The most one can say is that people can be fairly good
prophets
when their wishes are
realizable.
realizable.
Orwell
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. " I
pointed out before, but evidently it needs repeating, that it is probably somewhat better to
kill a cross-section of the population than to kill only the young men. If the figures
published by the Germans are true, and we have really killed 1,200,000 civilians in our
raids, that loss of life has probably harmed the German race somewhat less than a
corresponding loss on the Russian front or in Africa and Italy.
Any nation at war will do its best to protect its children, and the number of children killed
in raids probably does not correspond to their percentage of the general population.
Women cannot be protected to the same extent, but the outcry against killing women, if
you accept killing at all, is sheer sentimentality. Why is it worse to kill a woman than a
man? The argument usually advanced is that in killing women you are killing the
breeders, whereas men can be more easily spared. But this is a fallacy based on the notion
that human beings can be bred like animals. The idea behind it is that since one man is
capable of fertilizing a very large number of women, just as a prize ram fertilizes
thousands of ewes, the loss of male lives is comparatively unimportant. Human beings,
however, are not cattle. When the slaughter caused by war leaves a surplus of women, the
enormous majority of those women bear no children. Male lives are very nearly as
important, biologically, as female ones.
In the last war the British Empire lost nearly a million men killed, of whome abou;three-
quarters came from these islands. Most of them will have been under thirty. If all those
young men had had only one child each whe should now have en extra 750,000 people
round about the age of twenty. France, which lost much more heavily, never recovered
from the slaughter of the last war, and it is doubtful whether Britain has fully recovered,
either. We can't yet calculate the casualties of the present war, but the last one killed
between ten and twenty million young men. Flad it been conducted, as the next one will
perhaps be, with flying bombs, rockets and other long-range weapons which kill old and
young, healthy and unhealthy, male and female impartially, it would probably have
damaged European civilization somewhat less than it did.
Contrary to what some of my correspondents seem to think, I have no enthusiasm for air
raids, either ours or the enemy's. Like a lot of other people in this country, I am growing
definitely tired of bombs. But I do object to the hypocrisy of accepting force as an
instrument while squealing against this or that individual weapon, or of denouncing war
while wanting to preserve the kind of soceity that makes war inevitable.
As I Please - My Country Right Or Wrong
Tribune, 24 December 1943
Attacking me in the Weekly Review for attacking Douglas Reed, Mr. A. K. Chesterton
remarks, "'My country — right or wrong' is a maxim which apparently has no place in Mr.
Orwell's philosophy. " He also states that "all of us believe that whatever her condition
Britain must win this war, or for that matter any other war in which she is engaged. "
The operative phrase is any other war. There are plenty of us who would defend our
own country, under no matter what government, if it seemed that we were in danger of
actual invasion and conquest. But "any war" is a different matter. How about the Boer
War, for instance? There is a neat little bit of historical irony here. Mr. A. K. Chesterton
is the nephew of G. K. Chesterton, who courageously opposed the Boer War, and once
remarked that "My country, right or wrong" was on the same moral level as "My mother,
drunk or sober. "
As I Please - Atrocity Pictures
Tribune, 8 September 1944
I have before me an exceptionally disgusting photograph, from the Star of August 29, of
two partially undressed women, with shaven heads and with swastikas painted on their
faces, being led through the streets of Paris amid grinning onlookers. The Star — not that I
am picking on the Star, for most of the press has behaved likewise — reproduces this
photograph with seeming approval.
I don't blame the French for doing this kind of thing. They have had four years of
suffering, and I can partially imagine how they feel towards the collaborators. But it is a
different matter when newspapers in this country try to persuade their readers that
shaving women's heads is a nice thing to do. As soon as I saw this Star photograph, I
thought, "Where have I seen something like this before? " Then I remembered. Just about
ten years ago, when the Nazi regime was beginning to get into its stride, very similar
pictures of humiliated Jews being led through the streets of German cities were exhibited
in the British press — but with this difference, that on that occasion we were not expected
to approve.
Recently another newspaper published photographs of the dangling corpses of Germans
hanged by the Russians in Kharkov, and carefully informed its readers that these
executions had been filmed and that the public would shortly be able to witness them at
the new theatres. (Were children admitted, I wonder? )
There is a saying of Nietzche which I have quoted before, but which is worth quoting
again:
He who fights too long against dragons becomes a dragon himself; and if you gaze too
long into the abyss, the abyss will gaze into you.
"Too long," in this context, should perhaps be taken as meaning "after the dragon is
beaten. "
As I Please -- Hell
14 April 1944
Attacking Mr. C. A. Smith and myself in the Malvern Torch for various remarks about
the Christian religion, Mr. Sidney Dark grows very angry because I have suggested that
the belief in personal immortality is decaying. "I would wager," he says, "that if a Gallup
poll were taken seventy-five percent (of the British population) would confess to a vague
belief in survival. " Writing elsewhere during the same week, Mr. Dark puts it at eighty-
five percent.
Now, I find it very rare to meet anyone, of whatever background, who admits to believing
in personal immortality. Still, I think it quite likely that if you asked everyone the
question and put pencil and paper in hands, a fairly large number (I am not so free with
my percentages as Mr. Dark) would admit the possibility that after death there might be
"something. " The point Mr. Dark has missed is that the belief, such as it is, hasn't the
actuality it had for our forefathers. Never, literally never in recent years, have I met
anyone who gave me the impression of believing in the next world as firmly as he
believed in the existence of, for instance, Australia. Belief in the next world does not
influence conduct as it would if it were genuine. With that endless existence beyond
death to look forward to, how trivial our lives here would seem! Most Christians profess
to believe in Hell. Yet have you ever met a Christian who seemed as afraid of Hell as he
was of cancer? Even very devout Christians will make jokes about Hell. They wouldn't
make jokes about leprosy, or RAF pilots with their faces burnt away: the subject is too
painful. Here there springs into my mind a little triolet by the late A. M. Currie:
It's a pity that Poppa has sold
his soul It makes him sizzle at breakfast so. The
money was useful, but still on the whole It's a
pity that Poppa has sold his soul When he might
have held on like the Baron de Coal And not
cleared out when the price was low. It's a pity
that Poppa has sold his soul It makes him sizzle
at breakfast so.
Currie, a Catholic, would presumably have said that he believed in Hell. If his next-door
neighbour had been burnt to death he would not have written a comic poem about it, yet
he can make jokes about somebody being fried for millions of years. I say that such belief
has no reality. It is a sham currency, like the money in Samuel Butler's Musical Banks.
