A More Faithful Prophet

Muggeridge Speaks

We have begun re-reading the autobiography of Malcolm Muggeridge, Chronicles of Wasted Time. It serves as an illuminating window upon the world-spirit of the West in the twentieth century. We commend it to any Believer in the West who has found himself groaning and asking, How has it come to this? Muggeridge cuts through the necrotic flesh of the times with the ruthlessness of a surgeon striving to heal.

In 1933 as an impecunious and disillusioned liberal, Muggeridge secured a position in Geneva with the International Labour Organisation--a division of the League of Nations. He writes:

The League of Nations in those days focused the hope of the enlightened everywhere; all eyes were upon it in the confident expectation that it would succeed in making war as obsolete as duelling, and armed forces as unnecessary to nations as wearing a sword had become to individual citizens. In some mysterious way, just willing this would bring it to pass; by renouncing armaments, nationalistic policies and other works of the evil one, good would triumph, and peace reign forevermore.

Sooner or later, everyone who was anyone came to Geneva to celebrate this new era of universal peace that was being inaugurated there. . . . What a time this was for Geneva! Not since Calvin has the spotlight of history so shone on it; and, of course, with the spotlight, came the world's newspapermen, their favourite haunt being the Cafe Bavaria, whose walls were lined with appropriate cartoons in deference to this special clientele. Thither they came, hot-foot from Berlin or Paris or London or New York, their stringers respectfully in attendance, with stories to write, expense accounts to draw on. . . .

They were the Knights-errant of our time; rescuers of nations in distress, champions of the downtrodden and oppressed, who smote the offending dragon hip and thigh with breathless words rattled off on their typewriters. . . . Above the tobacco smoke and the clatter of glasses, words and phrases resounded. Civilian bombing . . . Would they be able to re-phrase the resolution to make it acceptable to the Great Powers? . . . Drafters hard at work . . . Eden optimistic and sees light at the end of the tunnel. . . .

Here one knew what was happening; felt the world's pulse, and listened to its heartbeat. Here, as the Guardian would have put it, "a new way of conducting international relations was being forged; quiet reasonable discussions round a table instead of bluster and gun-boats. . . .

Alas, as it turned out, barely was the Palais Des Nations completed and ready to be occupied that the second world war was ready to begin. While Hitler's panzers were actually roaring into Poland from the west, and Stalin's divisions lumbering in to meet them from the east, the League was in session in its new premises, discussing--the codification of level-crossing signs. At the time I remember feeling a sort of relief. At least there would be no more compromise resolutions . . .

How wrong I was! Another Tower of Babel, taller, more tower-like and more babulous, would spring up in Manhattan, to outdo the League many times over in the irrelevance of its proceedings, the ambiguity of its resolutions and the confusion of its purposes. What will they be discussing there, I ask myself, when the guided missiles begin to fly?

Malcolm Muggeridge, Chronicles of Wasted Time, Volume 2: The Infernal Grove (Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1975), pp.8--10)

How fatuous and irrelevant the West has become. It has not got better since those League of Nations days. Witness the complete irrelevance and inability of the UN to "deal" with any trouble spot on the globe--and when UN troops do arrive you had better lock up your daughters. Meanwhile we have all those fatuous and harmful treaties, and declarations, and empty statements of human rights.

The practitioners of realpolitik amongst the world community use the UN as a tool to be used to advance their own causes, and manipulate and undermine other nations. That is why the UN Council of Human Rights is dominated by nations whose human rights record is appalling. These nations know they can use it to make the naive idealists amongst the Western nations uncomfortable and guilty and can use it to lever concessions which are to their advantage.

It is well past time to give up on the naive utopianism of internationalism. It needs to be retired to a dusty corner of history to a room entitled "Useless Antiquarian Relics". What a far better place the world would be without the UN. Muggeridge saw its folly acutely over seventy years ago. It has only got worse. But humanists are such slow learners.

But hope continues to spring eternal in the breast of the desperate and the credulous.