But to be
corrupted by totalitarianism one does not have to live in a totalitarian country.
corrupted by totalitarianism one does not have to live in a totalitarian country.
Orwell
In
real life Lord Elton, D. N. Pritt, Lady Houston, Ezra Pound, Lord Vanisttart, Father
Coughlin and all the rest of their dreary tribe have to be fought against, but their
intellectual deficiencies hardly need pointing out. Monomania is not interesting, and the
fact that no nationalist of the more bigoted kind can write a book which still seems worth
reading after a lapse of years has a certain deodorizing effect. But when one has admitted
that nationalism has not triumphed everywhere, that there are still peoples whose
judgements are not at the mercy of their desires, the fact does remain that the pressing
problems — India, Poland, Palestine, the Spanish civil war, the Moscow trials, the
American Negroes, the Russo-German Pact or what have you — cannot be, or at least
never are, discussed upon a reasonable level. The Eltons and Pritts and Coughlins, each
of them simply an enormous mouth bellowing the same lie over and over again, are
obviously extreme cases, but we deceive ourselves if we do not realize that we can all
resemble them in unguarded moments. Let a certain note be struck, let this or that corn be
trodden on — and it may be corn whose very existence has been unsuspected hitherto —
and the most fair-minded and sweet-tempered person may suddenly be transformed into a
vicious partisan, anxious only to "score" over his adversary and indifferent as to how
many lies he tells or how many logical errors he commits in doing so. When Lloyd
George, who was an opponent of the Boer War, announced in the House of Commons
that the British communiques, if one added them together, claimed the killing of more
Boers than the whole Boer nation contained, it is recorded that Arthur Balfour rose to his
feet and shouted "Cad! " Very few people are proof against lapses of this type. The Negro
snubbed by a white woman, the Englishman who hears England ignorantly criticized by
an American, the Catholic apologist reminded of the Spanish Armada, will all react in
much the same way. One prod to the nerve of nationalism, and the intellectual decencies
can vanish, the past can be altered, and the plainest facts can be denied.
If one harbours anywhere in one's mind a nationalistic loyalty or hatred, certain facts,
although in a sense known to be true, are inadmissible. Here are just a few examples. I
list below five types of nationalist, and against each I append a fact which it is impossible
for that type of nationalist to accept, even in his secret thoughts:
BRITISH TORY : Britian will come out of this war with reduced power and prestige.
COMMUNIST. If she had not been aided by Britain and America, Russia would have
been defeated by Germany.
IRISH NATIONALIST. Eire can only remain independent because of British protection.
TROTSKYIST. The Stalin regime is accepted by the Russian masses.
PACIFIST. Those who "abjure" violence can only do so because others are committing
violence on their behalf.
All of these facts are grossly obvious if one's emotions do not happen to be involved: but
to the kind of person named in each case they are also intolerable, and so they have to be
denied, and false theories constructed upon their denial. I come back to the astonishing
failure of military prediction in the present war. It is, I think, true to say that the
intelligentsia have been more wrong about the progress of the war than the common
people, and that they were more swayed by partisan feelings. The average intellectual of
the Left believed, for instance, that the war was lost in 1940, that the Germans were
bound to overrun Egypt in 1942, that the Japanese would never be driven out of the lands
they had conquered, and that the Anglo-American bombing offensive was making no
impression on Germany. He could believe these things because his hatred for the British
ruling class forbade him to admit that British plans could succeed. There is no limit to the
follies that can be swallowed if one is under the influence of feelings of this kind. I have
heard it confidently stated, for instance, that the American troops had been brought to
Europe not to fight the Germans but to crush an English revolution. One has to belong to
the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool. When
Hitler invaded Russia, the officials of the MOI issued "as background" a warning that
Russia might be expected to collapse in six weeks. On the other hand the Communists
regarded every phase of the war as a Russian victory, even when the Russians were
driven back almost to the Caspian Sea and had lost several million prisoners. There is no
need to multiply instances. The point is that as soon as fear, hatred, jealousy and power
worship are involved, the sense of reality becomes unhinged. And, as I have pointed out
already, the sense of right and wrong becomes unhinged also. There is no crime,
absolutely none, that cannot be condoned when "our" side commits it. Even if one does
not deny that the crime has happened, even if one knows that it is exactly the same crime
as one has condemned in some other case, even if one admits in an intellectual sense that
it is unjustified — still one cannot feel that it is wrong. Loyalty is involved, and so pity
ceases to function.
The reason for the rise and spread of nationalism is far too big a question to be raised
here. It is enough to say that, in the forms in which it appears among English
intellectuals, it is a distorted reflection of the frightful battles actually happening in the
external world, and that its worst follies have been made possible by the breakdown of
patriotism and religious belief. If one follows up this train of thought, one is in danger of
being led into a species of Conservatism, or into political quietism. It can be plausibly
argued, for instance — it is even possibly true — that patriotism is an inocculation against
nationalism, that monarchy is a guard against dictatorship, and that organized religion is a
guard against superstition. Or again, it can be argued that no unbiased outlook is possible,
that all creeds and causes involve the same lies, follies, and barbarities; and this is often
advanced as a reason for keeping out of politics altogether. I do not accept this argument,
if only because in the modem world no one describable as an intellectual can keep out of
politics in the sense of not caring about them. I think one must engage in politics — using
the word in a wide sense — and that one must have preferences: that is, one must
recognize that some causes are objectively better than others, even if they are advanced
by equally bad means. As for the nationalistic loves and hatreds that I have spoken of,
they are part of the make-up of most of us, whether we like it or not. Whether it is
possible to get rid of them I do not know, but I do believe that it is possible to struggle
against them, and that this is essentially a moral effort. It is a question first of all of
discovering what one really is, what one's own feelings really are, and then of making
allowance for the inevitable bias. If you hate and fear Russia, if you are jealous of the
wealth and power of America, if you despise Jews, if you have a sentiment of inferiority
towards the British ruling class, you cannot get rid of those feelings simply by taking
thought. But you can at least recognize that you have them, and prevent them from
contaminating your mental processes. The emotional urges which are inescapable, and
are perhaps even necessary to political action, should be able to exist side by side with an
acceptance of reality. But this, I repeat, needs a moral effort, and contemporary English
literature, so far as it is alive at all to the major issues of our time, shows how few of us
are prepared to make it.
The Prevention of Literature
1946
About a year ago I attended a meeting of the P. E. N. Club, the occasion being the
tercentenary of Milton's Aeropagitica — a pamphlet, it may be remembered, in defense of
freedom of the press. Milton's famous phrase about the sin of "killing" a book was printed
on the leaflets advertising the meeting which had been circulated beforehand.
There were four speakers on the platform. One of them delivered a speech which did deal
with the freedom of the press, but only in relation to India; another said, hesitantly, and in
very general terms, that liberty was a good thing; a third delivered an attack on the laws
relating to obscenity in literature. The fourth devoted most of his speech to a defense of
the Russian purges. Of the speeches from the body of the hall, some reverted to the
question of obscenity and the laws that deal with it, others were simply eulogies of Soviet
Russia. Moral liberty — the liberty to discuss sex questions frankly in print — seemed to
be generally approved, but political liberty was not mentioned. Out of this concourse of
several hundred people, perhaps half of whom were directly connected with the writing
trade, there was not a single one who could point out that freedom of the press, if it
means anything at all, means the freedom to criticize and oppose. Significantly, no
speaker quoted from the pamphlet which was ostensibly being commemorated. Nor was
there any mention of the various books which have been "killed" in England and the
United States during the war. In its net effect the meeting was a demonstration in favor of
censorship.
There was nothing particularly surprising in this. In our age, the idea of intellectual
liberty is under attack from two directions. On the one side are its theoretical enemies, the
apologists of totalitarianism, and on the other its immediate, practical enemies, monopoly
and bureaucracy. Any writer or journalist who wants to retain his integrity finds himself
thwarted by the general drift of society rather than by active persecution. The sort of
things that are working against him are the concentration of the press in the hands of a
few rich men, the grip of monopoly on radio and the films, the unwillingness of the
public to spend money on books, making it necessary for nearly every writer to earn part
of his living by hackwork, the encroachment of official bodies like the M. O. I. and the
British Council, which help the writer to keep alive but also waste his time and dictate his
opinions, and the continuous war atmosphere of the past ten years, whose distorting
effects no one has been able to escape. Everything in our age conspires to turn the writer,
and every other kind of artist as well, into a minor official, working on themes handed
down from above and never telling what seems to him the whole of the truth. But in
struggling against this fate he gets no help from his own side; that is, there is no large
body of opinion which will assure him that he's in the right. In the past, at any rate
throughout the Protestant centuries, the idea of rebellion and the idea of intellectual
integrity were mixed up. A heretic — political, moral, religious, or aesthetic — was one
who refused to outrage his own conscience. His outlook was summed up in the words of
the Revivalist hymn:
Dare to be a Daniel
Dare to stand alone
Dare to have a purpose firm
Dare to make it known
To bring this hymn up to date one would have to add a "Don't" at the beginning of each
line. For it is the peculiarity of our age that the rebels against the existing order, at any
rate the most numerous and characteristic of them, are also rebelling against the idea of
individual integrity. "Daring to stand alone" is ideologically criminal as well as
practically dangerous. The independence of the writer and the artist is eaten away by
vague economic forces, and at the same time it is undermined by those who should be its
defenders. It is with the second process that I am concerned here.
Freedom of thought and of the press are usually attacked by arguments which are not
worth bothering about. Anyone who has experience of lecturing and debating knows
them off backwards. Here I am not trying to deal with the familiar claim that freedom is
an illusion, or with the claim that there is more freedom in totalitarian countries than in
democratic ones, but with the much more tenable and dangerous proposition that freedom
is undesirable and that intellectual honesty is a form of anti-social selfishness. Although
other aspects of the question are usually in the foreground, the controversy over freedom
of speech and of the press is at bottom a controversy of the desirability, or otherwise, of
telling lies. What is really at issue is the right to report contemporary events truthfully, or
as truthfully as is consistent with the ignorance, bias and self-deception from which every
observer necessarily suffers. In saying this I may seem to be saying that straightforward
"reportage" is the only branch of literature that matters: but I will try to show later that at
every literary level, and probably in every one of the arts, the same issue arises in more or
less subtilized forms. Meanwhile, it is necessary to strip away the irrelevancies in which
this controversy is usually wrapped up.