As I Please - Conversation With A Pacifist
On the night in 1940 when the big ack-ack barrage was fired over London for the first
time, I was in Picadilly Circus when the guns opened up, and I fled into the Cafe Royal to
take cover. Among the crowd inside a good-looking, well-made youth of about twenty-
five was making somewhat of a nuisance of himself with a copy of Peace News, which
he was forcing upon the attention of everyone at the neighbouring tables. I got into
conversation with him, and the conversation went something like this:
The youth: "I tell you, it'll all be over by Christmas. There's obviously going to be a
compromise peace. I'm pinning my faith to Sir Samuel Hoare. It's degrading company to
be in, I admit, but still Hoare is on our side. So long as Hoare's in Madrid, there's always
hope of a sell-out. "
Orwell: "What about all those preparations that they're making against invasion — the pill
boxes that they're building everywhere, the Local Defense Volunteers and so forth? "
The youth: "Oh, that merely means they're getting ready to crush the working class when
the Germans get here. I suppose some of them might be fools enough to try to resist, but
Churchill and the Germans between them won't take long to settle them. Don't worry, it'll
soon be over. "
Orwell: "Do you really want to see your children grow up Nazis? "
The youth: "Nonsense! You don't suppose the Germans are going to encourage Fascism
in this country, do you? They don't want to breed up a race of warriors to fight against
them. Their object will be to turn us into slaves. That's why I’m a pacifist. They'll
encourage people like me. "
Orwell: "And shoot people like me? "
The youth: "That would be just too bad. "
Orwell: "But why are you so anxious to remain alive? "
The youth: "So that I can get on with my work, of course. "
It had come out in the conversation that the youth was a painter — whether good or bad I
do not know; but at any rate, sincerely interested in painting and quite ready to face
poverty in pursuit of it. As a painter, he would probably have been somewhat better off
under a German occupation than a writer or journalist would be. But still, what he said
contained a very dangerous fallacy, now very widespread in the countries where
totalitarianism has not actually established itself.
The fallacy is to believe that under a dictatorial government you can be free inside. Quite
a number of people console themselves with this thought, now that totalitarianism in one
form or another is visibly on the up-grade in every part of the world. Out in the street the
loudspeakers bellow, the flags flutter from the rooftops, the police with their tommy-guns
prowl to and fro, the face of the Leader, four feet wide, glares from every hoarding; but
up in the attics the secret enemies of the regime can record their thoughts in perfect
freedom — that is the idea, more or less. And many people are under the impression that
this is going on now in Germany and other dictatorial countries.
Why is this idea false? I pass over the fact that modem dictatorships don't, in fact, leave
the loopholes that the old-fashioned despotisms did; and also the probable weakening of
the desire for intellectual liberty owing to totalitarian methods of education. The greatest
mistake is to imagine that the human being is an autonomous individual. The secret
freedom which you can supposedly enjoy under a despotic government is nonsense,
because your thoughts are never entirely your own. Philosophers, writers, artists, even
scientists, not only need encouragement and an audience, they need constant stimulation
from other people. It is almost impossible to think without talking. If Defoe had really
lived on a desert island, he could not have written Robinson Crusoe, nor would he have
wanted to. Take away freedom of speech, and the creative faculties dry up. Had the
Germans really got to England my acquaintance of the Cafe Royal would soon have
found his painting deteriorating, even if the Gestapo had let him alone. And when the lid
is taken off Europe, I believe one of the things that will surprise us will be to find how
little worthwhile writing of any kind — even such things as diaries, for instance — has
been produced in secret under the dictators.
Partisan Review - Wishful Thinking
So far as I can see, all political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way.
People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most
grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome. For example, right up to
May of this year the more disaffected English intellectuals refused to believe that a
Second Front would be opened. They went on refusing while, bang in front of their faces,
the endless convoys of guns and landing-craft rumbled through London on their way to
the coast. One could point to countless other instances of people hugging quite manifest
delusions because the truth would be wounding to their pride. Hence the absence of
reliable political prediction. To name just one easily isolated example: who foresaw the
Russo-German pact of 1939? A few pessimistic Conservatives foretold an agreement
between Germany and Russia, but the wrong kind of agreement, and for the wrong
reasons. So far as I am aware, no intellectual of the Left, whether russophile or
russophobe, foresaw anything of the kind. For that matter, the Left as a whole failed to
foresee the rise of Fascism and failed to grasp that the Nazis were dangerous even when
they were on the verge of seizing power. To appreciate the danger of Fascism the Left
would have had to admit its own shortcomings, which was too painful; so the whole
phenomenon was ignored or misinterpreted, with disastrous results.
The most one can say is that people can be fairly good prophets when their wishes are
realizable. But a truly objective approach is almost impossible, because in one form or
another almost everyone is a nationalist . . . The most intelligent people seem capable of
holding schizophrenic beliefs, or disregarding plain facts, of evading serious questions
with debating-society repartees, or swallowing baseless rumours and of looking on
indifferently while history is falsified. All these mental vices spring ultimately from the
nationalistic habit of mind, which is itself, I suppose, the product of fear and of the
ghastly emptiness of machine civilization. . . .
I believe that it is possible to be more objective than most of us are, but that it involves a
moral effort. One cannot get away from one's own subjective feelings, but at least one
can know what they are and make allowance for them.
Partisan Review, Winter 1945
As I Please - The Coming Age Of Superpowers
Tribune
2 February 1945
A not-too-distant explosion shakes the house, the windows rattle in their sockets, and in
the next room the class of 1964 wakes up and lets out a yell or two. Each time this
happens I find myself thinking, "Is it possible that human beings can continue with this
lunacy very much longer? " You know the answer, of course. Indeed, the difficulty
nowadays is to find anyone who thinks that there will not be another war in the fairly
near future.
Germany, I suppose, will be defeated this year, and when Germany is out of the way
Japan will not be able to stand up to the combined powers of Britain and the U. S. A. Then
there will be a peace of exhaustion, with only minor and unofficial wars raging all over
the place, and perhaps this so-called peace may last for decades. But after that, by the
way the world is actually shaping, it may well be that war will become permanent.
Already, quite visibly and more or less with the acquiescence of all of us, the world is
splitting up into the two or three huge super-states forecast in James Burnham's
Managerial Revolution. One cannot draw their exact boundaries as yet, but one can see
more or less what areas they will comprise. And if the world does settle down into this
pattern, it is likely that these vast states will be permanently at war with one another,
though it will not necessarily be a very intensive or bloody kind of war. Their problems,
both economic and psychological, will be a lot simpler if the doodlebugs are more or less
continually whizzing to and fro.
If these two or three super-states do establish themselves, not only will each of them be
too big to be conquered, but they will be under no necessity to trade with one another,
and in a position to prevent all contact between their nationals. Already, for a dozen years
or so, large areas of the earth have been cut off from one another, although technically at
peace.
