The British empire he hated, which he regarded as an evil conspiracy against the weak and innocent coloured peoples of the world, is now 'at one with Nineveh and Tyre'. Africa has been unscrambled, Asia 'liberated', sovereignty awarded to more than a hundred nations which, in Blunt's day, were administered by European officials. New tyrannies have replaced old ones, and fresh injustices have been generously heaped on the heads of countless innocents in every quarter of the earth. Few sensitive souls can look around the world today with feelings of satisfaction, or optimism. But the events of this century should remind us that the hopes of mankind almost always prove illusory, and that we have only a limited ability to devise permanent and equitable solutions to problems which spring from human nature.
All good societies breed enemies whose combined hostility can prove fatal.
There is no easy defensive formula, and the most effective strategy is to identify the malign forces quickly, as and when they appear. That has been the chief purpose of this book. At the same time, there are certain salient principles, valid always but of special relevance today, which we should take particular care to uphold. The first, and perhaps the most important, is to reassert our belief in moral absolutes. It is not true that all codes of human conduct are relative, and reflect cultural assumptions and economic arrangements which do not necessarily possess any authority.