The enemies of intellectual liberty always try to present their case as a plea for discipline
versus individualism. The issue truth-versus-untruth is as far as possible kept in the
background. Although the point of emphasis may vary, the writer who refuses to sell his
opinions is always branded as a mere egoist. He is accused, that is, of either wanting to
shut himself up in an ivory tower, or of making an exhibitionist display of his own
personality, or of resisting the inevitable current of history in an attempt to cling to
unjustified privilege. The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an
opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent. Each of them tacitly claims that "the
truth" has already been revealed, and that the heretic, if he is not simply a fool, is secretly
aware of "the truth" and merely resists it out of selfish motives. In Communist literature
the attack on intellectual liberty is usually masked by oratory about "petty-bourgeois
individualism," "the illusions of nineteenth-century liberalism," etc. , and backed up by
words of abuse such as "romantic" and "sentimental," which, since they do not have any
agreed meaning, are difficult to answer. In this way the controversy is maneuvered away
from its real issue. One can accept, and most enlightened people would accept, the
Communist thesis that pure freedom will only exist in a classless society, and that one is
most nearly free when one is working to bring such a society about. But slipped in with
this is the quite unfounded claim that the Communist Party is itself aiming at the
establishment of the classless society, and that in the U. S. S. R. this aim is actually on the
way to being realized. If the first claim is allowed to entail the second, there is almost no
assault on common sense and common decency that cannot be justified. But meanwhile,
the real point has been dodged. Freedom of the intellect means the freedom to report what
one has seen, heard, and felt, and not to be obliged to fabricate imaginary facts and
feelings. The familiar tirades against "escapism" and "individualism," "romanticism," and
so forth, are merely a forensic device, the aim of which is to make the perversion of
history seem respectable.
Fifteen years ago, when one defended the freedom of the intellect, one had to defend it
against Conservatives, against Catholics, and to some extent — for they were not of great
importance in England — against Fascists. Today one has to defend it against
Communists and "fellow-travelers. " One ought not to exaggerate the direct influence of
the small English Communist Party, but there can be no question about the poisonous
effect of the Russian mythos on English intellectual life. Because of it known facts are
suppressed and distorted to such an extent as to make it doubtful whether a true history of
our times can ever be written. Let me give just one instance out of the hundreds that
could be cited. When Germany collapsed, it was found that very large numbers of Soviet
Russians — mostly, no doubt, from non-political motives — had changed sides and were
fighting for the Germans. Also, a small but not negligible portion of the Russian prisoners
and displaced persons refused to go back to the U. S. S. R. , and some of them, at least,
were repatriated against their will. These facts, known to many journalists on the spot,
went almost unmentioned in the British press, while at the same time Russophile
publicists in England continued to justify the purges and deportations of 1936-38 by
claiming that the U. S. S. R. "had no quislings. " The fog of lies and misinformation that
surrounds such subjects as the Ukraine famine, the Spanish civil war, Russian policy in
Poland, and so forth, is not due entirely to conscious dishonesty, but any writer or
journalist who is fully sympathetic for the U. S. S. R. — sympathetic, that is, in the way the
Russians themselves would want him to be — does have to acquiesce in deliberate
falsification on important issues. I have before me what must be a very rare pamphlet,
written by Maxim Litvinoff in 1918 and outlining the recent events in the Russian
Revolution. It makes no mention of Stalin, but gives high praise to Trotsky, and also to
Zinoviev, Kamenev, and others. What could be the attitude of even the most intellectually
scrupulous Communist towards such a pamphlet? At best, the obscurantist attitude of
saying that it is an undesirable document and better suppressed. And if for some reason it
were decided to issue a garbled version of the pamphlet, denigrating Trotsky and
inserting references to Stalin, no Communist who remained faithful to his party could
protest. Forgeries almost as gross as this have been committed in recent years. But the
significant thing is not that they happen, but that, even when they are known about, they
provoke no reaction from the left-wing intelligentsia as a whole. The argument that to tell
the truth would be "inopportune" or would "play into the hands of' somebody or other is
felt to be unanswerable, and few people are bothered by the prospect of the lies which
they condone getting out of the newspapers and into the history books.
The organized lying practiced by totalitarian states is not, as is sometimes claimed, a
temporary expedient of the same nature as military deception. It is something integral to
totalitarianism, something that would still continue even if concentration camps and
secret police forces had ceased to be necessary. Among intelligent Communists there is
an underground legend to the effect that although the Russian government is obliged now
to deal in lying propaganda, frame-up trials, and so forth, it is secretly recording the true
facts and will publish them at some future time. We can, I believe, be quite certain that
this is not the case, because the mentality implied by such an action is that of a liberal
historian who believes that the past cannot be altered and that a correct knowledge of
history is valuable as a matter of course. From the totalitarian point of view history is
something to be created rather than learned. A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy,
and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible. But
since, in practice, no one is infallible, it is frequently necessary to rearrange past events in
order to show that this or that mistake was not made, or that this or that imaginary
triumph actually happened. Then again, every major change in policy demands a
corresponding change of doctrine and a revelation of prominent historical figures. This
kind of thing happens everywhere, but is clearly likelier to lead to outright falsification in
societies where only one opinion is permissible at any given moment. Totalitarianism
demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably
demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth. The friends of totalitarianism
in this country usually tend to argue that since absolute truth is not attainable, a big lie is
no worse than a little lie. It is pointed out that all historical records are biased and
inaccurate, or on the other hand, that modern physics has proven that what seems to us
the real world is an illusion, so that to believe in the evidence of one's senses is simply
vulgar philistinism. A totalitarian society which succeeded in perpetuating itself would
probably set up a schizophrenic system of thought, in which the laws of common sense
held good in everyday life and in certain exact sciences, but could be disregarded by the
politician, the historian, and the sociologist. Already there are countless people who
would think it scandalous to falsify a scientific textbook, but would see nothing wrong in
falsifying an historical fact. It is at the point where literature and politics cross that
totalitarianism exerts its greatest pressure on the intellectual. The exact sciences are not,
at this date, menaced to anything like the same extent. This partly accounts for the fact
that in all countries it is easier for the scientists than for the writers to line up behind their
respective governments.
To keep the matter in perspective, let me repeat what I said at the beginning of this essay:
that in England the immediate enemies of truthfulness, and hence of freedom of thought,
are the press lords, the film magnates, and the bureaucrats, but that on a long view the
weakening of the desire for liberty among the intellectuals themselves is the most serious
symptom of all. It may seem that all this time I have been talking about the effects of
censorship, not on literature as a whole, but merely on one department of political
journalism. Granted that Soviet Russia constitutes a sort of forbidden area in the British
press, granted that issues like Poland, the Spanish civil war, the Russo-German pact, and
so forth, are debarred from serious discussion, and that if you possess information that
conflicts with the prevailing orthodoxy you are expected to either distort it or keep quiet
about it — granted all this, why should literature in the wider sense be affected? Is every
writer a politician, and is every book necessarily a work of straightforward "reportage"?
Even under the tightest dictatorship, cannot the individual writer remain free inside his
own mind and distill or disguise his unorthodox ideas in such a way that the authorities
will be too stupid to recognize them? And in any case, if the writer himself is in
agreement with the prevailing orthodoxy, why should it have a cramping effect on him?
Is not literature, or any of the arts, likeliest to flourish in societies in which there are no
major conflicts of opinion and no sharp distinction between the artist and his audience?
Does one have to assume that every writer is a rebel, or even that a writer as such is an
exceptional person?
Whenever one attempts to defend intellectual liberty against the claims of totalitarianism,
one meets with these arguments in one form or another. They are based on a complete
misunderstanding of what literature is, and how — one should perhaps say why — it
comes into being. They assume that a writer is either a mere entertainer or else a venal
hack who can switch from one line of propaganda to another as easily as an organ grinder
changing tunes. But after all, how is it that books ever come to be written? Above a quite
low level, literature is an attempt to influence the viewpoint of one's contemporaries by
recording experience. And so far as freedom of expression is concerned, there is not
much difference between a mere journalist and the most "unpolitical" imaginative writer.
The journalist is unfree, and is conscious of unfreedom, when he is forced to write lies or
suppress what seems to him important news; the imaginative writer is unfree when he has
to falsify his subjective feelings, which from his point of view are facts. He may distort
and caricature reality in order to make his meaning clearer, but he cannot misrepresent
the scenery of his own mind; he cannot say with any conviction that he likes what he
dislikes, or believes what he disbelieves. If he is forced to do so, the only result is that his
creative faculties will dry up. Nor can he solve the problem by keeping away from
controversial topics. There is no such thing as a genuinely non-political literature, and
least of all in an age like our own, when fears, hatreds, and loyalties of a directly political
kind are near to the surface of everyone's consciousness. Even a single taboo can have an
all-round crippling effect upon the mind, because there is always the danger that any
thought which is freely followed up may lead to the forbidden thought. It follows that the
atmosphere of totalitarianism is deadly to any kind of prose writer, though a poet, at any
rate a lyric poet, might possibly find it breathable. And in any totalitarian society that
survives for more than a couple of generations, it is probable that prose literature, of the
kind that has existed during the past four hundred years, must actually come to an end.
Literature has sometimes flourished under despotic regimes, but, as has often been
pointed out, the despotisms of the past were not totalitarian. Their repressive apparatus
was always inefficient, their ruling classes were usually either corrupt or apathetic or
half-liberal in outlook, and the prevailing religious doctrines usually worked against
perfectionism and the notion of human infallibility. Even so it is broadly true that prose
literature has reached its highest levels in periods of democracy and free speculation.
What is new in totalitarianism is that its doctrines are not only unchallengeable but also
unstable. They have to be accepted on pain of damnation, but on the other hand, they are
always liable to be altered on a moment's notice. Consider, for example, the various
attitudes, completely incompatible with one another, which an English Communist or
"fellow-traveler" has had to adopt toward the war between Britain and Germany. For
years before September, 1939, he was expected to be in a continuous stew about "the
horrors of Nazism" and to twist everything he wrote into a denunciation of Hitler: after
September, 1939, for twenty months, he had to believe that Germany was more sinned
against than sinning, and the word "Nazi," at least as far as print went, had to drop right
out of his vocabulary. Immediately after hearing the 8 o'clock news bulletin on the
morning of June 22, 1941, he had to start believing once again that Nazism was the most
hideous evil the world had ever seen. Now, it is easy for the politician to make such
changes: for a writer the case is somewhat different. If he is to switch his allegiance at
exactly the right moment, he must either tell lies about his subjective feelings, or else
suppress them altogether. In either case he has destroyed his dynamo. Not only will ideas
refuse to come to him, but the very words he uses will seem to stiffen under his touch.