Some months ago, in this column, I pointed out that modern scientific inventions have
tended to prevent rather than increase international communication. This brought me
several angry letters from readers, but none of them were able to show that what I had
said was false. They merely retorted that if we had Socialism, the aeroplane, the radio etc.
would not be perverted to wrong uses. Very true, but then we haven't Socialism. As it is,
the aeroplane is primarily a thing for dropping bombs and the radio primarily a thing for
whipping up nationalism. Even before the war there was enormously less contact
between the peoples of the earth than there had been thirty years earlier, and education
was perverted, history re-written and freedom of thought suppressed to an extent
undreamed of in earlier ages. And there is no sign whatever of these tendencies being
reversed.
Maybe I am pessimistic. But at any rate those are the thoughts that cross my mind (and a
lot of other people's too, I believe) every time the explosion of a V bomb booms through
the mist.
Review:
The Road to Serfdom by F. A. Hayek The Mirror of the Past by K. Zilliacus
Taken together, these two books give grounds for dismay. The first of them is an
eloquent defence of laissez-faire capitalism, the other is an even more vehement
denunciation of it. They cover to some extent the same ground, they frequently quote the
same authorities, and they even start out with the same premise, since each of them
assumes that Western civilization depends on the sanctity of the individual. Yet each
writer is convinced that the other's policy leads directly to slavery, and the alarming thing
is that they may both be right. . . .
Between them these two books sum up our present predicament. Capitalism leads to dole
queues, the scramble for markets, and war. Collectivism leads to concentration camps,
leader worship, and war. There is no way out of this unless a planned economy can
somehow be combined with the freedom of the intellect, which can only happen if the
concept of right and wrong is restored to politics.
Both of these writers are aware of this, more or less; but since they can show no
practicable way of bringing it about the combined effect of their books is a depressing
one.
Observer, 9 April 1 944
As I Please - Ugly Leaders
Tribune, 7 January, 1944
Looking through the photographs of the New Year's Honours List, I am struck (as usual)
by the quite exceptional ugliness and vulgarity of the faces displayed there. It seems to be
almost the rule that the kind of person who earns the right to call himself Lord Percy de
Falcontowers should look at best like an overfed publican and at worst like a tax collector
with a duodenal ulcer. But our country is not alone in this. Anyone who is a good hand
with scissors and paste could compile an excellent book entitled Our Rulers, and
consisting simply of published photographs of the great ones of the earth. The idea first
occurred to me when I saw in Picture Post some "stills" of Beaverbrook delivering a
speech and looking more like a monkey on a stick than you would think possible for
anyone who was not doing it on purpose.
When you had got together your collection of fuerhers, actual and would-be, you would
notice that several qualities recur throughout the list. To begin with, they are all old. In
spite of the lip-service that is paid everywhere to youth, there is no such thing as a person
in a truly commanding position who is less than fifty years old. Secondly, they are nearly
all undersized. A dictator taller than five feet six inches is a very great rarity. And,
thirdly, there is this almost general and sometimes quite fantastic ugliness. The collection
would contain photographs of Streicher bursting a blood vessel, Japanese war-lords
impersonating baboons, Mussolini with his scrubby dewlap, the chinless de Gaulle, the
stumpy short-armed Churchill, Gandhi with his long sly nose and huge bat's ears, Tojo
displaying thirty-two teeth with gold in every one of them. And opposite each, to make a
contrast, there would be a photograph of an ordinary human being from the country
concerned. Opposite Hitler a young sailor from a German submarine, opposite Tojo a
Japanese peasant of the old type — and so on.
As I Please - War Guilt
Tribune, 31 December, 1943
Reading the discussion of "war guilt" which reverberates in the correspondence columns
of the newspapers, I note the surprise with which many people seem to discover that war
is not a crime. Hitler, it appears, has not done anything actionable. He has not raped
anybody, nor carried off any pieces of loot with his own hands, nor personally flogged
any prisoners, buried any wounded men alive, thrown any babies into the air and spitted
them on his bayonet, dipped any nuns in petrol and touched them off with church tapers
— in fact he has not done any of the things which enemy nationals are usually credited
with doing in war-time. He has merely precipitated a world war which will perhaps have
cost twenty-million lives before it ends. And there is nothing illegal in that. How could
there be, when legality implies authority and there is no authority with the power to
transcend national frontiers?
At the recent trials in Kharkov some attempt was made to fix on Hitler, Himmler and the
rest the responsibility for their subordinates' crimes, but the mere fact that this had to be
done shows that Hitlers's guilt is not self-evident. His crime, it is implied, was not to
build up an army for the purpose of aggressive war, but to instruct that army to torture its
prisoners. So far as it goes, the distinction between an atrocity and an act of war is valid.
An atrocity means an act of terrorism which has no genuine military purpose. One must
accept such distinctions if one accepts war at all, which in practice everyone does.
Nevertheless, a world in which it is wrong to murder an individual civilian and right to
drop a thousand tons of high explosive on a residential area does sometimes make me
wonder whether this earth of ours is not a loony bin made use of by some other planet.
Revenge is Sour
Tribune
9 November, 1945
Whenever I read phrases like "war guilt trials", "punishment of war criminals" and so
forth, there comes back into my mind the memory of something I saw in a prisoner-of-
war camp in South Germany, earlier this year.
Another correspondent and myself were being show round the camp by a little Viennese
Jew who had been enlisted in the branch of the American army which deals with the
interrogation of prisoners. He was an alert, fair-haired, rather good-looking youth of
about twenty-five, and politically so much more knowledgeable than the average
American officer that it was a pleasure to be with him. The camp was on an airfield, and,
after we had been round the cages, our guide led us to a hangar where various prisoners
who were in a different category from the others were being "screened. "
Up at one end of the hangar about a dozen men were lying in a row on the concrete floor.
These, it was explained, were S. S. officers who had been segregated from the other
prisoners. Among them was a man in dingy civilian clothes who was lying with his arm
across his face and apparently asleep. He had strange and horribly deformed feet. The
two of them were quite symmetrical, but they were clubbed out into an extraordinary
globular shape which made them more like a horse's hoof than anything human. As we
approached the group, the little Jew seemed to be working himself up into a state of
excitement.
"That’s the real swine! " he said, and suddenly he lashed out with his heavy army boot and
caught the prostrate man a fearful kick right on the bulge of one of his deformed feet.
