Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes
I have absolutely no doubt that there is an intense anti-Americanism in all Western Europe, and I think the reason for that is a very, very simple one.
Muggeridge, Malcolm. Tread Softly for You Tread on My Jokes. Collins, 1966.
The administration of George W. Bush was the most unpopular in American history amongst most of the countries of the world. By the end of his second term, Bush himself was the most unpopular President in America since polls were taken to measure it. However, when Barack Obama went to Berlin, as a senator and presidential candidate he was very warmly received with a crowd of over 200,000 Germans turning out in Berlin to hear his speech.
Many Americans were paranoid about Democratic Socialism being a stalking horse or front organization for Communists. Similarly, many Socialists were paranoid that the American and European (and other) capitalists were out to destroy them in their conflation of socialism and communism.
Senator Burton was using this quotation to support the Republican isolation policy that they were advocating at the time. This quotation has been cited by almost every American politician advocating isolationism. Generally it was the Republican party that has been the isolationist advocates in America. However, after the Second World War that began to change, and in the beginning of the 21st century, the George W. Bush Administration, without any declaration of war by Congress, attacked and invaded two different countries starting the Iraq and the Afghanistan Wars. Meanwhile, the Democrats, who had been advocating American activism in foreign affairs also flip flopped and opposed foreign military intervention as Democratic President Obama withdrew American troops from the two Bush wars. The Afghanistan War was the longest war in American history.
This has generally been true even a century later, despite the fact that at the end of the 20th century the Scandinavian countries had a higher standard of living, a longer life span, and Norway had become the richest per capita democracy in the world.
Thomas Malcolm Muggeridge was an English journalist and satirist. His father, H. T. Muggeridge, was a prominent socialist politician and one of the early Labour Party Members of Parliament for Romford, in Essex. In his twenties, Muggeridge was attracted to communism and went to live in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, but the experience turned him into an anticommunist.