Political writing in our time consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted
together like the pieces of a child's Meccano set. It is the unavoidable result of self-
censorship. To write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one
thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox. It might be otherwise in an "age of
faith," when the prevailing orthodoxy has long been established and is not taken too
seriously. In that case it would be possible, or might be possible, for large areas of one's
mind to remain unaffected by what one officially believed. Even so, it is worth noticing
that prose literature almost disappeared during the only age of faith that Europe has ever
enjoyed. Throughout the whole of the Middle Ages there was almost no imaginative
prose literature and very little in the way of historical writing; and the intellectual leaders
of society expressed their most serious thoughts in a dead language which barley altered
during a thousand years.
Totalitarianism, however, does not so much promise an age of faith as an age of
schizophrenia. A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly
artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to
power by force or fraud. Such a society, no matter how long it persists, can never afford
to become either tolerant or intellectually stable. It can never permit either the truthful
recording of facts or the emotional sincerity that literary creation demands.
But to be
corrupted by totalitarianism one does not have to live in a totalitarian country. The mere
prevalence of certain ideas can spread a kind of poison that makes one subject after
another impossible for literary purposes. Wherever there is an enforced orthodoxy — or
even two orthodoxies, as often happens — good writing stops. This was well illustrated by
the Spanish civil war. To many English intellectuals the war was a deeply moving
experience, but not an experience about which they could write sincerely. There were
only two things that you were allowed to say, and both of them were palpable lies: as a
result, the war produced acres of print but almost nothing worth reading.
It is not certain whether the effects of totalitarianism upon verse need be so deadly as its
effects on prose. There is a whole series of converging reasons why it is somewhat easier
for a poet than a prose writer to feel at home in an authoritarian society. To begin with,
bureaucrats and other "practical" men usually despise the poet too deeply to be much
interested in what he is saying. Secondly, what the poet is saying — that is, what his poem
"means" if translated into prose — is relatively unimportant, even to himself. The thought
contained in a poem is always simple, and is no more the primary purpose of the poem
than the anecdote is the primary purpose of the picture. A poem is an arrangement of
sounds and associations, as a painting is an arrangement of brushmarks. For short
snatches, indeed, as in the refrain of a song, poetry can even dispense with meaning
altogether. It is therefore fairly easy for a poet to keep away from dangerous subjects and
avoid uttering heresies; and even when he does utter them, they may escape notice. But
above all, good verse, unlike good prose, is not necessarily and individual product.
Certain kinds of poems, such as ballads, or, on the other hand, very artificial verse forms,
can be composed co-operatively by groups of people. Whether the ancient English and
Scottish ballads were originally produced by individuals, or by the people at large, is
disputed; but at any rate they are non-individual in the sense that they constantly change
in passing from mouth to mouth. Even in print no two versions of a ballad are ever quite
the same. Many primitive peoples compose verse communally. Someone begins to
improvise, probably accompanying himself on a musical instalment, somebody else chips
in with a line or a rhyme when the first singer breaks down, and so the process continues
until there exists a whole song or ballad which has no identifiable author.
In prose, this kind of intimate collaboration is quite impossible. Serious prose, in any
case, has to be composed in solitude, whereas the excitement of being part of a group is
actually an aid to certain kinds of versification. Verse — and perhaps good verse of its
own kind, though it would not be the highest kind — might survive under even the most
inquisitorial regime. Even in a society where liberty and individuality had been
extinguished, there would still be a need either for patriotic songs and heroic ballads
celebrating victories, or for elaborate exercises in flattery; and these are the kinds of
poems that can be written to order, or composed communally, without necessarily lacking
artistic value. Prose is a different matter, since the prose writer cannot narrow the range
of his thoughts without killing his inventiveness. But the history of totalitarian societies,
or of groups of people who have adopted the totalitarian outlook, suggests that loss of
liberty is inimical to all forms of literature. German literature almost disappeared during
the Hitler regime, and the case was not much better in Italy. Russian literature, so far as
one can judge by translations, has deteriorated markedly since the early days of the
revolution, though some of the verse appears to be better than the prose. Few if any
Russian novels that it is possible to take seriously have been translated for about fifteen
years. In western Europe and America large sections of the literary intelligentsia have
either passed through the Communist Party or have been warmly sympathetic to it, but
this whole leftward movement has produced extraordinarily few books worth reading.
Orthodox Catholicism, again, seems to have a crushing effect upon certain literary forms,
especially the novel. During a period of three hundred years, how many people have been
at once good novelists and good Catholics? The fact is that certain themes cannot be
celebrated in words, and tyranny is one of them. No one ever wrote a good book in praise
of the Inquisition. Poetry might survive in a totalitarian age, and certain arts or half-arts,
such as architecture, might even find tyranny beneficial, but the prose writer would have
no choice between silence or death. Prose literature as we know it is the product of
rationalism, of the Protestant centuries, of the autonomous individual. And the
destruction of intellectual liberty cripples the journalist, the sociological writer, the
historian, the novelist, the critic, and the poet, in that order. In the future it is possible that
a new kind of literature, not involving individual feeling or truthful observation, may
arise, but no such thing is at present imaginable. It seems much likelier that if the liberal
culture that we have lived in since the Renaissance comes to an end, the literary art will
perish with it.
Of course, print will continue to be used, and it is interesting to speculate what kinds of
reading matter would survive in a rigidly totalitarian society. Newspapers will
presumably continue until television technique reaches a higher level, but apart from
newspapers it is doubtful even now whether the great mass of people in the industrialized
countries feel the need for any kind of literature. They are unwilling, at any rate, to spend
anywhere near as much on reading matter as they spend on several other recreations.
Probably novels and stories will be completely superseded by film and radio productions.
Or perhaps some kind of low grade sensational fiction will survive, produced by a sort of
conveyor-belt process that reduces human initiative to the minimum.
It would probably not be beyond human ingenuity to write books by machinery. But a
sort of mechanizing process can already be seen at work in the film and radio, in
publicity and propaganda, and in the lower reaches of journalism. The Disney films, for
instance, are produced by what is essentially a factory process, the work being done
partly mechanically and partly by teams of artists who have to subordinate their
individual style. Radio features are commonly written by tired hacks to whom the subject
and the manner of treatment are dictated beforehand: even so, what they write is merely a
kind of raw material to be chopped into shape by producers and censors. So also with the
innumerable books and pamphlets commissioned by government departments. Even more
machine-like is the production of short stories, serials, and poems for the very cheap
magazines. Papers such as the Writer abound with advertisements of literary schools, all
of them offering you ready-made plots at a few shillings a time. Some, together with the
plot, supply the opening and closing sentences of each chapter. Others furnish you with a
sort of algebraical formula by the use of which you can construct plots for yourself.
Others have packs of cards marked with characters and situations, which have only to be
shuffled and dealt in order to produce ingenious stories automatically. It is probably in
some such way that the literature of a totalitarian society would be produced, if literature
were still felt to be necessary. Imagination — even consciousness, so far as possible —
would be eliminated from the process of writing. Books would be planned in their broad
lines by bureaucrats, and would pass through so many hands that when finished they
would be no more an individual product than a Ford car at the end of the assembly line. It
goes without saying that anything so produced would be rubbish; but anything that was
not rubbish would endanger the structure of the state. As for the surviving literature of the
past, it would have to be suppressed or at least elaborately rewritten.
Meanwhile, totalitarianism has not fully triumphed anywhere. Our own society is still,
broadly speaking, liberal. To exercise your right of free speech you have to fight against
economic pressure and against strong sections of public opinion, but not, as yet, against a
secret police force. You can say or print almost anything so long as you are willing to do
it in a hole-and-corner way. But what is sinister, as I said at the beginning of this essay, is
that the conscious enemies of liberty are those to whom liberty ought to mean most. The
big public do not care about the matter one way or the other. They are not in favour of
persecuting the heretic, and they will not exert themselves to defend him. They are at
once too sane and too stupid to acquire the totalitarian outlook. The direct, conscious
attack on intellectual decency comes from the intellectuals themselves.
It is possible that the Russophile intelligentsia, if they had not succumbed to that
particular myth, would have succumbed to another of much the same kind. But at any
rate the Russian myth is there, and the corruption it causes stinks. When one sees highly
educated men looking on indifferently at oppression and persecution, one wonders which
to despise more, their cynicism or their shortsightedness. Many scientists, for example,
are the uncritical admirers of the U. S. S. R. They appear to think that the destruction of
liberty is of no importance so long as their own line of work is for the moment
unaffected. The U. S. S. R. is a large, rapidly developing country which has an acute need
of scientific workers and, consequently, treats them generously. Provided that they steer
clear of dangerous subjects such as psychology, scientists are privileged persons. Writers,
on the other hand, are viciously persecuted. It is true that literary prostitutes like Ilya
Ehrenburg or Alexei Tolstoy are paid huge sums of money, but the only thing which is of
any value to the writer as such — his freedom of expression — is taken away from him.
Some, at least, of the English scientists who speak so enthusiastically of the opportunities
to be enjoyed by scientists in Russia are capable of understanding this. But their
reflection appears to be: "Writers are persecuted in Russia. So what? I am not a writer. "
They do not see that any attack on intellectual liberty, and on the concept of objective
truth, threatens in the long run every department of thought.
For the moment the totalitarian state tolerates the scientist because it needs him. Even in
Nazi Germany, scientists, other than Jews, were relatively well treated and the German
scientific community, as a whole, offered no resistance to Hitler. At this stage of history,
even the most autocratic ruler is forced to take account of physical reality, partly because
of the lingering-on of liberal habits of thought, partly because of the need to prepare for
war. So long as physical reality cannot altogether be ignored, so long as two and two
have to make four when you are, for example, drawing the blueprint of an aeroplane, the
scientist has his function, and can even be allowed a measure of liberty. His awakening
will come later, when the totalitarian state is firmly established. Meanwhile, if he wants
to safeguard the integrity of science, it is his job to develop some kind of solidarity with
his literary colleagues and not disregard it as a matter of indifference when writers are
silenced or driven to suicide, and newspapers systematically falsified.
