Operation Death-Wish

...What was I to make of it...

...It appeared in Esquire magazine, then edited by Harold Hayes, and attracted a certain amount of attention, being reprinted in various periodicals, including, surprisingly, the Soviet magazine, Literaturnaya Gaxeta, along with an explanatory, and by no means wholly critical, commentary...

...The great liberal death-wish, then, may be seen as a kind of do-ityourself collectivization kit enabling us to enslave ourselves rather than be enslaved...

...telling all, hiding all...

...Subsequently, there came a time when the Inquisition no longer sufficed to achieve the Grand Inquisitor's purpose, and it was of this need for a substitute that the great liberal death-wish was born...

...Here, a comparison may be made with the troubledformer inmate of a criminal insane asylum released on parole who finds himself longing nostalgically for the peace, the seclusion, the silence of a padded cell...

...Almost all of them displayed a credulity about the regime, and about what they heard from its professional apologists, that would have shaken an African witch doctor...

...Their leader, Peter Verkhovensky, gives them the order-of-the-day: "A generation or two of debauchery, followed by a little drop of nice fresh blood, and then the turmoil will begin...

...in numbers, deception...

...only the inexorable working out of a predetermined genetic destiny...

...This did not signify a triumphant proletarian revolution sweeping through the world in accordance with the Marxist prophesies...

...Notable examples were Bernard Shaw, the Webbs, Andre Gide, Lincoln Steffans, Julian Huxley, Henri Barbusse, and Harold Laski...

...That model has its uses, but its presuppositions are such as to make it inadequate, by way of description or prescription, for a political community...

...After all, Donald Maclean, who operated as a Soviet spy in the British Foreign Office, and then defected to the USSR, is the son of an eminent liberal politician...

...the trumpet-blast which brings our walls tumbling down sounds from within...

...Similarly, the liberal mind, screaming for democracy, yearns for a one-party authoritarian state, in darkest Africa if not yet in twilight Britain...

...Romantics believe that the outcome will be a great, glorious nuclear bang, a fireworks display in our own corner of the stratosphere, and then curtains...

...I know, however, that in either case, whether the nuclear fireworks or the socio-biological bliss, in some remote forgotten place a naked savage, all unaware of such apocalyptic developments, will feel impelled to daub a stone with colored mud and prostrate himself before it in an act of worship, somehow aware in his dim brain and simple heart that he exists only as a participant in the purposes of a Godhead requiring to be worshipped and adored...

...and this quite irrespective of whatever might happen to him historically, however inimical to such an outcome might be the principles he ostensibly adhered to, and however furiously and valiantly he might struggle in an opposite direction...

...I am thinking particularly of the occasion when they set free a chain of galley slaves who, the moment they were liberated, set themselves to hurling stones at their liberators...

...for the key turning in the lock which not only shut him in, but also shut everyone and everything else out...

...To produce the maximum effect with such devices, however, a voice was needed...

...silencing all warning voices, scorning the faith that might yet avert catastrophe...

...sleepwalking into our own Gulag, incarcerating ourselves in our own high-rise prisons, murdering our own innocents before they are born and planning our own families out of existence, making ourselves sick by swallowing our own drugs and impotent by wallowing in our own porn, reducing ourselves to penury by printing ever more of our own currency, poisoning ourselves with our own pollution, and believing our own lies fed to us by our own media...

...the Pied Piper in living color beckons us on from a television screen, and lo...

...while Labour Party firebrands like Michael Foot and Tony Benn were sired and reared in sentimental liberalism, and the Guardian, an emanation of the liberal mind if ever there was one, has long been a favorite shop-window for Marxist and other revolutionary bric-a-brac...

...seeking happiness ever more ardently, and finding despair ever more surely...

...What, for instance, could more effectively discredit the liberal notion of substituting the conference table for traditional diplomacy and the battlefield than, first, the League of Nations, and then its successor, the United Nations—two towers of Babel whose deliberations have created even more confusion than already existed, and whose directives have succeeded in multiplying confrontations and intensified conflicts in a world given over to strife...

...Finally, I was forced to conclude that this attitude of western liberals to the Soviet regime was not so much a delusion as an addiction, signifying in them a death-wish, a built-in passion to destroy everything and everyone they purported to hold dear, with a view to ultimately abolishing themselves...

...But it rejects the romanticism inherent in the yearnings for a more "organic" order, just as it rejects any need to glorify a predominantly free-enterprise economy as being, always and everywhere, the best of all possible worlds...

...Andrew Young, the United States Ambassador to the United Nations, and Dr...

...As I write these words, Mr...

...Cholerton, the most brilliant and perceptive British correspondent ever to be stationed in the USSR, put it, the vomit returned to the dog...

