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Roger Kimball on Malcolm Muggeridge. Quotable:

Muggeridge was weaned on well-scrubbed attempts to set up an earthly paradise. It was a main plank of the Fabian creed: to dispense with the burdensome scaffolding of the past, its selfish institutions, its superstitions, its allegiance to outmoded vices like competition and greed. Love, harmony, brotherhood�an end to the depredations of inherited wealth, inherited � anything. Onwards, upwards, unfettered progress forever and ever. Not only was Muggeridge raised in that creed, he also married into it. Kitty Dobbs was the beautiful, freethinking niece of Sidney and Beatrice Webb; in marrying her, he noted many years later, he was marrying into �a sort of aristocracy of the Left.�

Muggeridge�s great gift as a political commentator was a nose for spurious idealism. Like nearly every right-thinking (which meant left-leaning) person, the young Muggeridge regarded the Soviet Union as the first chapter of the new utopia. When he went there as Moscow correspondent for The Manchester Guardian in the early 1930s, disabusement was almost immediate. As a leader writer, Muggeridge had tapped out �Many an uplifting sentence � expressing the hope that moderate men of all shades of opinion would draw together, and that wiser counsels might yet prevail.� In Moscow, he discovered that �moderate men of all shades of opinion had a way of disappearing into Lubinka Prison, never to be seen again.� Muggeridge saw the future, and�unlike Lincoln Steffens a decade earlier�he saw that it was hell on earth. Russia, he understood, was in the process of becoming �a huge and centrally organised slave state.� It wasn�t long before he was writing to his aunt-by-marriage Beatrice about his:

overwhelming conviction that the [Soviet] Government and all it stands for, its crude philosophy (religion if you like) is evil and a denial of everything I care for in life� . Why should uncle Sidney say � �I indignantly repudiate the slander that there is forced labour in the Soviet Union� when every single person in Russia knows there is forced labour � ?

A glimpse of Stalin�s Russia spurred Muggeridge�s political awakening. It is to his everlasting credit that he had the wit to see through his Fabian �ideals� and the courage to broadcast the horrors going on around him. In the beginning, at least, he was almost alone. Western intellectuals flocked to the workers� paradise that Stalin had created and �they were one and all utterly delighted and excited by what they saw there.� Clergymen walked serenely and happily through the anti-god museums, politicians claimed that no system of society could possibly be more equitable and just, lawyers admired Soviet justice, and economists praised the Soviet economy.

As for the Webbs and their starry-eyed ideal of universal brotherhood, Muggeridge summed it up in a dismissive BBC broadcast after their deaths. Comparing Beatrice to Don Quixote, he wrote that �she finished up enmeshed in her own self-deception, adulating a regime [the USSR] which bore as little relation to the Fabian Good Life as Dulcinea del Toboso to the Mistress of Don Quixote�s dreams.