But however it may be with the physical sciences, or with music, painting and
architecture, it is — as I have tried to show — certain that literature is doomed if liberty of
thought perishes. Not only is it doomed in any country which retains a totalitarian
structure; but any writer who adopts the totalitarian outlook, who finds excuses for
persecution and the falsification of reality, thereby destroys himself as a writer. There is
no way out of this. No tirades against "individualism" and the "ivory tower," no pious
platitudes to the effect that "true individuality is only attained through identification with
the community," can get over the fact that a bought mind is a spoiled mind. Unless
spontaneity enters at some point or another, literary creation is impossible, and language
itself becomes something totally different from what it is now, we may learn to separate
literary creation from intellectual honesty. At present we know only that the imagination,
like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity. Any writer or journalist who denies
that fact — and nearly all the current praise of the Soviet Union contains or implies such a
denial — is, in effect, demanding his own destruction.
As I Please
Tribune, 4 February 1944
When Sir Walter Raleigh was imprisoned in the Tower of London, he occupied himself
with writing a history of the world. He had finished the first volume and was at work on
the second when there was a scuffle between some workmen beneath the window of his
cell, and one of the men was killed. In spite of diligent enquiries, and in spite of the fact
that he had actually seen the thing happen, Sir Walter was never able to discover what the
quarrel was about; whereupon, so it is said — and if the story is not true it certainly ought
to be — he burned what he had written and abandoned his project.
This story has come into my head I do not know how many times during the past ten
years, but always with the reflection that Raleigh was probably wrong. Allowing for all
the difficulties of research at that date, and the special difficulty of conducting research in
prison, he could probably have produced a world history which had some resemblance to
the real course of events. Up to a fairly recent date, the major events recorded in the
history books probably happened. It is probably true that the battle of Hastings was
fought in 1066, that Columbus discovered America, that Henry VIII had six wives, and
so on. A certain degree of truthfulness was possible so long as it was admitted that a
fact may be true even if you don't like it. Even as late as the last war it was possible for
the Encyclopedia Britannica, for instance, to compile its articles on the various
campaigns partly from German sources. Some of the facts — the casualty figures, for
instance — were regarded as neutral and in substance accepted by everybody. No such
thing would be possible now. A Nazi and a non-Nazi version of the present war would
have no resemblance to one another, and which of them finally gets into the history books
will be decided not by evidential methods but on the battlefield.
During the Spanish civil war I found myself feeling very strongly that a true history of
this war never would or could be written. Accurate figures, objective accounts of what
was happening, simply did not exist. And if I felt that even in 1937, when the Spanish
Government was still in being, and the lies which the various Republican factions were
telling about each other and about the enemy were relatively small ones, how does the
case stand now? Even if Franco is overthrown, what kind of records will the future
historian have to go upon? And if Franco or anyone at all resembling him remains in
power, the history of the war will consist quite largely of "facts" which millions of people
now living know to be lies. One of these "facts," for instance, is that there was a
considerable Russian army in Spain. There exists the most abundant evidence that there
was no such army. Yet if Franco remains in power, and if Fascism in general survives,
that Russian army will go into the history books and future school children will believe in
it. So for practical purposes the lie will have become truth.
This kind of thing is happening all the time. Out of the milions of instances which must
be available, I will choose one which happens to be verifiable. During part of 1941 and
1942, when the Luftwaffe was busy in Russia, the German radio regaled its home
audiences with stories of devestating air raids on London. Now, we are aware that those
raids did not happen. But what use would our knowledge be if the Germans conquered
Britain? For the purposes of a future historian, did those raids happen, or didn't they? The
answer is: If Hitler survives, they happened, and if he falls they didn't happen. So with
innumerable other events of the past ten or twenty years. Is the Protocols of the Elders of
Zion a genuine document? Did Trotsky plot with the Nazis? How many German
aeroplanes were shot down in the Battle of Britain? Does Europe welcome the New
Order? In no case do you get one answer which is universally accepted because it is true:
in each case you get a number of totally incompatible answers, one of which is finally
adopted as the result of a physical struggle. History is written by the winners.
In the last analysis our only claim to victory is that if we win the war we shall tell fewer
lies about it than our adversaries. The really frightening thing about totalitarianism is not
that it commits "atrocities" but that it attacks the concept of objective truth; it claims to
control the past as well as the future. In spite of all the lying and self-righteousness that
war encourages, I do not honestly think it can be said that that habit of mind is growing in
Britain. Taking one thing with another, I should say that the press is slightly freer than it
was before the war. I know out of my own experience that you can print things now
which you couldn't print ten years ago. War resisters have probably been less maltreated
in this war than in the last one, and the expression of unpopular opinion in public is
certainly safer. There is some hope, therefore, that the liberal habit of mind, which thi nk s
of truth as something outside yourself, something to be discovered, and not as something
you can make up as you go along, will survive. But I still don't envy the future historian's
job. Is it not a strange commentary on our time that even the casualties in the present war
cannot be estimated within several millions?
No New Ideas?
Looking through Chesterton's Introduction to Hard Times in the Everyman Edition
(incidentally, Chesterton's Introductions to Dickens are about the best thing he ever
wrote) , I note the typically sweeping statement: "There are no new ideas. " Chesterton is
here claiming that the ideas which animated the French Revolution were not new ones
but simply a revival of doctrines which had flourished earlier and then had been
abandoned. But the claim that "there is nothing new under the sun" is one of the stock
arguments of intelligent reactionaries. Catholic apologists, in particular, use it almost
automatically. Everything that you can say or think has been said or thought before.
Every political theory from Liberalism to Trotskyism can be shown to be a development
of some heresy in the early Church. Every system of philosophy springs ultimately from
the Greeks. Every scientific theory (if we are to believe the popular Catholic press) was
anticipated by Roger Bacon and others in the thirteenth century. Some Hindu thinkers go
even further and claim that not merely the scientific theories, but the products of applied
science as well, aeroplanes, radio and the whole bag of tricks, were known to the ancient
Hindus, who afterward dropped them as being unworthy of their attention.
It is not very difficult to see that this idea is rooted in the fear of progress. If there is
nothing new under the sun, if the past in some shape or another always returns, then the
future when it comes will be something familiar. At any rate what will never come —
since it has never come before — is that hated, dreaded thing, a world of free and equal
human beings. Particularly comforting to reactionary thinkers is the idea of a cyclical
universe, in which the same chain of events happens over and over again. In such a
universe every seeming advance towards democracy simply means that the coming age of
tyranny and privilege is a little bit nearer. This belief, obviously superstitious though it is,
is widely held nowadays, and is common among Fascists and near-Fascists.
In fact, there are new ideas. The idea that an advanced civilization need not rest on
slavery is a relatively new idea, for instance; it is a good deal younger than the Christian
religion. But even if Chesterton's dictum were true, it would only be true in the sense that
a statue is contained in every block of stone. Ideas may not change, but emphasis shifts
constantly. It could be claimed, for example, that the most important part of Marx's
theory is contained in the saying: "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. "
But before Marx developed it, what force had that saying had? Who had paid any
attention to it? Who had inferred from it — what it certainly implies — that laws, religions
and moral codes are all a superstructure built over existing property relations? It was
Christ, according to the Gospel, who uttered the text, but it was Marx who brought it to
life. And ever since he did so the motives of politicians, priests, judges, moralists and
millionaires have been under the deepest suspicion — which, of course, is why they hate
him so much.
As I Please - Robot Bombs
Tribune, 30 June 1944
I notice that apart from the widespread complaint that the German pilotless planes "seem
so unnatural" (a bomb dropped by a live airman is quite natural, apparently), some
journalists are denouncing them as barbarous, inhumane and "an indiscriminate attack on
civilians. "
After what we have been doing to the Germans over the past two years, this seems a bit
thick, but it is the normal human response to every new weapon. Poison gas, the
machine-gun, the submarine, gunpowder, and even the crossbow were similarly
denounced in their day. Every weapon seems unfair until you have adopted it yourself.
But I would not deny that the pilotless plane, flying bomb, or whatever its correct name
may be, is an exceptionally unpleasant thing, because, unlike most other projectiles, it
gives you time to think. What is your first reaction when you hear that droning, zooming
noise? Inevitably it is a hope that the noise won 't stop. You want to hear the bomb pass
safely overhead and die away into the distance before the engine cuts out. In other words,
you are hoping it will fall on somebody else. So also when you dodge a shell or an
ordinary bomb — but in that case you have only about five seconds to take cover and no
time to speculate on the bottomless selfishness of the human being.
As I Please - Civilian Bombing
Tribune, 14 July 1944
I have received a number of letters, some of them quite violent ones, attacking me for my
remarks on Miss Vera Brittain's anti-bombing pamphlet. There are two points that seem
to need further comment.
First of all there is the charge, which is becoming quite a common one, that "we started
it," i. e. that Britain was the first country to practise systematic bombing of civilians. How
anyone can make this claim, with the history of the past dozen years in mind, is almost
beyond me. The first act in the present war — some hours, if I remember rightly, before
any declaration of war passed — was the German bombing of Warsaw. The Germans
bombed and shelled the city so intensively that, according to the Poles, at one time 700
fires were raging simultaneously. They made a film of the destruction of Warsaw, which
they entitled "Baptism of Fire" and sent all round the world with the object of terrorising
neutrals.
Several years earlier than this the Condor Legion, sent to Spain by Hitler, had bombed
one Spanish city after another. The "silent raids" on Barcelona in 1938 killed several
thousand people in a couple of days. Earlier than this the Italians had bombed entirely
defenseless Abyssinians and boasted of their explodes as something screamingly funny.
Bruno Mussolini wrote newspaper articles in which he described bombed Abyssinians
"bursting open like a rose," which he said was "most amusing. " And the Japanese ever
since 1931, and intensively since 1937, have been bombing crowded Chinese cities where
there are not even any ARP arrangements, let alone any AA guns or fighter aircraft.
I am not arguing that two blacks make a white, nor that Britain's record is a particularly
good one. In a number of "little wars" from about 1920 onwards the RAF has dropped its
bombs on Afghans, Indians and Arabs who had little or no power of hitting back. But it is
simply untruthful to say that large-scale bombing of crowded town areas, with the object
of causing panic, is a British invention. It was the Fascist states who started this practice,
and so long as the air war went in their favour they avowed their aims quite clearly.