...Our western civilization is the first in all history to breed and indoctrinate its own destroyers, educating at the public expense the barbarians who will overthrow it, brainwashing its citizens to expect and even welcome its downfall...

...Thus, a process of what amounts to creeping revolution is seen as a mighty leap forward in the quest for a kingdom of heaven on earth, and Christendom's setting sun is taken to be a new dawn breaking...

...It would seem to me abundantly clear that the feature of our time that will strike posterity most forcefully will be precisely this bizarre working out of a death-wish in terms of utopianism...

...As the decade of the seventies draws to a close, the forces of demolition can be seen to be advancing at an accelerating rate on all fronts...

...At the beginning of the seventies I wrote an article entitled "The Decade of the Great Liberal Death-Wish...

...As in a vision, I saw in London, in Paris, in New York, in all the cities of the West, the same sort of crowds drifting, along the same streets as I had seen in Moscow, Leningrad, and Kiev...

...I brooded long on this strange phenomenon, constantly expecting that some new instance of Soviet perfidy and resort to terrorism would produce a change of heart in the regime's liberal admirers...

...In my Esquire article I attempted to trace something of the part the great liberal death-wish is playing in the decline and impending fall of what we continue to call western civilization...

...Again, the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the betrayal over the occupation of Eastern and Central Europe after the 1939-45 war, the suppression of the Hungarian, East German, and Polish risings, and the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Red Army, not to mention Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin at the twentieth Party Congress, and the subsequent posthumous dethronement of the most adulated and wiliest of all the Soviet leaders...

...He has come to find the burden of the freedom he inherited from the past centuries of Christendom, insupportable...

...Where the Inquisition disposed only of crude instruments like the thumbscrew and the rack to enforce orthodoxy, and the fear of excommunication to sustain it, other more subtle means of persuasion have been developed, reaching in the twentieth century a high degree of effectiveness...

...Neo-conservatism appreciates the criticisms of this order by such conservative cultural analysts as T. S. Eliot or Russell Kirk, or evenby such radical cultural critics as Herbert Marcuse and Jean-Paul Sartre, who do call our attention to elements that are lacking in modernity for a truly humane life...

...In short, involving the many in the death-wish of the few...

...When I was working in Moscow all those years ago I had an extraordinarily strong conviction, amounting to a kind of mystical certainty, that what was happening there was, in essentials, bound to come to pass everywhere else...

...his freedom is too much for him, and he wants to shed it...

...I venture to quote the concluding words of my article: As the astronauts soar into the vast eternities of space, on earth the garbage piles higher...

...It can fairly be described as an anti-political theory, in that all human relations are coerced into a model of economic activity...

...The role of the great liberal death-wish in bringing about this collectivist consummation will be, I am confident, seen historically as decisive...

...It is only necessary to look round the world today to realize how thoroughly this program has been carried out, and how infallibly the predicted turmoil has come about and is continuing...

...It is therefore relatively untroubled by group old-age insurance (i.e., social security), group unemployment insurance, group medical insurance (i.e., medicare and medicaid)—or even collective charity (i.e., welfare...

...still less, the final realization of the Slavophile dreams of conquest that the Soviet regime under Stalin took over from its Tzarist predecessor...

...The same point is made with superb artistry and insight by Dostoevsky in his novel The Devils (in its first English translation, by Constance Garnett, called The Possessed...

...in the TV gurus, charismatic, verbose, sincere, its perfect spokesmen...

...a Pied Piper to lead the way to the rainbow's end, where, instead of a crock of gold, there turns out to be a Gulag Archipelago...

...Jericho's walls were brought down by a trumpet-blast from without its gates...

...The neo-conservative cast of mind, in short, is—or should be—more philosophical than ideological...

...Politics has to do with practical virtue, not with the regeneration of humanity by passionate commitment to any sovereign ideal...

...These are all symptoms, however...

...Owen, the British Foreign Secretary, are away on their African travels with a view to furthering the setting up in the Union of South Africa and Rhodesia of black majority rule based on universal suffrage and parliamentary democracy—a system of government not to be found anywhere on the African continent, least of all in the former British colonies or in the recently soi di sant liberated Portuguese ones...

...Spock had come out strongly for birching in schools, I could not have been more surprised and shocked...

...Nor would it surprise me if they met with similar adventures to those which befell the Knight and his Squire...

...looking in the same sort of way into shop-windows and newspapers, echoing the same sort of slogans masquerading as thoughts and opinions, crowding onto the same sort of buses and trains, and infesting the same sort of beaches, parks of culture and rest, and places of entertainment —Broadway, Piccadilly, the Champs Elysees scarcely distinguishable from the Nevsky Prospect, the Arbaat, the Red Square...

