World War II — Muggeridge's Take

I've mentioned the book by Malcolm Muggeridge that I've been reading when eating alone in a restaurant: "a third testament" with chapters on various notable Christian thinkers. Last Friday I finished reading it and offered it to Seth the waiter, who graciously declined the offer.

The final chapter of the book is on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor who was executed by the Nazis shortly before the end of WWII. At the conclusion of the chapter, Muggeridge writes:

Looking back now across the years, I ask myself where in that murky darkness any light shines. Not among the Nazis, certainly, nor among the liberators, who, as we now know, were to liberate no one and nothing. The rhetoric and the cant have mercifully been forgotten. What lives on is the memory of a man who dies, not on behalf of freedom or democracy or a steadily rising Gross National Product, nor for any of the twentieth century's counterfeit hopes and desires, but on behalf of a Cross on which another man died two thousand years before. As on that previous occasion on Golgotha, so amidst the rubble and desolation of "liberated" Europe, the only victor is the man who died, as the only hope for the future lies in his triumph over death. There can never be any other victory or any other hope.