The other thing that needs dealing with is the parrot cry "killing women and children.
real life Lord Elton, D. N. Pritt, Lady Houston, Ezra Pound, Lord Vanisttart, Father
Coughlin and all the rest of their dreary tribe have to be fought against, but their
intellectual deficiencies hardly need pointing out. Monomania is not interesting, and the
fact that no nationalist of the more bigoted kind can write a book which still seems worth
reading after a lapse of years has a certain deodorizing effect. But when one has admitted
that nationalism has not triumphed everywhere, that there are still peoples whose
judgements are not at the mercy of their desires, the fact does remain that the pressing
problems — India, Poland, Palestine, the Spanish civil war, the Moscow trials, the
American Negroes, the Russo-German Pact or what have you — cannot be, or at least
never are, discussed upon a reasonable level. The Eltons and Pritts and Coughlins, each
of them simply an enormous mouth bellowing the same lie over and over again, are
obviously extreme cases, but we deceive ourselves if we do not realize that we can all
resemble them in unguarded moments. Let a certain note be struck, let this or that corn be
trodden on — and it may be corn whose very existence has been unsuspected hitherto —
and the most fair-minded and sweet-tempered person may suddenly be transformed into a
vicious partisan, anxious only to "score" over his adversary and indifferent as to how
many lies he tells or how many logical errors he commits in doing so. When Lloyd
George, who was an opponent of the Boer War, announced in the House of Commons
that the British communiques, if one added them together, claimed the killing of more
Boers than the whole Boer nation contained, it is recorded that Arthur Balfour rose to his
feet and shouted "Cad! " Very few people are proof against lapses of this type. The Negro
snubbed by a white woman, the Englishman who hears England ignorantly criticized by
an American, the Catholic apologist reminded of the Spanish Armada, will all react in
much the same way. One prod to the nerve of nationalism, and the intellectual decencies
can vanish, the past can be altered, and the plainest facts can be denied.
If one harbours anywhere in one's mind a nationalistic loyalty or hatred, certain facts,
although in a sense known to be true, are inadmissible. Here are just a few examples. I
list below five types of nationalist, and against each I append a fact which it is impossible
for that type of nationalist to accept, even in his secret thoughts:
BRITISH TORY : Britian will come out of this war with reduced power and prestige.
COMMUNIST. If she had not been aided by Britain and America, Russia would have
been defeated by Germany.
IRISH NATIONALIST. Eire can only remain independent because of British protection.
TROTSKYIST. The Stalin regime is accepted by the Russian masses.
PACIFIST. Those who "abjure" violence can only do so because others are committing
violence on their behalf.
All of these facts are grossly obvious if one's emotions do not happen to be involved: but
to the kind of person named in each case they are also intolerable, and so they have to be
denied, and false theories constructed upon their denial. I come back to the astonishing
failure of military prediction in the present war. It is, I think, true to say that the
intelligentsia have been more wrong about the progress of the war than the common
people, and that they were more swayed by partisan feelings. The average intellectual of
the Left believed, for instance, that the war was lost in 1940, that the Germans were
bound to overrun Egypt in 1942, that the Japanese would never be driven out of the lands
they had conquered, and that the Anglo-American bombing offensive was making no
impression on Germany. He could believe these things because his hatred for the British
ruling class forbade him to admit that British plans could succeed. There is no limit to the
follies that can be swallowed if one is under the influence of feelings of this kind. I have
heard it confidently stated, for instance, that the American troops had been brought to
Europe not to fight the Germans but to crush an English revolution. One has to belong to
the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool. When
Hitler invaded Russia, the officials of the MOI issued "as background" a warning that
Russia might be expected to collapse in six weeks. On the other hand the Communists
regarded every phase of the war as a Russian victory, even when the Russians were
driven back almost to the Caspian Sea and had lost several million prisoners. There is no
need to multiply instances. The point is that as soon as fear, hatred, jealousy and power
worship are involved, the sense of reality becomes unhinged. And, as I have pointed out
already, the sense of right and wrong becomes unhinged also. There is no crime,
absolutely none, that cannot be condoned when "our" side commits it. Even if one does
not deny that the crime has happened, even if one knows that it is exactly the same crime
as one has condemned in some other case, even if one admits in an intellectual sense that
it is unjustified — still one cannot feel that it is wrong. Loyalty is involved, and so pity
ceases to function.
The reason for the rise and spread of nationalism is far too big a question to be raised
here. It is enough to say that, in the forms in which it appears among English
intellectuals, it is a distorted reflection of the frightful battles actually happening in the
external world, and that its worst follies have been made possible by the breakdown of
patriotism and religious belief. If one follows up this train of thought, one is in danger of
being led into a species of Conservatism, or into political quietism. It can be plausibly
argued, for instance — it is even possibly true — that patriotism is an inocculation against
nationalism, that monarchy is a guard against dictatorship, and that organized religion is a
guard against superstition. Or again, it can be argued that no unbiased outlook is possible,
that all creeds and causes involve the same lies, follies, and barbarities; and this is often
advanced as a reason for keeping out of politics altogether. I do not accept this argument,
if only because in the modem world no one describable as an intellectual can keep out of
politics in the sense of not caring about them. I think one must engage in politics — using
the word in a wide sense — and that one must have preferences: that is, one must
recognize that some causes are objectively better than others, even if they are advanced
by equally bad means. As for the nationalistic loves and hatreds that I have spoken of,
they are part of the make-up of most of us, whether we like it or not. Whether it is
possible to get rid of them I do not know, but I do believe that it is possible to struggle
against them, and that this is essentially a moral effort. It is a question first of all of
discovering what one really is, what one's own feelings really are, and then of making
allowance for the inevitable bias. If you hate and fear Russia, if you are jealous of the
wealth and power of America, if you despise Jews, if you have a sentiment of inferiority
towards the British ruling class, you cannot get rid of those feelings simply by taking
thought. But you can at least recognize that you have them, and prevent them from
contaminating your mental processes. The emotional urges which are inescapable, and
are perhaps even necessary to political action, should be able to exist side by side with an
acceptance of reality. But this, I repeat, needs a moral effort, and contemporary English
literature, so far as it is alive at all to the major issues of our time, shows how few of us
are prepared to make it.
The Prevention of Literature
1946
About a year ago I attended a meeting of the P. E. N. Club, the occasion being the
tercentenary of Milton's Aeropagitica — a pamphlet, it may be remembered, in defense of
freedom of the press. Milton's famous phrase about the sin of "killing" a book was printed
on the leaflets advertising the meeting which had been circulated beforehand.
There were four speakers on the platform. One of them delivered a speech which did deal
with the freedom of the press, but only in relation to India; another said, hesitantly, and in
very general terms, that liberty was a good thing; a third delivered an attack on the laws
relating to obscenity in literature. The fourth devoted most of his speech to a defense of
the Russian purges. Of the speeches from the body of the hall, some reverted to the
question of obscenity and the laws that deal with it, others were simply eulogies of Soviet
Russia. Moral liberty — the liberty to discuss sex questions frankly in print — seemed to
be generally approved, but political liberty was not mentioned. Out of this concourse of
several hundred people, perhaps half of whom were directly connected with the writing
trade, there was not a single one who could point out that freedom of the press, if it
means anything at all, means the freedom to criticize and oppose. Significantly, no
speaker quoted from the pamphlet which was ostensibly being commemorated. Nor was
there any mention of the various books which have been "killed" in England and the
United States during the war. In its net effect the meeting was a demonstration in favor of
censorship.
There was nothing particularly surprising in this. In our age, the idea of intellectual
liberty is under attack from two directions. On the one side are its theoretical enemies, the
apologists of totalitarianism, and on the other its immediate, practical enemies, monopoly
and bureaucracy. Any writer or journalist who wants to retain his integrity finds himself
thwarted by the general drift of society rather than by active persecution. The sort of
things that are working against him are the concentration of the press in the hands of a
few rich men, the grip of monopoly on radio and the films, the unwillingness of the
public to spend money on books, making it necessary for nearly every writer to earn part
of his living by hackwork, the encroachment of official bodies like the M. O. I. and the
British Council, which help the writer to keep alive but also waste his time and dictate his
opinions, and the continuous war atmosphere of the past ten years, whose distorting
effects no one has been able to escape. Everything in our age conspires to turn the writer,
and every other kind of artist as well, into a minor official, working on themes handed
down from above and never telling what seems to him the whole of the truth. But in
struggling against this fate he gets no help from his own side; that is, there is no large
body of opinion which will assure him that he's in the right. In the past, at any rate
throughout the Protestant centuries, the idea of rebellion and the idea of intellectual
integrity were mixed up. A heretic — political, moral, religious, or aesthetic — was one
who refused to outrage his own conscience. His outlook was summed up in the words of
the Revivalist hymn:
Dare to be a Daniel
Dare to stand alone
Dare to have a purpose firm
Dare to make it known
To bring this hymn up to date one would have to add a "Don't" at the beginning of each
line. For it is the peculiarity of our age that the rebels against the existing order, at any
rate the most numerous and characteristic of them, are also rebelling against the idea of
individual integrity. "Daring to stand alone" is ideologically criminal as well as
practically dangerous. The independence of the writer and the artist is eaten away by
vague economic forces, and at the same time it is undermined by those who should be its
defenders. It is with the second process that I am concerned here.
Freedom of thought and of the press are usually attacked by arguments which are not
worth bothering about. Anyone who has experience of lecturing and debating knows
them off backwards. Here I am not trying to deal with the familiar claim that freedom is
an illusion, or with the claim that there is more freedom in totalitarian countries than in
democratic ones, but with the much more tenable and dangerous proposition that freedom
is undesirable and that intellectual honesty is a form of anti-social selfishness. Although
other aspects of the question are usually in the foreground, the controversy over freedom
of speech and of the press is at bottom a controversy of the desirability, or otherwise, of
telling lies. What is really at issue is the right to report contemporary events truthfully, or
as truthfully as is consistent with the ignorance, bias and self-deception from which every
observer necessarily suffers. In saying this I may seem to be saying that straightforward
"reportage" is the only branch of literature that matters: but I will try to show later that at
every literary level, and probably in every one of the arts, the same issue arises in more or
less subtilized forms. Meanwhile, it is necessary to strip away the irrelevancies in which
this controversy is usually wrapped up.