"Get up, you swine! " he shouted as the man started out of sleep, and then repeated
something of the kind in German. The prisoner scrambled to his feet and stood clumsily
to attention. With the same air of working himself up into a fury — indeed he was almost
dancing up and down as he spoke — the Jew told us the prisoner's history. He was a "real"
Nazi: his party number indicated that he had been a member since the very early days,
and he had held a post corresponding to a General in the political branch of the S. S. It
could be taken as quite certain that he had had charge of concentration camps and had
presided over tortures and hangings. In short, he represented everything that we had been
fighting against during the past five years.
Meanwhile, I was studying his appearance. Quite apart from the scrubby, unfed,
unshaven look that a newly captured man generally has, he was a disgusting specimen.
But he did not look brutal or in any way frightening: merely neurotic and, in a low way,
intellectual. His pale, shifty eyes were deformed by powerful spectacles. He could have
been an unfrocked clergyman, an actor ruined by drink, or a spiritualist medium. I have
seen very similar people in London common lodging houses, and also in the Reading
Room of the British Museum. Quite obviously he was mentally unbalanced — indeed,
only doubtfully sane, though at this moment sufficiently in his right mind to be frightened
of getting another kick. And yet everything that the Jew was telling me of his history
could have been true, and probably was true! So the Nazi torturer of one's imagination,
the monstrous figure against whom one had struggled for so many years, dwindled to this
pitiful wretch, whose obvious need was not for punishment, but for some kind of
psychological treatment.
Later, there were further humiliations. Another S. S. officer, a large brawny man, was
ordered to strip to the waist and show the blood group number tattooed on his under-arm;
another was forced to explain to us how he had lied about being a member of the S. S. and
attempted to pass himself off as an ordinary soldier of the Wehrmacht. I wondered
whether the Jew was getting any real kick out of this new-found power that he was
exercising. I concluded that he wasn't really enjoying it, and that he was merely — like a
man in a brothel, or a boy smoking his first cigar, or a tourist traipsing round a picture
gallery — telling himself that he was enjoying it, and behaving as he had planned to
behave in the days he was helpless.
It is absurd to blame any German or Austrian Jew for getting his own back on the Nazis.
Heaven knows what scores this particular man may have had to wipe out; very likely his
whole family had been murdered; and after all, even a wanton kick to a prisoner is a very
tiny thing compared with the outrages committed by the Hitler regime. But what this
scene, and much else that I saw in Germany, brought home to me was that the whole idea
of revenge and punishment is a childish daydream. Properly speaking, there is no such
thing as revenge. Revenge is an act which you want to commit when you are powerless
and because you are powerless: as soon as the sense of impotence is removed, the desire
evaporates also.
Who would not have jumped for joy, in 1940, at the thought of seeing S. S. officers
kicked and humiliated? But when the thing becomes possible, it is merely pathetic and
disgusting. It is said that when Mussolini's corpse was exhibited in public, an old woman
drew a revolver and fired five shots into it, exclaiming, "Those are for my five sons! " It is
the kind of story that the newspapers make up, but it might be true. I wonder how much
satisfaction she got out of those five shots, which, doubtless, she had dreamed years
earlier of firing. The condition of her being able to get close enough to Mussolini to shoot
at him was that he should be a corpse.
In so far as the big public in this country is responsible for the monstrous peace
settlement now being forced on Germany, it is because of a failure to see in advance that
punishing an enemy brings no satisfaction. We acquiesce in crimes like the expulsion of
all Germans from East Prussia — crimes which in some cases we could not prevent but
might at least have protested against — because the Germans had angered and frightened
us, and therefore we were certain that when they were down we should feel no pity for
them. We persist in these policies, or let others persist in them on our behalf, because of a
vague feeling that, having set out to punish Germany, we ought to go ahead and do it.
Actually there is little acute hatred of Germany left in this country, and even less, I
should expect to find, in the army of occupation. Only the minority of sadists, who must
have their "atrocities" from one source or another, take a keen interest in the hunting-
down of war criminals and quislings. If you asked the average man what crime Goering,
Ribbentrop, and the rest are to be charged with at their trial, he cannot tell you. Somehow
the punishment of these monsters ceases to sem attractive when it becomes possible:
indeed, once under lock and key, they almost cease to be monsters.
Unfortunately, there is often a need of some concrete incident before one can discover the
real state of one's feelings. Here is another memory from Germany. A few hours after
Stuttgart was captured by the French army, a Belgian journalist and myself entered the
town, which was still in some disorder. The Belgian had been broadcasting throughout
the war for the European Service of the BBC, and, like nearly all Frenchmen or Belgians,
he had a very much tougher attitude towards "the Boche" than an Englishman or an
American would have. All the main bridges into town had been blown up, and we had to
enter by a small footbridge which the Germans had evidently mad efforts to defend. A
dead German soldier was lying supine at the foot of the steps. His face was a waxy
yellow. On his breast someone had laid a bunch of the lilac which was blooming
everywhere.
The Belgian averted his face as we went past. When we were well over the bridge he
confided to me that this was the first time he had seen a dead man. I suppose he was
thirty five years old, and for four years he had been doing war propaganda over the radio.
For several days after this, his attitude was quite different from what it had been earlier.
He looked with disgust at the bomb-wrecked town and the humiliation the Germans were
undergoing, and even on one occasion intervened to prevent a particularly bad bit of
looting. When he left, he gave the residue of the coffee we had brought with us to the
Germans on whom we were billeted. A week earlier he would probably have been
scandalized at the idea of giving coffee to a "Boche. " But his feelings, he told me, had
undergone a change at the sight of ce pauvre mort beside the bridge: it had suddenly
brought home to him the meaning of war. And yet, if we had happened to enter the town
by another route, he might have been spared the experience of seeing one corpse out of
the — perhaps — twenty million that the war has produced.
George Orwell
A Hanging
It was in Burma, a sodden morning of the rains. A sickly light, like yellow tinfoil, was slanting
over the high walls into the jail yard. We were waiting outside the condemned cells, a row of
sheds fronted with double bars, like small animal cages. Each cell measured about ten feet by
ten and was quite bare within except for a plank bed and a pot of drinking water. In some of
them brown silent men were squatting at the inner bars, with their blankets draped round
them. These were the condemned men, due to be hanged within the next week or two.
One prisoner had been brought out of his cell. He was a Hindu, a puny wisp of a man, with a
shaven head and vague liquid eyes. He had a thick, sprouting moustache, absurdly too big for
his body, rather like the moustache of a comic man on the films. Six tall Indian warders were
guarding him and getting him ready for the gallows. Two of them stood by with rifles and
fixed bayonets, while the others handcuffed him, passed a chain through his handcuffs and
fixed it to their belts, and lashed his arms tight to his sides. They crowded very close about
him, with their hands always on him in a careful, caressing grip, as though all the while
feeling him to make sure he was there. It was like men handling a fish which is still alive and
may jump back into the water. But he stood quite unresisting, yielding his arms limply to the
ropes, as though he hardly noticed what was happening.