...Has not the very word "welfare" come to stink to high heaven in light of the consequences of its elevation into a way of life, as writing the pursuit of happiness into the American Declaration of Independence has vilified the very notion of being happy, luring many pursuers of happiness into cul-de-sacs like drug-addiction, and sending them aimlessly about the world, bearded, tousled, and hopeless...

...the media have taken over from the • Quoted by Duncan Williams in Trousered Apes from Fiedler's Waiting for the End...

...In other words, the liberal mind, it would appear, is possessed with a passion to abolish freedom in the name of freedom...

...The theme is one that has haunted me ever since, as a young journalist in Moscow in the early thirties, I observed the truly extraordinary antics there of visiting intelligentsia from Western Europe and the United States...

...in view of their liberal orientation, ostensibly representing progress rather than regress, compassion rather than brutal necessity, liberation rather than oppression, freedom rather than servitude...

...for the harsh commands of the jailor and the inflexible prison rules against which there was no appeal...

...People will always want security as much as they want liberty, and the 19th-century liberal-individualist notion that life for all of us should be an enterprise at continual risk is a doctrinaire fantasy...

...In the media the great liberal death-wish realizes its perfect fulfillment...

...Prometheus who stole the fire of the gods to make himself free was punished by being bound to a rock, and each day having his entrails gouged out by ravening birds of prey...

...as the phallic cult spreads, so does impotence...

...That makes it very much worth defending...

...itself a sort of liberal gloss, demonic possession being commonly regarded as less pernicious than actual diabolism), which portrays a group of quasi-revolutionaries and the havoc they make with no other purpose than to create disorder and stir up violence...

...With a little help from makeup, lighting, and an autocue, who better equipped than they to denounce an unjust war and bring it to an ignominious and disastrous end, to unseat a President and jeopardize the institution of the Presidency, to unmask the CIA and dismantle the whole intelligence setup of which it is an integral part...

...there was nothing, it seemed, they liked better than being shown round the anti-God museums, and, though mostly ardent pacifists at home, they heard with delight Malcolm Muggeridge is the author of many books on Christianity, including Jesus: The Man Who Lives and Something Beautiful for God...

...A welfare state, properly conceived, can be an integral part of a conservative society...

...In great wealth, great poverty...

...And if such a modest conception of politics fails to excite one's sensibilities—well, one can always retire to one's library and read a book...

...He has published two volumes of his memoirs, Chronicles of Wasted Time, and is presently writing the third...

...as the groves of academe extend their domain, their alumni's arms reach lower...

...the roar of Soviet war planes overhead and the rattle of Soviet tanks across the Red Square...

...The American Spectator November 1977 9...

...Imagine subversive conspirators operating underground, well provided with money and weapons, well entrenched altogether—could they have hoped to do a thousandth part as well as this Operation Death-Wish, mounted and carried out not by alien enemies or domestic traitors, but by the pampered, favorite sons of the very institutions and interests whose downfall they promote...

...as the late A .T...

...In political philosophy, the dominant influence has been the late Professor Leo Strauss, who—together with his students—has shown how it is possible to understand and support the modern liberal order while having a detached intellectual perspective on it...

...For the past two centuries most of our political thinking has been ideological—i.e., dominated by utopian visions of social and human perfection...

...sedated, left restless...

...It is certainly not the best of all possible worlds—but the evidence of the twentieth century is quite conclusive that it is the best of all available worlds...

...the higher the hopes placed in education as a civilizing and enlightening influence, the more evident was the reversion to barbarism, as exemplified in hooliganism of one sort or another—baby and wife-battering, vandalism, muggings, rape, and the like...

...For instance, the Purges, when all the old Bolsheviks, the men who had made the Revolution, the USSR's founding fathers, were fast humiliated publicly and then executed, on Stalin's orders...

...in flesh united, forever separate...

...There is substance to practically every criticism that has been made, on the left or right, of modern democratic capitalism...

...Again, who has more effectively exposed the absurdities, contradictions, and inherent weaknesses of capitalism than its sometime reputed savior, John Maynard Keynes...

...as it might be, a male impersonation of Mrs...

...Indeed, one of the frustrations of social democracy is that so many of its initial reforms, once established, serve as bulwarks against a further socialist transformation...

...In each case, after some momentary disconcertment and protest, the old The American Spectator...

...the basic cause, I have come to believe, of the phenomenon of the great liberal death-wish is simply that western man has grown weary of the struggle to be free...

...But it is not upset by the fact that, in a populous, complex, and affluent society, people may prefer to purchase certain goods and services collectively rather than individually...

...a weariness with humanism itself which underlines all the movements of our world, a weariness with the striving to be men...