The enemies of intellectual liberty always try to present their case as a plea for discipline
versus individualism. The issue truth-versus-untruth is as far as possible kept in the
background. Although the point of emphasis may vary, the writer who refuses to sell his
opinions is always branded as a mere egoist. He is accused, that is, of either wanting to
shut himself up in an ivory tower, or of making an exhibitionist display of his own
personality, or of resisting the inevitable current of history in an attempt to cling to
unjustified privilege. The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an
opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent. Each of them tacitly claims that "the
truth" has already been revealed, and that the heretic, if he is not simply a fool, is secretly
aware of "the truth" and merely resists it out of selfish motives. In Communist literature
the attack on intellectual liberty is usually masked by oratory about "petty-bourgeois
individualism," "the illusions of nineteenth-century liberalism," etc. , and backed up by
words of abuse such as "romantic" and "sentimental," which, since they do not have any
agreed meaning, are difficult to answer. In this way the controversy is maneuvered away
from its real issue. One can accept, and most enlightened people would accept, the
Communist thesis that pure freedom will only exist in a classless society, and that one is
most nearly free when one is working to bring such a society about. But slipped in with
this is the quite unfounded claim that the Communist Party is itself aiming at the
establishment of the classless society, and that in the U. S. S. R. this aim is actually on the
way to being realized. If the first claim is allowed to entail the second, there is almost no
assault on common sense and common decency that cannot be justified. But meanwhile,
the real point has been dodged. Freedom of the intellect means the freedom to report what
one has seen, heard, and felt, and not to be obliged to fabricate imaginary facts and
feelings. The familiar tirades against "escapism" and "individualism," "romanticism," and
so forth, are merely a forensic device, the aim of which is to make the perversion of
history seem respectable.
Fifteen years ago, when one defended the freedom of the intellect, one had to defend it
against Conservatives, against Catholics, and to some extent — for they were not of great
importance in England — against Fascists. Today one has to defend it against
Communists and "fellow-travelers. " One ought not to exaggerate the direct influence of
the small English Communist Party, but there can be no question about the poisonous
effect of the Russian mythos on English intellectual life. Because of it known facts are
suppressed and distorted to such an extent as to make it doubtful whether a true history of
our times can ever be written. Let me give just one instance out of the hundreds that
could be cited. When Germany collapsed, it was found that very large numbers of Soviet
Russians — mostly, no doubt, from non-political motives — had changed sides and were
fighting for the Germans. Also, a small but not negligible portion of the Russian prisoners
and displaced persons refused to go back to the U. S. S. R. , and some of them, at least,
were repatriated against their will. These facts, known to many journalists on the spot,
went almost unmentioned in the British press, while at the same time Russophile
publicists in England continued to justify the purges and deportations of 1936-38 by
claiming that the U. S. S. R. "had no quislings. " The fog of lies and misinformation that
surrounds such subjects as the Ukraine famine, the Spanish civil war, Russian policy in
Poland, and so forth, is not due entirely to conscious dishonesty, but any writer or
journalist who is fully sympathetic for the U. S. S. R. — sympathetic, that is, in the way the
Russians themselves would want him to be — does have to acquiesce in deliberate
falsification on important issues. I have before me what must be a very rare pamphlet,
written by Maxim Litvinoff in 1918 and outlining the recent events in the Russian
Revolution. It makes no mention of Stalin, but gives high praise to Trotsky, and also to
Zinoviev, Kamenev, and others. What could be the attitude of even the most intellectually
scrupulous Communist towards such a pamphlet? At best, the obscurantist attitude of
saying that it is an undesirable document and better suppressed. And if for some reason it
were decided to issue a garbled version of the pamphlet, denigrating Trotsky and
inserting references to Stalin, no Communist who remained faithful to his party could
protest. Forgeries almost as gross as this have been committed in recent years. But the
significant thing is not that they happen, but that, even when they are known about, they
provoke no reaction from the left-wing intelligentsia as a whole. The argument that to tell
the truth would be "inopportune" or would "play into the hands of' somebody or other is
felt to be unanswerable, and few people are bothered by the prospect of the lies which
they condone getting out of the newspapers and into the history books.
The organized lying practiced by totalitarian states is not, as is sometimes claimed, a
temporary expedient of the same nature as military deception. It is something integral to
totalitarianism, something that would still continue even if concentration camps and
secret police forces had ceased to be necessary. Among intelligent Communists there is
an underground legend to the effect that although the Russian government is obliged now
to deal in lying propaganda, frame-up trials, and so forth, it is secretly recording the true
facts and will publish them at some future time. We can, I believe, be quite certain that
this is not the case, because the mentality implied by such an action is that of a liberal
historian who believes that the past cannot be altered and that a correct knowledge of
history is valuable as a matter of course. From the totalitarian point of view history is
something to be created rather than learned. A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy,
and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible. But
since, in practice, no one is infallible, it is frequently necessary to rearrange past events in
order to show that this or that mistake was not made, or that this or that imaginary
triumph actually happened. Then again, every major change in policy demands a
corresponding change of doctrine and a revelation of prominent historical figures. This
kind of thing happens everywhere, but is clearly likelier to lead to outright falsification in
societies where only one opinion is permissible at any given moment. Totalitarianism
demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably
demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth. The friends of totalitarianism
in this country usually tend to argue that since absolute truth is not attainable, a big lie is
no worse than a little lie. It is pointed out that all historical records are biased and
inaccurate, or on the other hand, that modern physics has proven that what seems to us
the real world is an illusion, so that to believe in the evidence of one's senses is simply
vulgar philistinism. A totalitarian society which succeeded in perpetuating itself would
probably set up a schizophrenic system of thought, in which the laws of common sense
held good in everyday life and in certain exact sciences, but could be disregarded by the
politician, the historian, and the sociologist. Already there are countless people who
would think it scandalous to falsify a scientific textbook, but would see nothing wrong in
falsifying an historical fact. It is at the point where literature and politics cross that
totalitarianism exerts its greatest pressure on the intellectual. The exact sciences are not,
at this date, menaced to anything like the same extent. This partly accounts for the fact
that in all countries it is easier for the scientists than for the writers to line up behind their
respective governments.
To keep the matter in perspective, let me repeat what I said at the beginning of this essay:
that in England the immediate enemies of truthfulness, and hence of freedom of thought,
are the press lords, the film magnates, and the bureaucrats, but that on a long view the
weakening of the desire for liberty among the intellectuals themselves is the most serious
symptom of all. It may seem that all this time I have been talking about the effects of
censorship, not on literature as a whole, but merely on one department of political
journalism. Granted that Soviet Russia constitutes a sort of forbidden area in the British
press, granted that issues like Poland, the Spanish civil war, the Russo-German pact, and
so forth, are debarred from serious discussion, and that if you possess information that
conflicts with the prevailing orthodoxy you are expected to either distort it or keep quiet
about it — granted all this, why should literature in the wider sense be affected? Is every
writer a politician, and is every book necessarily a work of straightforward "reportage"?
Even under the tightest dictatorship, cannot the individual writer remain free inside his
own mind and distill or disguise his unorthodox ideas in such a way that the authorities
will be too stupid to recognize them? And in any case, if the writer himself is in
agreement with the prevailing orthodoxy, why should it have a cramping effect on him?
Is not literature, or any of the arts, likeliest to flourish in societies in which there are no
major conflicts of opinion and no sharp distinction between the artist and his audience?
Does one have to assume that every writer is a rebel, or even that a writer as such is an
exceptional person?
Whenever one attempts to defend intellectual liberty against the claims of totalitarianism,
one meets with these arguments in one form or another. They are based on a complete
misunderstanding of what literature is, and how — one should perhaps say why — it
comes into being. They assume that a writer is either a mere entertainer or else a venal
hack who can switch from one line of propaganda to another as easily as an organ grinder
changing tunes. But after all, how is it that books ever come to be written? Above a quite
low level, literature is an attempt to influence the viewpoint of one's contemporaries by
recording experience. And so far as freedom of expression is concerned, there is not
much difference between a mere journalist and the most "unpolitical" imaginative writer.
The journalist is unfree, and is conscious of unfreedom, when he is forced to write lies or
suppress what seems to him important news; the imaginative writer is unfree when he has
to falsify his subjective feelings, which from his point of view are facts. He may distort
and caricature reality in order to make his meaning clearer, but he cannot misrepresent
the scenery of his own mind; he cannot say with any conviction that he likes what he
dislikes, or believes what he disbelieves. If he is forced to do so, the only result is that his
creative faculties will dry up. Nor can he solve the problem by keeping away from
controversial topics. There is no such thing as a genuinely non-political literature, and
least of all in an age like our own, when fears, hatreds, and loyalties of a directly political
kind are near to the surface of everyone's consciousness. Even a single taboo can have an
all-round crippling effect upon the mind, because there is always the danger that any
thought which is freely followed up may lead to the forbidden thought. It follows that the
atmosphere of totalitarianism is deadly to any kind of prose writer, though a poet, at any
rate a lyric poet, might possibly find it breathable. And in any totalitarian society that
survives for more than a couple of generations, it is probable that prose literature, of the
kind that has existed during the past four hundred years, must actually come to an end.
Literature has sometimes flourished under despotic regimes, but, as has often been
pointed out, the despotisms of the past were not totalitarian. Their repressive apparatus
was always inefficient, their ruling classes were usually either corrupt or apathetic or
half-liberal in outlook, and the prevailing religious doctrines usually worked against
perfectionism and the notion of human infallibility. Even so it is broadly true that prose
literature has reached its highest levels in periods of democracy and free speculation.
What is new in totalitarianism is that its doctrines are not only unchallengeable but also
unstable. They have to be accepted on pain of damnation, but on the other hand, they are
always liable to be altered on a moment's notice. Consider, for example, the various
attitudes, completely incompatible with one another, which an English Communist or
"fellow-traveler" has had to adopt toward the war between Britain and Germany. For
years before September, 1939, he was expected to be in a continuous stew about "the
horrors of Nazism" and to twist everything he wrote into a denunciation of Hitler: after
September, 1939, for twenty months, he had to believe that Germany was more sinned
against than sinning, and the word "Nazi," at least as far as print went, had to drop right
out of his vocabulary. Immediately after hearing the 8 o'clock news bulletin on the
morning of June 22, 1941, he had to start believing once again that Nazism was the most
hideous evil the world had ever seen. Now, it is easy for the politician to make such
changes: for a writer the case is somewhat different. If he is to switch his allegiance at
exactly the right moment, he must either tell lies about his subjective feelings, or else
suppress them altogether. In either case he has destroyed his dynamo. Not only will ideas
refuse to come to him, but the very words he uses will seem to stiffen under his touch.