Eight o'clock struck and a bugle call, desolately thin in the wet air, floated from the distant
barracks. The superintendent of the jail, who was standing apart from the rest of us, moodily
prodding the gravel with his stick, raised his head at the sound. He was an army doctor, with
a grey toothbrush moustache and a gruff voice. ‘For God's sake hurry up, Francis,’ he said
irritably. ‘The man ought to have been dead by this time. Aren't you ready yet? ’
Francis, the head jailer, a fat Dravidian in a white drill suit and gold spectacles, waved his
black hand. ‘Yes sir, yes sir,’ he bubbled. ‘All iss satisfactorily prepared. The hangman iss
waiting. We shall proceed. ’
‘Well, quick march, then. The prisoners can't get their breakfast till this job's over. ’
We set out for the gallows. Two warders marched on either side of the prisoner, with their
rifles at the slope; two others marched close against him, gripping him by arm and shoulder,
as though at once pushing and supporting him. The rest of us, magistrates and the like,
followed behind. Suddenly, when we had gone ten yards, the procession stopped short
without any order or warning. A dreadful thing had happened — a dog, come goodness knows
whence, had appeared in the yard. It came bounding among us with a loud volley of barks,
and leapt round us wagging its whole body, wild with glee at finding so many human beings
together. It was a large woolly dog, half Airedale, half pariah. For a moment it pranced round
us, and then, before anyone could stop it, it had made a dash for the prisoner, and jumping up
tried to lick his face. Everyone stood aghast, too taken aback even to grab at the dog.
‘Who let that bloody brute in here? ’ said the superintendent angrily. ‘Catch it, someone! ’
A warder, detached from the escort, charged clumsily after the dog, but it danced and
gambolled just out of his reach, taking everything as part of the game. A young Eurasian jailer
picked up a handful of gravel and tried to stone the dog away, but it dodged the stones and
came after us again. Its yaps echoed from the jail wails. The prisoner, in the grasp of the two
warders, looked on incuriously, as though this was another formality of the hanging. It was
several minutes before someone managed to catch the dog. Then we put my handkerchief
through its collar and moved off once more, with the dog still straining and whimpering.
It was about forty yards to the gallows. I watched the bare brown back of the prisoner
marching in front of me. He walked clumsily with his bound arms, but quite steadily, with
that bobbing gait of the Indian who never straightens his knees.
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. " I
pointed out before, but evidently it needs repeating, that it is probably somewhat better to
kill a cross-section of the population than to kill only the young men. If the figures
published by the Germans are true, and we have really killed 1,200,000 civilians in our
raids, that loss of life has probably harmed the German race somewhat less than a
corresponding loss on the Russian front or in Africa and Italy.
Any nation at war will do its best to protect its children, and the number of children killed
in raids probably does not correspond to their percentage of the general population.
Women cannot be protected to the same extent, but the outcry against killing women, if
you accept killing at all, is sheer sentimentality. Why is it worse to kill a woman than a
man? The argument usually advanced is that in killing women you are killing the
breeders, whereas men can be more easily spared. But this is a fallacy based on the notion
that human beings can be bred like animals. The idea behind it is that since one man is
capable of fertilizing a very large number of women, just as a prize ram fertilizes
thousands of ewes, the loss of male lives is comparatively unimportant. Human beings,
however, are not cattle. When the slaughter caused by war leaves a surplus of women, the
enormous majority of those women bear no children. Male lives are very nearly as
important, biologically, as female ones.
In the last war the British Empire lost nearly a million men killed, of whome abou;three-
quarters came from these islands. Most of them will have been under thirty. If all those
young men had had only one child each whe should now have en extra 750,000 people
round about the age of twenty. France, which lost much more heavily, never recovered
from the slaughter of the last war, and it is doubtful whether Britain has fully recovered,
either. We can't yet calculate the casualties of the present war, but the last one killed
between ten and twenty million young men. Flad it been conducted, as the next one will
perhaps be, with flying bombs, rockets and other long-range weapons which kill old and
young, healthy and unhealthy, male and female impartially, it would probably have
damaged European civilization somewhat less than it did.
Contrary to what some of my correspondents seem to think, I have no enthusiasm for air
raids, either ours or the enemy's. Like a lot of other people in this country, I am growing
definitely tired of bombs. But I do object to the hypocrisy of accepting force as an
instrument while squealing against this or that individual weapon, or of denouncing war
while wanting to preserve the kind of soceity that makes war inevitable.
As I Please - My Country Right Or Wrong
Tribune, 24 December 1943
Attacking me in the Weekly Review for attacking Douglas Reed, Mr. A. K. Chesterton
remarks, "'My country — right or wrong' is a maxim which apparently has no place in Mr.
Orwell's philosophy. " He also states that "all of us believe that whatever her condition
Britain must win this war, or for that matter any other war in which she is engaged. "
The operative phrase is any other war. There are plenty of us who would defend our
own country, under no matter what government, if it seemed that we were in danger of
actual invasion and conquest. But "any war" is a different matter. How about the Boer
War, for instance? There is a neat little bit of historical irony here. Mr. A. K. Chesterton
is the nephew of G. K. Chesterton, who courageously opposed the Boer War, and once
remarked that "My country, right or wrong" was on the same moral level as "My mother,
drunk or sober. "
As I Please - Atrocity Pictures
Tribune, 8 September 1944
I have before me an exceptionally disgusting photograph, from the Star of August 29, of
two partially undressed women, with shaven heads and with swastikas painted on their
faces, being led through the streets of Paris amid grinning onlookers. The Star — not that I
am picking on the Star, for most of the press has behaved likewise — reproduces this
photograph with seeming approval.
I don't blame the French for doing this kind of thing. They have had four years of
suffering, and I can partially imagine how they feel towards the collaborators. But it is a
different matter when newspapers in this country try to persuade their readers that
shaving women's heads is a nice thing to do. As soon as I saw this Star photograph, I
thought, "Where have I seen something like this before? " Then I remembered. Just about
ten years ago, when the Nazi regime was beginning to get into its stride, very similar
pictures of humiliated Jews being led through the streets of German cities were exhibited
in the British press — but with this difference, that on that occasion we were not expected
to approve.
Recently another newspaper published photographs of the dangling corpses of Germans
hanged by the Russians in Kharkov, and carefully informed its readers that these
executions had been filmed and that the public would shortly be able to witness them at
the new theatres. (Were children admitted, I wonder? )
There is a saying of Nietzche which I have quoted before, but which is worth quoting
again:
He who fights too long against dragons becomes a dragon himself; and if you gaze too
long into the abyss, the abyss will gaze into you.