...In the great scene in The Brothers Karamazov when the Grand Inquisitor and the returned Christ confront one another in Seville, the Grand Inquisitor speaks for all liberal minds when he explains to the returned Christ that He cannot be permitted to stay because, if He did, He would once again, as He had before, offer mankind His dreadful gift of freedom...

...I had been brought up to regard these western intelligentsia as the chosen elite, the Samurai of our time, and there they were adulating to an extravagant degree the most ruthless and comprehensive dictatorship the world has yet seen...

...For instance, the ingenious device has been adopted of preaching anarchy to promote servitude, of acclaiming eros to spread impotence, of announcing the imminent withering away of the State—Hobbes' Great Leviathan—to extend and enhance its power, thereby preparing the way for authoritarian government of one sort or another, it matters little, in Grand Inquisitor terms, under whose auspices and what the precise ideology may be...

...As Leslie Fiedler has put it: There is "a weariness in the West which undercuts the struggle between socialism and capitalism, democracy and autocracy...

...And in that act, yet another chapter will begin in the unfolding drama of our human destiny, with time reaching up to eternity and eternity stooping down to time, making Now Always and Always Now...

...western man seeking to shed his freedom has arranged his own punishment, binding himself to a rock, and daily feeding on his own entrails and calling it liberation...

...The major intellectual effort of neo-conservatism is to deutopianize political thinking...

...Gorging, left hungry...

...8 The American Spectator November 1977 Grand Inquisitor...

...They will note that the more money spent on schools and colleges, the more illiteracy increased...

...But all this means is that our society, like every other, has its inherent costs as well as its obvious benefits...

...Which is why the left-wing factions of all social-democratic parties are expressing an increasing dissatisfaction with a "mere" welfare state...

...Dostoevsky, too, brilliantly shows how the nihilism of Peter Verkhovensky derives directly from the sentimental liberalism of his father, Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky —a superbly drawn farcical character...

...in health, sickness...

...Young's and Owen's journeyings irresistibly recall those of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, likewise directed towards liberating the enslaved and delivering the oppressed...

...So we press on along the valley of abundance that leads to the wasteland of satiety, passing on our way through the gardens of fantasy...

...Now the voice has been found, coming out of a microphone...

...Neo-conservatism says that such visions may have their pedagogic or speculative uses, but that the real world should be treated with that kind of due respect we call prudence—which -is, in turn, the cardinal virtue of statesmanship...

...Nor did it mean the acceptance elsewhere of the ideology and system of government in the USSR as then existing...

...Moscow in 1932, that is to say, was a preview of the life-style of the future—collectivized in every sense of the word, with an imposed comprehensive orthodoxy relentlessly enforced...

...0 Malcolm Muggeridge Operation Death-Wish It would appear the liberal mind is possessed with a passion to abolish freedom in the name of freedom, involving the many in the death wish of the few...

...as easier procedures for divorce led to the break-up of ever more marriages and homes, and the legalization of abortion to a positive holocaust of unborn babies—in England over a million in three years, which is more deaths than in the 1914-18 war...

...Eleanor Roosevelt...

...Rather, it meant that I was seeing in Moscow the shape of things to come, in the sense that western man was fated to fall into a collectivist way of life such as existed in the USSR as a result of the Russian Revolution...

...Or who the fatuities and monstrosities of Communism more relentlessly than its foremost twentieth-century exponent, Joseph Stalin...

...It would seem to be the case that liberal genes automatically breed revolutionary ideologues and activists...

...Once more the Word will become flesh, and dwell among us full of grace and truth...

...This may well be the most important thing about it...

...As the plain van comes to fetch him, screaming to be free, he yearns for confinement...

...Messrs...

...More ostensibly humane attitudes to crime and criminals resulted in sharp increases year by year in crimes of violence, especially by juveniles of both sexes...

...It has taken the Inquisition, the Grand Inquisitor explains, much toil and trouble to undo the disastrous consequences of this misguided offer, and they just can't risk having all the work to do again, which is what Christ's continuing presence in Seville would necessarily involve...

...Realists, on the other hand, foresee the coming to pass of a socio-biological Garden of Eden to which Adam and Eve have been readmitted by spewing up the apple giving them knowledge of good and evil, attaining thereby a second innocence with no real choices to be made...

...If the Pope had suddenly issued an encyclical in favor of wife-swapping, or Dr...

...Will it not, then, appear as though, woven into the history of our time, was a principle of reductio ad absurdum, whereby theliberal mind, pursuing its utopian fantasies, managed to frustrate the very purposes to which it was ostensibly dedicated...

...November 1977 7 spirit of acquiescence and adulation resumed its sway...

...The performance of visiting clergymen was particularly striking...