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[The following entry from Malcolm Muggeridge’s diary is dated April 8, 1942. Muggeridge—raised in a socialist family but disillusioned with collectivism after seven months in Russia as the Manchester Guardian’s Moscow correspondent—was passing through Lisbon on his way to serve as a British intelligence officer in Mozambique.]

As I sat writing, I broke off to speak Portuguese with a workman; dark, vivacious, vehement man in blue overalls. Very anti-German and pro-English, as he insisted all Portuguese were; immensely pro-Soviet, anti-clerical, fond of ‘futeval’ [football], married, no children. England was, second only to Russia, the land of his heart’s desire; many mansions, mansions of light and love. He associated his interests, quite fallaciously, as I think, with the two countries. In their success he might hope to participate; their failure he would share. He was a living demonstration of the Marxist theory, and also its idiocy. It is the hopes of men which attach themselves to causes. They are the fire—hope for a larger, richer, ampler, more adequate life; and, of course, these hopes are always disappointed. Crusades, reformations, revolutions, etc. are a sudden boiling up of hope; religion, in the continuing sense, their opposite, is the acceptance of our lot here on earth, and the transference to eternity of the impulse to live. My heart is with the latter. I have hoped enough.

I’d rather suffer the selfishness and small-mindedness of conservatives than be ruined by the idealism of radicals.

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