Years ago when I was working for a nonprofit organization focused on global hunger I was doing research into the causes of hunger. At that point, as a young man, I assumed people were hungry primarily from natural causes: too many people in the world; droughts, floods and famine interrupted the food supply; people could not afford food.

Then one day I read about a man-made famine in the Ukraine known as the Holodomor or The Great Famine of 1932–1933. Joseph Stalin intentionally starved to death 7 million to 10 million innocent Ukrainians for political reasons. As time went on, I learned of more and more man-made famines. Tyrants will do anything to extend and maintain power.

British journalist Malcolm Muggridge informed the world in the 1930’s of the planned famine in the Ukraine. But the world refused to listen. They were too busy following the “guiding lights” or, better said, the lies of the intellectual tyrants.

That was then, this is now, and as the book of Ecclesiastes reminds us, “there is nothing new under the sun.” Today’s growing tyranny of postmodernism makes me want to shout “WAKE UP! Can’t you see what is right in front of you? Can you not see the tyrannical impulses of the modern and postmodern political, communication, and technical elites at work today?”

Because Muggeridge’s paper on the Great Liberal Death Wish is so relevant for today, we have posted it here. If you have not read it, I would encourage you to do so now. It explains so clearly what we see happening before our very eyes in the West today.

What Muggeridge saw

The 2020 movie Mr. Jones tells the story of Welsh journalist Gareth Jones who, like Muggeridge, saw the famine firsthand and reported its horrors to the Western world. For telling the truth Jones was assassinated. See the trailer here.

In his article “Lessons From a Journalist’s First Encounter with Totalitarianism,” journalist Lloyd Billingsley writes about Winter in Moscow, Muggeridge’s 1934 book in which he told the world what was happening in the Soviet Union.

“The future seemed empty to Wraithby. It was easy to burn up the past, but not so easy to face a future lacking everything that had given the past substance.”

That is from Winter in Moscow, by Malcolm Muggeridge, first published in 1934, and proclaimed by historian A.J.P Taylor as the best book on Soviet Russia. In 2021, Winter in Moscow could well be the best book for what is now going on in America: surging totalitarianism, fake news, cancel culture, and wokeness. That dynamic was already on display when Muggeridge went to the USSR in 1932 as a correspondent of the Manchester Guardian.

Wokeness took the form of a general idea in narrow, empty minds, an idea pioneered by French historian Hippolyte Taine. Since these minds are incapable of questioning the idea, they become quite literally possessed. The prevailing general idea of the time was a classless, utopian society, which Wraithby, the name Muggeridge uses for himself, accurately calls the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.

Cultural Marxism is the child of Stalin’s Marxism

Let there be no mistake: the tyranny of Stalin’s economic Marxism in the Soviet Union in the 1930’s is reborn in the growing tyranny of Cultural Marxism and wokeness in the 2020’s. To suggest they are unrelated is pretense. They manifest the same atheistic set of ideas, one focused on economics, one on culture.

George Santayana, the philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist, famously said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Today’s postmodern is leading societies out of reality into the world of illusion, forsaking history to embrace fantasy. But if we forget history, or choose to ignore it, we will invite a new tyranny.

Wake up before it is too late!

• Darrow Miller

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