Political writing in our time consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted
together like the pieces of a child's Meccano set. It is the unavoidable result of self-
censorship. To write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one
thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox. It might be otherwise in an "age of
faith," when the prevailing orthodoxy has long been established and is not taken too
seriously. In that case it would be possible, or might be possible, for large areas of one's
mind to remain unaffected by what one officially believed. Even so, it is worth noticing
that prose literature almost disappeared during the only age of faith that Europe has ever
enjoyed. Throughout the whole of the Middle Ages there was almost no imaginative
prose literature and very little in the way of historical writing; and the intellectual leaders
of society expressed their most serious thoughts in a dead language which barley altered
during a thousand years.
Totalitarianism, however, does not so much promise an age of faith as an age of
schizophrenia. A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly
artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to
power by force or fraud. Such a society, no matter how long it persists, can never afford
to become either tolerant or intellectually stable. It can never permit either the truthful
recording of facts or the emotional sincerity that literary creation demands.
But to be
corrupted by totalitarianism one does not have to live in a totalitarian country. The mere
prevalence of certain ideas can spread a kind of poison that makes one subject after
another impossible for literary purposes. Wherever there is an enforced orthodoxy — or
even two orthodoxies, as often happens — good writing stops. This was well illustrated by
the Spanish civil war. To many English intellectuals the war was a deeply moving
experience, but not an experience about which they could write sincerely. There were
only two things that you were allowed to say, and both of them were palpable lies: as a
result, the war produced acres of print but almost nothing worth reading.
It is not certain whether the effects of totalitarianism upon verse need be so deadly as its
effects on prose. There is a whole series of converging reasons why it is somewhat easier
for a poet than a prose writer to feel at home in an authoritarian society. To begin with,
bureaucrats and other "practical" men usually despise the poet too deeply to be much
interested in what he is saying. Secondly, what the poet is saying — that is, what his poem
"means" if translated into prose — is relatively unimportant, even to himself. The thought
contained in a poem is always simple, and is no more the primary purpose of the poem
than the anecdote is the primary purpose of the picture. A poem is an arrangement of
sounds and associations, as a painting is an arrangement of brushmarks. For short
snatches, indeed, as in the refrain of a song, poetry can even dispense with meaning
altogether. It is therefore fairly easy for a poet to keep away from dangerous subjects and
avoid uttering heresies; and even when he does utter them, they may escape notice. But
above all, good verse, unlike good prose, is not necessarily and individual product.
Certain kinds of poems, such as ballads, or, on the other hand, very artificial verse forms,
can be composed co-operatively by groups of people. Whether the ancient English and
Scottish ballads were originally produced by individuals, or by the people at large, is
disputed; but at any rate they are non-individual in the sense that they constantly change
in passing from mouth to mouth. Even in print no two versions of a ballad are ever quite
the same. Many primitive peoples compose verse communally. Someone begins to
improvise, probably accompanying himself on a musical instalment, somebody else chips
in with a line or a rhyme when the first singer breaks down, and so the process continues
until there exists a whole song or ballad which has no identifiable author.
In prose, this kind of intimate collaboration is quite impossible. Serious prose, in any
case, has to be composed in solitude, whereas the excitement of being part of a group is
actually an aid to certain kinds of versification. Verse — and perhaps good verse of its
own kind, though it would not be the highest kind — might survive under even the most
inquisitorial regime. Even in a society where liberty and individuality had been
extinguished, there would still be a need either for patriotic songs and heroic ballads
celebrating victories, or for elaborate exercises in flattery; and these are the kinds of
poems that can be written to order, or composed communally, without necessarily lacking
artistic value. Prose is a different matter, since the prose writer cannot narrow the range
of his thoughts without killing his inventiveness. But the history of totalitarian societies,
or of groups of people who have adopted the totalitarian outlook, suggests that loss of
liberty is inimical to all forms of literature. German literature almost disappeared during
the Hitler regime, and the case was not much better in Italy. Russian literature, so far as
one can judge by translations, has deteriorated markedly since the early days of the
revolution, though some of the verse appears to be better than the prose. Few if any
Russian novels that it is possible to take seriously have been translated for about fifteen
years. In western Europe and America large sections of the literary intelligentsia have
either passed through the Communist Party or have been warmly sympathetic to it, but
this whole leftward movement has produced extraordinarily few books worth reading.
Orthodox Catholicism, again, seems to have a crushing effect upon certain literary forms,
especially the novel. During a period of three hundred years, how many people have been
at once good novelists and good Catholics? The fact is that certain themes cannot be
celebrated in words, and tyranny is one of them. No one ever wrote a good book in praise
of the Inquisition. Poetry might survive in a totalitarian age, and certain arts or half-arts,
such as architecture, might even find tyranny beneficial, but the prose writer would have
no choice between silence or death. Prose literature as we know it is the product of
rationalism, of the Protestant centuries, of the autonomous individual. And the
destruction of intellectual liberty cripples the journalist, the sociological writer, the
historian, the novelist, the critic, and the poet, in that order. In the future it is possible that
a new kind of literature, not involving individual feeling or truthful observation, may
arise, but no such thing is at present imaginable. It seems much likelier that if the liberal
culture that we have lived in since the Renaissance comes to an end, the literary art will
perish with it.
Of course, print will continue to be used, and it is interesting to speculate what kinds of
reading matter would survive in a rigidly totalitarian society. Newspapers will
presumably continue until television technique reaches a higher level, but apart from
newspapers it is doubtful even now whether the great mass of people in the industrialized
countries feel the need for any kind of literature. They are unwilling, at any rate, to spend
anywhere near as much on reading matter as they spend on several other recreations.
Probably novels and stories will be completely superseded by film and radio productions.
Or perhaps some kind of low grade sensational fiction will survive, produced by a sort of
conveyor-belt process that reduces human initiative to the minimum.
It would probably not be beyond human ingenuity to write books by machinery. But a
sort of mechanizing process can already be seen at work in the film and radio, in
publicity and propaganda, and in the lower reaches of journalism. The Disney films, for
instance, are produced by what is essentially a factory process, the work being done
partly mechanically and partly by teams of artists who have to subordinate their
individual style. Radio features are commonly written by tired hacks to whom the subject
and the manner of treatment are dictated beforehand: even so, what they write is merely a
kind of raw material to be chopped into shape by producers and censors. So also with the
innumerable books and pamphlets commissioned by government departments. Even more
machine-like is the production of short stories, serials, and poems for the very cheap
magazines. Papers such as the Writer abound with advertisements of literary schools, all
of them offering you ready-made plots at a few shillings a time. Some, together with the
plot, supply the opening and closing sentences of each chapter. Others furnish you with a
sort of algebraical formula by the use of which you can construct plots for yourself.
Others have packs of cards marked with characters and situations, which have only to be
shuffled and dealt in order to produce ingenious stories automatically. It is probably in
some such way that the literature of a totalitarian society would be produced, if literature
were still felt to be necessary. Imagination — even consciousness, so far as possible —
would be eliminated from the process of writing. Books would be planned in their broad
lines by bureaucrats, and would pass through so many hands that when finished they
would be no more an individual product than a Ford car at the end of the assembly line. It
goes without saying that anything so produced would be rubbish; but anything that was
not rubbish would endanger the structure of the state. As for the surviving literature of the
past, it would have to be suppressed or at least elaborately rewritten.
Meanwhile, totalitarianism has not fully triumphed anywhere. Our own society is still,
broadly speaking, liberal. To exercise your right of free speech you have to fight against
economic pressure and against strong sections of public opinion, but not, as yet, against a
secret police force. You can say or print almost anything so long as you are willing to do
it in a hole-and-corner way. But what is sinister, as I said at the beginning of this essay, is
that the conscious enemies of liberty are those to whom liberty ought to mean most. The
big public do not care about the matter one way or the other. They are not in favour of
persecuting the heretic, and they will not exert themselves to defend him. They are at
once too sane and too stupid to acquire the totalitarian outlook. The direct, conscious
attack on intellectual decency comes from the intellectuals themselves.
It is possible that the Russophile intelligentsia, if they had not succumbed to that
particular myth, would have succumbed to another of much the same kind. But at any
rate the Russian myth is there, and the corruption it causes stinks. When one sees highly
educated men looking on indifferently at oppression and persecution, one wonders which
to despise more, their cynicism or their shortsightedness. Many scientists, for example,
are the uncritical admirers of the U. S. S. R. They appear to think that the destruction of
liberty is of no importance so long as their own line of work is for the moment
unaffected. The U. S. S. R. is a large, rapidly developing country which has an acute need
of scientific workers and, consequently, treats them generously. Provided that they steer
clear of dangerous subjects such as psychology, scientists are privileged persons. Writers,
on the other hand, are viciously persecuted. It is true that literary prostitutes like Ilya
Ehrenburg or Alexei Tolstoy are paid huge sums of money, but the only thing which is of
any value to the writer as such — his freedom of expression — is taken away from him.
Some, at least, of the English scientists who speak so enthusiastically of the opportunities
to be enjoyed by scientists in Russia are capable of understanding this. But their
reflection appears to be: "Writers are persecuted in Russia. So what? I am not a writer. "
They do not see that any attack on intellectual liberty, and on the concept of objective
truth, threatens in the long run every department of thought.
For the moment the totalitarian state tolerates the scientist because it needs him. Even in
Nazi Germany, scientists, other than Jews, were relatively well treated and the German
scientific community, as a whole, offered no resistance to Hitler. At this stage of history,
even the most autocratic ruler is forced to take account of physical reality, partly because
of the lingering-on of liberal habits of thought, partly because of the need to prepare for
war. So long as physical reality cannot altogether be ignored, so long as two and two
have to make four when you are, for example, drawing the blueprint of an aeroplane, the
scientist has his function, and can even be allowed a measure of liberty. His awakening
will come later, when the totalitarian state is firmly established. Meanwhile, if he wants
to safeguard the integrity of science, it is his job to develop some kind of solidarity with
his literary colleagues and not disregard it as a matter of indifference when writers are
silenced or driven to suicide, and newspapers systematically falsified.
