but meaning itself,

has disappeared.

I well remember how, seated on my bed in my Ash Vale

barrack hut, with a pencil in my hand and paper before

me, striving to finish The Thirties, one phrase intruded

itself into all my thoughts and deliberations—’Lost in

the darkness of change’. It seemed to sum up my, and

everyone else’s, situation. We were lost; like children

trying to extricate some familiar shape or sound out of

the darkness which had fallen. All we knew was that

when the darkness lifted a new landscape with new contours

would be revealed. Meanwhile, we had to reconcile

ourselves to living in darkness. Fiat Nox!—it was our

fate, and must be accepted.

The phrase seems to me as valid now as it did in 1940.

We are still lost in the darkness of change. If anything, the

darkness is more impenetrable than it was then. The

difference, as far as I am concerned, is that now I find more

compensations in such a plight. In times of bright light one

is so easily dazzled. How readily one might have accepted, in stabler and more vainglorious circumstances, the pretensions

of power, the certainties of authority, the false

sense of security generated by seeming permanence. As

it is, one accepts nothing. One is driven back upon

those other certainties, propounded in darkness but shining

with their own bright inward light, which relate,

not to any conceivable human situation, favourable or

unfavourable, mighty or decrepit, but to the deserts of

vast eternity which lie beyond our shifting human history.

There, in all humility, I venture to cast my eye, intent

upon a land that is very far off, and in search of truth

which is not for yesterday or to-day or to-morrow, but

for all time.

No true Conservative worthy of the term showed up to contest this election.

I loved Duncan Hunter, but if you’re saying “Duncan who?” that pretty much sums up what was wrong there.

Rudy bungled his campaign in any number of ways, and Fred couldn’t really be bothered working weekends … or most days, come to that … to gain the nomination. I was and am horribly disappointed, but they apparently didn’t want the job.

Mitt Romney would have been a much more reliably Republican choice, but had innumerable enemies. Thus, we ended up with John McCain, who, as I believe Mark Steyn memorably said, had been running against Republicans for so long that he didn’t know hoe to run for them.

The public came out in droves when they saw what looked like a genuine Conservative: Sarah Palin. That the Commentariat reacted to her in the same way that minor demons react to Holy Water … hissing, shrieking, writhing, and making a bad stink … told me as much about her authenticity and quality than any commercial or photo-op ever could. Similarly, McCain’s disinclination to explicitly come to her defense during the pre- and post-election smear-fest confirms every doubt I ever had about his lack of character and intergrity, too.

Yeah. Obama sucks. So what? That didn’t win this year, and we’ll have to do much better to have any chance of winning next time around. Deal with it.