"Too long," in this context, should perhaps be taken as meaning "after the dragon is
beaten. "
As I Please -- Hell
14 April 1944
Attacking Mr. C. A. Smith and myself in the Malvern Torch for various remarks about
the Christian religion, Mr. Sidney Dark grows very angry because I have suggested that
the belief in personal immortality is decaying. "I would wager," he says, "that if a Gallup
poll were taken seventy-five percent (of the British population) would confess to a vague
belief in survival. " Writing elsewhere during the same week, Mr. Dark puts it at eighty-
five percent.
Now, I find it very rare to meet anyone, of whatever background, who admits to believing
in personal immortality. Still, I think it quite likely that if you asked everyone the
question and put pencil and paper in hands, a fairly large number (I am not so free with
my percentages as Mr. Dark) would admit the possibility that after death there might be
"something. " The point Mr. Dark has missed is that the belief, such as it is, hasn't the
actuality it had for our forefathers. Never, literally never in recent years, have I met
anyone who gave me the impression of believing in the next world as firmly as he
believed in the existence of, for instance, Australia. Belief in the next world does not
influence conduct as it would if it were genuine. With that endless existence beyond
death to look forward to, how trivial our lives here would seem! Most Christians profess
to believe in Hell. Yet have you ever met a Christian who seemed as afraid of Hell as he
was of cancer? Even very devout Christians will make jokes about Hell. They wouldn't
make jokes about leprosy, or RAF pilots with their faces burnt away: the subject is too
painful. Here there springs into my mind a little triolet by the late A. M. Currie:
It's a pity that Poppa has sold
his soul It makes him sizzle at breakfast so. The
money was useful, but still on the whole It's a
pity that Poppa has sold his soul When he might
have held on like the Baron de Coal And not
cleared out when the price was low. It's a pity
that Poppa has sold his soul It makes him sizzle
at breakfast so.
Currie, a Catholic, would presumably have said that he believed in Hell. If his next-door
neighbour had been burnt to death he would not have written a comic poem about it, yet
he can make jokes about somebody being fried for millions of years. I say that such belief
has no reality. It is a sham currency, like the money in Samuel Butler's Musical Banks.
As I Please - Conversation With A Pacifist
On the night in 1940 when the big ack-ack barrage was fired over London for the first
time, I was in Picadilly Circus when the guns opened up, and I fled into the Cafe Royal to
take cover. Among the crowd inside a good-looking, well-made youth of about twenty-
five was making somewhat of a nuisance of himself with a copy of Peace News, which
he was forcing upon the attention of everyone at the neighbouring tables. I got into
conversation with him, and the conversation went something like this:
The youth: "I tell you, it'll all be over by Christmas. There's obviously going to be a
compromise peace. I'm pinning my faith to Sir Samuel Hoare. It's degrading company to
be in, I admit, but still Hoare is on our side. So long as Hoare's in Madrid, there's always
hope of a sell-out. "
Orwell: "What about all those preparations that they're making against invasion — the pill
boxes that they're building everywhere, the Local Defense Volunteers and so forth? "
The youth: "Oh, that merely means they're getting ready to crush the working class when
the Germans get here. I suppose some of them might be fools enough to try to resist, but
Churchill and the Germans between them won't take long to settle them. Don't worry, it'll
soon be over. "
Orwell: "Do you really want to see your children grow up Nazis? "
The youth: "Nonsense! You don't suppose the Germans are going to encourage Fascism
in this country, do you? They don't want to breed up a race of warriors to fight against
them. Their object will be to turn us into slaves. That's why I’m a pacifist. They'll
encourage people like me. "
Orwell: "And shoot people like me? "
The youth: "That would be just too bad. "
Orwell: "But why are you so anxious to remain alive? "
The youth: "So that I can get on with my work, of course. "
It had come out in the conversation that the youth was a painter — whether good or bad I
do not know; but at any rate, sincerely interested in painting and quite ready to face
poverty in pursuit of it. As a painter, he would probably have been somewhat better off
under a German occupation than a writer or journalist would be. But still, what he said
contained a very dangerous fallacy, now very widespread in the countries where
totalitarianism has not actually established itself.
The fallacy is to believe that under a dictatorial government you can be free inside. Quite
a number of people console themselves with this thought, now that totalitarianism in one
form or another is visibly on the up-grade in every part of the world. Out in the street the
loudspeakers bellow, the flags flutter from the rooftops, the police with their tommy-guns
prowl to and fro, the face of the Leader, four feet wide, glares from every hoarding; but
up in the attics the secret enemies of the regime can record their thoughts in perfect
freedom — that is the idea, more or less. And many people are under the impression that
this is going on now in Germany and other dictatorial countries.
Why is this idea false? I pass over the fact that modem dictatorships don't, in fact, leave
the loopholes that the old-fashioned despotisms did; and also the probable weakening of
the desire for intellectual liberty owing to totalitarian methods of education. The greatest
mistake is to imagine that the human being is an autonomous individual. The secret
freedom which you can supposedly enjoy under a despotic government is nonsense,
because your thoughts are never entirely your own. Philosophers, writers, artists, even
scientists, not only need encouragement and an audience, they need constant stimulation
from other people. It is almost impossible to think without talking. If Defoe had really
lived on a desert island, he could not have written Robinson Crusoe, nor would he have
wanted to. Take away freedom of speech, and the creative faculties dry up. Had the
Germans really got to England my acquaintance of the Cafe Royal would soon have
found his painting deteriorating, even if the Gestapo had let him alone. And when the lid
is taken off Europe, I believe one of the things that will surprise us will be to find how
little worthwhile writing of any kind — even such things as diaries, for instance — has
been produced in secret under the dictators.
Partisan Review - Wishful Thinking
So far as I can see, all political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way.
People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most
grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome. For example, right up to
May of this year the more disaffected English intellectuals refused to believe that a
Second Front would be opened. They went on refusing while, bang in front of their faces,
the endless convoys of guns and landing-craft rumbled through London on their way to
the coast. One could point to countless other instances of people hugging quite manifest
delusions because the truth would be wounding to their pride. Hence the absence of
reliable political prediction. To name just one easily isolated example: who foresaw the
Russo-German pact of 1939? A few pessimistic Conservatives foretold an agreement
between Germany and Russia, but the wrong kind of agreement, and for the wrong
reasons. So far as I am aware, no intellectual of the Left, whether russophile or
russophobe, foresaw anything of the kind. For that matter, the Left as a whole failed to
foresee the rise of Fascism and failed to grasp that the Nazis were dangerous even when
they were on the verge of seizing power. To appreciate the danger of Fascism the Left
would have had to admit its own shortcomings, which was too painful; so the whole
phenomenon was ignored or misinterpreted, with disastrous results.