But however it may be with the physical sciences, or with music, painting and
architecture, it is — as I have tried to show — certain that literature is doomed if liberty of
thought perishes. Not only is it doomed in any country which retains a totalitarian
structure; but any writer who adopts the totalitarian outlook, who finds excuses for
persecution and the falsification of reality, thereby destroys himself as a writer. There is
no way out of this. No tirades against "individualism" and the "ivory tower," no pious
platitudes to the effect that "true individuality is only attained through identification with
the community," can get over the fact that a bought mind is a spoiled mind. Unless
spontaneity enters at some point or another, literary creation is impossible, and language
itself becomes something totally different from what it is now, we may learn to separate
literary creation from intellectual honesty. At present we know only that the imagination,
like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity. Any writer or journalist who denies
that fact — and nearly all the current praise of the Soviet Union contains or implies such a
denial — is, in effect, demanding his own destruction.
As I Please
Tribune, 4 February 1944
When Sir Walter Raleigh was imprisoned in the Tower of London, he occupied himself
with writing a history of the world. He had finished the first volume and was at work on
the second when there was a scuffle between some workmen beneath the window of his
cell, and one of the men was killed. In spite of diligent enquiries, and in spite of the fact
that he had actually seen the thing happen, Sir Walter was never able to discover what the
quarrel was about; whereupon, so it is said — and if the story is not true it certainly ought
to be — he burned what he had written and abandoned his project.
This story has come into my head I do not know how many times during the past ten
years, but always with the reflection that Raleigh was probably wrong. Allowing for all
the difficulties of research at that date, and the special difficulty of conducting research in
prison, he could probably have produced a world history which had some resemblance to
the real course of events. Up to a fairly recent date, the major events recorded in the
history books probably happened. It is probably true that the battle of Hastings was
fought in 1066, that Columbus discovered America, that Henry VIII had six wives, and
so on. A certain degree of truthfulness was possible so long as it was admitted that a
fact may be true even if you don't like it. Even as late as the last war it was possible for
the Encyclopedia Britannica, for instance, to compile its articles on the various
campaigns partly from German sources. Some of the facts — the casualty figures, for
instance — were regarded as neutral and in substance accepted by everybody. No such
thing would be possible now. A Nazi and a non-Nazi version of the present war would
have no resemblance to one another, and which of them finally gets into the history books
will be decided not by evidential methods but on the battlefield.
During the Spanish civil war I found myself feeling very strongly that a true history of
this war never would or could be written. Accurate figures, objective accounts of what
was happening, simply did not exist. And if I felt that even in 1937, when the Spanish
Government was still in being, and the lies which the various Republican factions were
telling about each other and about the enemy were relatively small ones, how does the
case stand now? Even if Franco is overthrown, what kind of records will the future
historian have to go upon? And if Franco or anyone at all resembling him remains in
power, the history of the war will consist quite largely of "facts" which millions of people
now living know to be lies. One of these "facts," for instance, is that there was a
considerable Russian army in Spain. There exists the most abundant evidence that there
was no such army. Yet if Franco remains in power, and if Fascism in general survives,
that Russian army will go into the history books and future school children will believe in
it. So for practical purposes the lie will have become truth.
This kind of thing is happening all the time. Out of the milions of instances which must
be available, I will choose one which happens to be verifiable. During part of 1941 and
1942, when the Luftwaffe was busy in Russia, the German radio regaled its home
audiences with stories of devestating air raids on London. Now, we are aware that those
raids did not happen. But what use would our knowledge be if the Germans conquered
Britain? For the purposes of a future historian, did those raids happen, or didn't they? The
answer is: If Hitler survives, they happened, and if he falls they didn't happen. So with
innumerable other events of the past ten or twenty years. Is the Protocols of the Elders of
Zion a genuine document? Did Trotsky plot with the Nazis? How many German
aeroplanes were shot down in the Battle of Britain? Does Europe welcome the New
Order? In no case do you get one answer which is universally accepted because it is true:
in each case you get a number of totally incompatible answers, one of which is finally
adopted as the result of a physical struggle. History is written by the winners.
In the last analysis our only claim to victory is that if we win the war we shall tell fewer
lies about it than our adversaries. The really frightening thing about totalitarianism is not
that it commits "atrocities" but that it attacks the concept of objective truth; it claims to
control the past as well as the future. In spite of all the lying and self-righteousness that
war encourages, I do not honestly think it can be said that that habit of mind is growing in
Britain. Taking one thing with another, I should say that the press is slightly freer than it
was before the war. I know out of my own experience that you can print things now
which you couldn't print ten years ago. War resisters have probably been less maltreated
in this war than in the last one, and the expression of unpopular opinion in public is
certainly safer. There is some hope, therefore, that the liberal habit of mind, which thi nk s
of truth as something outside yourself, something to be discovered, and not as something
you can make up as you go along, will survive. But I still don't envy the future historian's
job. Is it not a strange commentary on our time that even the casualties in the present war
cannot be estimated within several millions?
No New Ideas?
Looking through Chesterton's Introduction to Hard Times in the Everyman Edition
(incidentally, Chesterton's Introductions to Dickens are about the best thing he ever
wrote) , I note the typically sweeping statement: "There are no new ideas. " Chesterton is
here claiming that the ideas which animated the French Revolution were not new ones
but simply a revival of doctrines which had flourished earlier and then had been
abandoned. But the claim that "there is nothing new under the sun" is one of the stock
arguments of intelligent reactionaries. Catholic apologists, in particular, use it almost
automatically. Everything that you can say or think has been said or thought before.
Every political theory from Liberalism to Trotskyism can be shown to be a development
of some heresy in the early Church. Every system of philosophy springs ultimately from
the Greeks. Every scientific theory (if we are to believe the popular Catholic press) was
anticipated by Roger Bacon and others in the thirteenth century. Some Hindu thinkers go
even further and claim that not merely the scientific theories, but the products of applied
science as well, aeroplanes, radio and the whole bag of tricks, were known to the ancient
Hindus, who afterward dropped them as being unworthy of their attention.
It is not very difficult to see that this idea is rooted in the fear of progress. If there is
nothing new under the sun, if the past in some shape or another always returns, then the
future when it comes will be something familiar. At any rate what will never come —
since it has never come before — is that hated, dreaded thing, a world of free and equal
human beings. Particularly comforting to reactionary thinkers is the idea of a cyclical
universe, in which the same chain of events happens over and over again. In such a
universe every seeming advance towards democracy simply means that the coming age of
tyranny and privilege is a little bit nearer. This belief, obviously superstitious though it is,
is widely held nowadays, and is common among Fascists and near-Fascists.
In fact, there are new ideas. The idea that an advanced civilization need not rest on
slavery is a relatively new idea, for instance; it is a good deal younger than the Christian
religion. But even if Chesterton's dictum were true, it would only be true in the sense that
a statue is contained in every block of stone. Ideas may not change, but emphasis shifts
constantly. It could be claimed, for example, that the most important part of Marx's
theory is contained in the saying: "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. "
But before Marx developed it, what force had that saying had? Who had paid any
attention to it? Who had inferred from it — what it certainly implies — that laws, religions
and moral codes are all a superstructure built over existing property relations? It was
Christ, according to the Gospel, who uttered the text, but it was Marx who brought it to
life. And ever since he did so the motives of politicians, priests, judges, moralists and
millionaires have been under the deepest suspicion — which, of course, is why they hate
him so much.
As I Please - Robot Bombs
Tribune, 30 June 1944
I notice that apart from the widespread complaint that the German pilotless planes "seem
so unnatural" (a bomb dropped by a live airman is quite natural, apparently), some
journalists are denouncing them as barbarous, inhumane and "an indiscriminate attack on
civilians. "
After what we have been doing to the Germans over the past two years, this seems a bit
thick, but it is the normal human response to every new weapon. Poison gas, the
machine-gun, the submarine, gunpowder, and even the crossbow were similarly
denounced in their day. Every weapon seems unfair until you have adopted it yourself.
But I would not deny that the pilotless plane, flying bomb, or whatever its correct name
may be, is an exceptionally unpleasant thing, because, unlike most other projectiles, it
gives you time to think. What is your first reaction when you hear that droning, zooming
noise? Inevitably it is a hope that the noise won 't stop. You want to hear the bomb pass
safely overhead and die away into the distance before the engine cuts out. In other words,
you are hoping it will fall on somebody else. So also when you dodge a shell or an
ordinary bomb — but in that case you have only about five seconds to take cover and no
time to speculate on the bottomless selfishness of the human being.
As I Please - Civilian Bombing
Tribune, 14 July 1944
I have received a number of letters, some of them quite violent ones, attacking me for my
remarks on Miss Vera Brittain's anti-bombing pamphlet. There are two points that seem
to need further comment.
First of all there is the charge, which is becoming quite a common one, that "we started
it," i. e. that Britain was the first country to practise systematic bombing of civilians. How
anyone can make this claim, with the history of the past dozen years in mind, is almost
beyond me. The first act in the present war — some hours, if I remember rightly, before
any declaration of war passed — was the German bombing of Warsaw. The Germans
bombed and shelled the city so intensively that, according to the Poles, at one time 700
fires were raging simultaneously. They made a film of the destruction of Warsaw, which
they entitled "Baptism of Fire" and sent all round the world with the object of terrorising
neutrals.
Several years earlier than this the Condor Legion, sent to Spain by Hitler, had bombed
one Spanish city after another. The "silent raids" on Barcelona in 1938 killed several
thousand people in a couple of days. Earlier than this the Italians had bombed entirely
defenseless Abyssinians and boasted of their explodes as something screamingly funny.
Bruno Mussolini wrote newspaper articles in which he described bombed Abyssinians
"bursting open like a rose," which he said was "most amusing. " And the Japanese ever
since 1931, and intensively since 1937, have been bombing crowded Chinese cities where
there are not even any ARP arrangements, let alone any AA guns or fighter aircraft.
I am not arguing that two blacks make a white, nor that Britain's record is a particularly
good one. In a number of "little wars" from about 1920 onwards the RAF has dropped its
bombs on Afghans, Indians and Arabs who had little or no power of hitting back. But it is
simply untruthful to say that large-scale bombing of crowded town areas, with the object
of causing panic, is a British invention. It was the Fascist states who started this practice,
and so long as the air war went in their favour they avowed their aims quite clearly.
The other thing that needs dealing with is the parrot cry "killing women and children.
