If, as often seems to be the case, we have driven Jesus away, or at any rate back to the catacombs, then we are totally at the mercy of our rulers, whoever they may be and whatever the ideology on behalf of which they purport to govern.
The only antidote to the poison from Caesar’s laurel crown comes from Jesus’s crown of thorns. He alone can deliver us from the monstrosities and buffooneries of power, as has been discovered by the most perceptive spirits of our time, such as Solzhenitsyn.
Faced with power at its most unbridled and most brutal, they turn for help and comfort, not to Universal Declarations of Human Rights and other pronouncements, solemn undertakings,Covenants and Charters in a similar vein, but to the man wearing a crown of thorns, decked out in a red robe of absurdity and with a court of jeering soldiers.
There alone the sting of power is drawn and its pretentions are exploded, and the princes of this world have no recourse but, like Judas, to flee into the night.
Malcolm Muggeridge (1903-1990)
