Nehemiah 6:1-19
2 Timothy 1:7
Ephesians 4:29
1 John 4:4
Definition of a Conspiracy:
A combination of persons for an evil or unlawful purpose; an agreement between two or more persons to do something criminal, illegal, or reprehensible (especially in relation to treason, sedition, or murder); a plot. Oxford English Dictionary
Malcom Muggeridge was an English Journalist born in 1903 and died in 1990. His Autobiography is titled: Chronicles of Wasted Time
In the forward, written by Ian Hunter we get a glimpse of the power of conspiracy and intimidation wielded against this incredible journalist by the elite of his days.
“If Muggeridge was sometimes mocked and seldom heeded – well, that is the fate of prophets, as Jeremiah discovered when, for his insights, he got himself chucked down a well. Prophets unsettle our preconceptions and disturb our complacency. Muggeridge never claimed to be a prophet. He said, adapting Amos: ‘I am no prophet, no, nor prophet’s son. I was a journalist, and the Lord took me as I sat at my typewriter.’
His instincts were on display in the winter months of 1932-33 when he served as stand-in correspondent for the Manchester Guardian in Moscow. He did a daring thing; he had his Russian interpreter buy him a railway ticket to the Ukraine and North Caucasus. What Muggeridge saw on that extended rail trip he never forgot; years later he wrote that it ‘remained in my mind as a nightmare memory.’ And he did his best to make sure the world did not forget. He saw the richest wheat lands of Europe turned into a wilderness. He saw famine – ‘planned, and deliberate; not due to any natural catastrophe like failure of rain or cyclone or flooding. An administrative famine brought about by the forced collectivization of agriculture….abandoned villages, the absence of livestock, neglected fields; everywhere, famished, frightened people.’
In a series of articles, Muggeridge wrote of what he had seen; on February 26, 1933:…’to say there is a famine in some of the most fertile parts of Russia is to say much less than the truth; there is not only famine…but a state of war, a military occupation…..the grain collection has been carried out with such thoroughness and brutality that the peasants are now quite without bread.’ The next month he wrote a three part series tracing how the ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat had become the Dictatorship of Joseph Stalin; then how the Dictatorship of Stalin became the ‘Dictatorship of the General Idea.’
His reporting produced a chorus of denunciation. The policy of the British government, and the inclination of the chattering classes, was wholehearted support for what was then called ‘the Soviet experiment’. Muggeridge was denounced as ‘an hysterical liar’ by such eminent personages as the Very Rev. Hewlett Johnson, Dean of Canterbury, who, from his pulpit had praised Stalin’s…..’steady purpose and kindly generosity’. Within Russia, Muggeridge’s reporting was contradicted preeminently by Walter Duranty, Moscow correspondent for the NEW YORK TIMES, a man whom Muggeridge later called ‘the greatest liar I have ever met’ – a reporter who nonetheless was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for journalism.” “It was Malcom’s Russian experience that first prompted a reevaluation of Christianity. As Muggeridge put it four decades later; ‘My disillusionment with the notion of a predestined progress towards a kingdom of heaven on earth led me inexorably back to the kingdom not of this world proclaimed in the Christian revelation.’
Nothing in Muggeridge’s controversial journalistic career ever rivaled his ‘Royal Soap Opera’ article that appeared in the STARDAY EVENING POST on October 19, 1957. His theme was that materialist societies like ours are especially prone to hero-worship; having by and large ceased to believe in God, they pay increasing obeisance to a Queen or Royal family, making of a symbol a kind of substitute or ersatz religion.
The Queen happened to be touring America when the article appeared, and the British press smelled blood. Muggeridge’s article was described as ‘…treasonous….ruthless… shocking…patronizing…..gruesome, to quote only a few epithets. Muggeridge received death threats and his home was vandalized. As he walked along the seafront in Brighton, a passer-by spat in his face. He was banned from the BBC, and his newspaper column dropped.”
You’re talking about conspiracies and intimidations. Muggeridge had the privilege to experience both in full force. However, like Nehemiah, he never caved, he never gave up the truth and the Lord used him to make some astounding prophetic utterances that are now in the history books for all to read.
In the 1960 and 70’s Muggeridge operated as a sort of freelance world correspondent. He said: “I have taken up the hazards of street-walking in preference of the security of being an inmate of a licensed house.”
Every cellphone and every computer ought to have written beside it the words of Ephesians 4:29
Let no foul speech whatever come out of your mouth, but only what serves well to improve the occasion, so as to add blessing to the listeners. (The Modern Language Bible)