Malcolm Muggeridge. A watery, wintry dawn seen across London roofs is exceedingly lovely. It is as though the old Thames were once more flowing through deserted, desolate marshes. In the stillness, London seems only a dream, a shadow, with no corporeal existence. Seeing it thus, I reflected that the greatness of Christian civilization, of which… Read More The Hunger and the Light
John Reith, the first ever Director General of the BBC, talks to Malcolm Muggeridge about his time at the corporation. He explains the thinking behind his decision to instruct BBC broadcasters to speak in the rather artificial manner – which became known as the ‘BBC accent’ – as opposed to their own local dialects. Lord… Read More John Reith to Malcolm Muggeridge on the BBC’s Effects on the Language
Gareth Richard Vaughan Jones (13 August 1905 – 12 August 1935) was a Welsh journalist who in March 1933 first reported in the Western world, without equivocation and under his own name, the existence of the Soviet famine of 1930–1933, including the Holodomor. In mid-October 1932 (less than a month after Malcolm Muggeridge had arrived in Moscow on the… Read More Gareth Jones, Malcom Muggeridge, and the Holodomor
… and Our time. Mark Groubert. “Whittaker Chambers is best known today as the veteran Soviet spy who became, in William F. Buckley Jr.’s words, “the most important American defector from Communism” when he testified against members of his underground Communist cell in the 1930s. Yet Chambers did more than reject Communism: He revealed a key… Read More The Whittaker Chamber – Alger Hiss Case
Only Christians know what this “rabbit hole” really is, and how deep it goes. The biblical view of history alone (which the writers of The Matrix could only incompletely sense in some aspects), tells what is happening in its revelations about both good and evil —and where history is headed. WSJ: “The 1999 sci-fi classic… Read More WSJ: “25 Years Later, We’re All Trapped in ‘The Matrix’”
And Frankenstein. “…Jesus is approached with the offer of a worldwide TV network, and “The Dead Sea Videotapes,” in which archaeologists centuries hence discover a cache of tapes, films, and other evidence of our contemporary society, and reach shocking conclusions. “Future historians,” says Muggeridge, “will surely see us as having created in the media a… Read More Malcolm Muggeridge on The Fourth Temptation
For his honest reporting on the Stalinist show trials Malcolm Muggeridge lost his job and was blacklisted for a time. The following is from 1979. (Drawing by a former Gulag prisoner) “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… Read More The Great Liberal Death Wish. Malcolm Muggeridge.
Mary Harrington: “The era began in the mid-twentieth century, with a biomedical innovation that radically changed what it is to be a human, in the human social order: reproductive technology. The Pill was the first transhumanist technology: it set out not to fix something that was wrong with ‘normal’ human physiology — in the ameliorative… Read More The Pill was the first transhumanist technology.
Vaclav Havel waves to crowds in Prague, shortly before becoming Czech president in December 1989. Kamila Valenta writes in America, “I was 17 years old when I heard the Lord’s Prayer spoken in public for the first time. It was in November 1989 during the Velvet Revolution, which brought freedom to Communist Czechoslovakia. The crowd… Read More The Lord’s Prayer, Freedom, and the Spiritual Vaclav Havel
McLuhan, 1969: “There’s nothing at all difficult about putting computers in the position where they will be able to conduct carefully orchestrated programing of the sensory life of whole populations. I know it sounds rather science-fictional, but if you understood cybernetics you’d realize we could do it today. The computer could program the media to… Read More Marshall McLuhan on media manipulation of peoples and nations
By Malcolm Muggeridge. Some eight decades ago I came into the world, full of cries and wind and hiccups; now I prepare to leave it, also full of cries and wind and hiccups. Whence I came I cannot know, least of all in the light of contemporary myths like Darwinian evolution, Freudian psychology, situational ethics,… Read More As daylight hours draw to a close
“God did not retreat back into Heaven when the fateful words “It is finished” were uttered on Golgotha. The Word that became flesh has continued and continues to dwell among us, full of grace and truth. There are examples on every hand; we have but to look for them. For instance, the man in Solzhenitsyn’s… Read More Malcolm Muggeridge on Suffering and Spiritual Growth
Metaphysical Boredom in an Empire of Desire “In the arid wasteland that is academic writing, amid the wider desert that is modern secular thought, R. J. Snell’s book on acedia is an oasis of flowers and fruit and fresh water. Professor Snell reminds us that man must never be made subordinate to work, nor even to the empty… Read More Acedia and Its Discontents
by Hilton Kramer A reprinting of Mr. Kramer’s 1976 article published in The New York Times. I. Introduction. “Few among the intellectuals in the Party realized at the time that their mentality was a caricature of the revolutionary spirit; that within the short span of three generations the Communist movement had travelled from the era of… Read More The Blacklist & the Cold War Revisited
Muggeridge on the Media.June 19, 2017. “IN the 1970s, British journalist and author Malcolm Muggeridge insisted that television news involved deliberate deception. During lectures on the media in London in 1976, he stated: “I remember once returning to my hotel in New York and noticing on the way that a crowd had assembled outside what was… Read More Muggeridge on the Media [and Control].
Msgr. Timothy Verdon, the director of the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, told CNA “The images of suffering that the Pietà always implies I think will deeply touch people. I think that visitors will be moved to see these works,” he said. The image of the Pietà evokes “the personal suffering of mothers who hold their… Read More How Michelangelo’s 3 Pietàs speak to a suffering world
“World-renowned philosopher, humorist, newspaper editor, and university rector, British writer Malcolm Muggeridge (1903–1990) is best known to American audiences for his book Something Beautiful for God (a classic biography of Mother Teresa that essentially introduced her to the West) and for his frequent appearances on Firing Line. A tart-tongued agnostic, Muggeridge was fascinated by the… Read More Malcolm Muggeridge. A Third Testament.
“I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution, especially the extent to which it’s been applied, will be one of the great jokes in the history books of the future. Posterity will marvel that so very flimsy and dubious an hypothesis could be accepted with the incredible credulity that it has.” Malcolm Muggeridge, The End… Read More Malcolm Muggeridge on Darwinism — Evolution
Catholic Critique 