The most one can say is that people can be fairly good prophets when their wishes are
realizable. But a truly objective approach is almost impossible, because in one form or
another almost everyone is a nationalist . . . The most intelligent people seem capable of
holding schizophrenic beliefs, or disregarding plain facts, of evading serious questions
with debating-society repartees, or swallowing baseless rumours and of looking on
indifferently while history is falsified. All these mental vices spring ultimately from the
nationalistic habit of mind, which is itself, I suppose, the product of fear and of the
ghastly emptiness of machine civilization. . . .
I believe that it is possible to be more objective than most of us are, but that it involves a
moral effort. One cannot get away from one's own subjective feelings, but at least one
can know what they are and make allowance for them.
Partisan Review, Winter 1945
As I Please - The Coming Age Of Superpowers
Tribune
2 February 1945
A not-too-distant explosion shakes the house, the windows rattle in their sockets, and in
the next room the class of 1964 wakes up and lets out a yell or two. Each time this
happens I find myself thinking, "Is it possible that human beings can continue with this
lunacy very much longer? " You know the answer, of course. Indeed, the difficulty
nowadays is to find anyone who thinks that there will not be another war in the fairly
near future.
Germany, I suppose, will be defeated this year, and when Germany is out of the way
Japan will not be able to stand up to the combined powers of Britain and the U. S. A. Then
there will be a peace of exhaustion, with only minor and unofficial wars raging all over
the place, and perhaps this so-called peace may last for decades. But after that, by the
way the world is actually shaping, it may well be that war will become permanent.
Already, quite visibly and more or less with the acquiescence of all of us, the world is
splitting up into the two or three huge super-states forecast in James Burnham's
Managerial Revolution. One cannot draw their exact boundaries as yet, but one can see
more or less what areas they will comprise. And if the world does settle down into this
pattern, it is likely that these vast states will be permanently at war with one another,
though it will not necessarily be a very intensive or bloody kind of war. Their problems,
both economic and psychological, will be a lot simpler if the doodlebugs are more or less
continually whizzing to and fro.
If these two or three super-states do establish themselves, not only will each of them be
too big to be conquered, but they will be under no necessity to trade with one another,
and in a position to prevent all contact between their nationals. Already, for a dozen years
or so, large areas of the earth have been cut off from one another, although technically at
peace.
Some months ago, in this column, I pointed out that modern scientific inventions have
tended to prevent rather than increase international communication. This brought me
several angry letters from readers, but none of them were able to show that what I had
said was false. They merely retorted that if we had Socialism, the aeroplane, the radio etc.
would not be perverted to wrong uses. Very true, but then we haven't Socialism. As it is,
the aeroplane is primarily a thing for dropping bombs and the radio primarily a thing for
whipping up nationalism. Even before the war there was enormously less contact
between the peoples of the earth than there had been thirty years earlier, and education
was perverted, history re-written and freedom of thought suppressed to an extent
undreamed of in earlier ages. And there is no sign whatever of these tendencies being
reversed.
Maybe I am pessimistic. But at any rate those are the thoughts that cross my mind (and a
lot of other people's too, I believe) every time the explosion of a V bomb booms through
the mist.
Review:
The Road to Serfdom by F. A. Hayek The Mirror of the Past by K. Zilliacus
Taken together, these two books give grounds for dismay. The first of them is an
eloquent defence of laissez-faire capitalism, the other is an even more vehement
denunciation of it. They cover to some extent the same ground, they frequently quote the
same authorities, and they even start out with the same premise, since each of them
assumes that Western civilization depends on the sanctity of the individual. Yet each
writer is convinced that the other's policy leads directly to slavery, and the alarming thing
is that they may both be right. . . .
Between them these two books sum up our present predicament. Capitalism leads to dole
queues, the scramble for markets, and war. Collectivism leads to concentration camps,
leader worship, and war. There is no way out of this unless a planned economy can
somehow be combined with the freedom of the intellect, which can only happen if the
concept of right and wrong is restored to politics.
Both of these writers are aware of this, more or less; but since they can show no
practicable way of bringing it about the combined effect of their books is a depressing
one.
Observer, 9 April 1 944
As I Please - Ugly Leaders
Tribune, 7 January, 1944
Looking through the photographs of the New Year's Honours List, I am struck (as usual)
by the quite exceptional ugliness and vulgarity of the faces displayed there. It seems to be
almost the rule that the kind of person who earns the right to call himself Lord Percy de
Falcontowers should look at best like an overfed publican and at worst like a tax collector
with a duodenal ulcer. But our country is not alone in this. Anyone who is a good hand
with scissors and paste could compile an excellent book entitled Our Rulers, and
consisting simply of published photographs of the great ones of the earth. The idea first
occurred to me when I saw in Picture Post some "stills" of Beaverbrook delivering a
speech and looking more like a monkey on a stick than you would think possible for
anyone who was not doing it on purpose.
When you had got together your collection of fuerhers, actual and would-be, you would
notice that several qualities recur throughout the list. To begin with, they are all old. In
spite of the lip-service that is paid everywhere to youth, there is no such thing as a person
in a truly commanding position who is less than fifty years old. Secondly, they are nearly
all undersized. A dictator taller than five feet six inches is a very great rarity. And,
thirdly, there is this almost general and sometimes quite fantastic ugliness. The collection
would contain photographs of Streicher bursting a blood vessel, Japanese war-lords
impersonating baboons, Mussolini with his scrubby dewlap, the chinless de Gaulle, the
stumpy short-armed Churchill, Gandhi with his long sly nose and huge bat's ears, Tojo
displaying thirty-two teeth with gold in every one of them. And opposite each, to make a
contrast, there would be a photograph of an ordinary human being from the country
concerned. Opposite Hitler a young sailor from a German submarine, opposite Tojo a
Japanese peasant of the old type — and so on.
As I Please - War Guilt
Tribune, 31 December, 1943
Reading the discussion of "war guilt" which reverberates in the correspondence columns
of the newspapers, I note the surprise with which many people seem to discover that war
is not a crime. Hitler, it appears, has not done anything actionable. He has not raped
anybody, nor carried off any pieces of loot with his own hands, nor personally flogged
any prisoners, buried any wounded men alive, thrown any babies into the air and spitted
them on his bayonet, dipped any nuns in petrol and touched them off with church tapers
— in fact he has not done any of the things which enemy nationals are usually credited
with doing in war-time. He has merely precipitated a world war which will perhaps have
cost twenty-million lives before it ends. And there is nothing illegal in that. How could
there be, when legality implies authority and there is no authority with the power to
transcend national frontiers?
At the recent trials in Kharkov some attempt was made to fix on Hitler, Himmler and the
rest the responsibility for their subordinates' crimes, but the mere fact that this had to be
done shows that Hitlers's guilt is not self-evident. His crime, it is implied, was not to
build up an army for the purpose of aggressive war, but to instruct that army to torture its
prisoners. So far as it goes, the distinction between an atrocity and an act of war is valid.
An atrocity means an act of terrorism which has no genuine military purpose. One must
accept such distinctions if one accepts war at all, which in practice everyone does.
Nevertheless, a world in which it is wrong to murder an individual civilian and right to
drop a thousand tons of high explosive on a residential area does sometimes make me
wonder whether this earth of ours is not a loony bin made use of by some other planet.
Revenge is Sour
Tribune
9 November, 1945
Whenever I read phrases like "war guilt trials", "punishment of war criminals" and so
forth, there comes back into my mind the memory of something I saw in a prisoner-of-
war camp in South Germany, earlier this year.
Another correspondent and myself were being show round the camp by a little Viennese
Jew who had been enlisted in the branch of the American army which deals with the
interrogation of prisoners. He was an alert, fair-haired, rather good-looking youth of
about twenty-five, and politically so much more knowledgeable than the average
American officer that it was a pleasure to be with him. The camp was on an airfield, and,
after we had been round the cages, our guide led us to a hangar where various prisoners
who were in a different category from the others were being "screened. "
Up at one end of the hangar about a dozen men were lying in a row on the concrete floor.
These, it was explained, were S. S. officers who had been segregated from the other
prisoners. Among them was a man in dingy civilian clothes who was lying with his arm
across his face and apparently asleep. He had strange and horribly deformed feet. The
two of them were quite symmetrical, but they were clubbed out into an extraordinary
globular shape which made them more like a horse's hoof than anything human. As we
approached the group, the little Jew seemed to be working himself up into a state of
excitement.
"That’s the real swine! " he said, and suddenly he lashed out with his heavy army boot and
caught the prostrate man a fearful kick right on the bulge of one of his deformed feet.
"Get up, you swine! " he shouted as the man started out of sleep, and then repeated
something of the kind in German. The prisoner scrambled to his feet and stood clumsily
to attention. With the same air of working himself up into a fury — indeed he was almost
dancing up and down as he spoke — the Jew told us the prisoner's history. He was a "real"
Nazi: his party number indicated that he had been a member since the very early days,
and he had held a post corresponding to a General in the political branch of the S. S. It
could be taken as quite certain that he had had charge of concentration camps and had
presided over tortures and hangings. In short, he represented everything that we had been
fighting against during the past five years.
Meanwhile, I was studying his appearance. Quite apart from the scrubby, unfed,
unshaven look that a newly captured man generally has, he was a disgusting specimen.
But he did not look brutal or in any way frightening: merely neurotic and, in a low way,
intellectual. His pale, shifty eyes were deformed by powerful spectacles. He could have
been an unfrocked clergyman, an actor ruined by drink, or a spiritualist medium. I have
seen very similar people in London common lodging houses, and also in the Reading
Room of the British Museum. Quite obviously he was mentally unbalanced — indeed,
only doubtfully sane, though at this moment sufficiently in his right mind to be frightened
of getting another kick. And yet everything that the Jew was telling me of his history
could have been true, and probably was true! So the Nazi torturer of one's imagination,
the monstrous figure against whom one had struggled for so many years, dwindled to this
pitiful wretch, whose obvious need was not for punishment, but for some kind of
psychological treatment.
Later, there were further humiliations. Another S. S. officer, a large brawny man, was
ordered to strip to the waist and show the blood group number tattooed on his under-arm;
another was forced to explain to us how he had lied about being a member of the S. S. and
attempted to pass himself off as an ordinary soldier of the Wehrmacht. I wondered
whether the Jew was getting any real kick out of this new-found power that he was
exercising. I concluded that he wasn't really enjoying it, and that he was merely — like a
man in a brothel, or a boy smoking his first cigar, or a tourist traipsing round a picture
gallery — telling himself that he was enjoying it, and behaving as he had planned to
behave in the days he was helpless.
It is absurd to blame any German or Austrian Jew for getting his own back on the Nazis.
Heaven knows what scores this particular man may have had to wipe out; very likely his
whole family had been murdered; and after all, even a wanton kick to a prisoner is a very
tiny thing compared with the outrages committed by the Hitler regime. But what this
scene, and much else that I saw in Germany, brought home to me was that the whole idea
of revenge and punishment is a childish daydream. Properly speaking, there is no such
thing as revenge. Revenge is an act which you want to commit when you are powerless
and because you are powerless: as soon as the sense of impotence is removed, the desire
evaporates also.
Who would not have jumped for joy, in 1940, at the thought of seeing S. S. officers
kicked and humiliated? But when the thing becomes possible, it is merely pathetic and
disgusting. It is said that when Mussolini's corpse was exhibited in public, an old woman
drew a revolver and fired five shots into it, exclaiming, "Those are for my five sons! " It is
the kind of story that the newspapers make up, but it might be true. I wonder how much
satisfaction she got out of those five shots, which, doubtless, she had dreamed years
earlier of firing. The condition of her being able to get close enough to Mussolini to shoot
at him was that he should be a corpse.
In so far as the big public in this country is responsible for the monstrous peace
settlement now being forced on Germany, it is because of a failure to see in advance that
punishing an enemy brings no satisfaction. We acquiesce in crimes like the expulsion of
all Germans from East Prussia — crimes which in some cases we could not prevent but
might at least have protested against — because the Germans had angered and frightened
us, and therefore we were certain that when they were down we should feel no pity for
them. We persist in these policies, or let others persist in them on our behalf, because of a
vague feeling that, having set out to punish Germany, we ought to go ahead and do it.
Actually there is little acute hatred of Germany left in this country, and even less, I
should expect to find, in the army of occupation. Only the minority of sadists, who must
have their "atrocities" from one source or another, take a keen interest in the hunting-
down of war criminals and quislings. If you asked the average man what crime Goering,
Ribbentrop, and the rest are to be charged with at their trial, he cannot tell you. Somehow
the punishment of these monsters ceases to sem attractive when it becomes possible:
indeed, once under lock and key, they almost cease to be monsters.
Unfortunately, there is often a need of some concrete incident before one can discover the
real state of one's feelings. Here is another memory from Germany. A few hours after
Stuttgart was captured by the French army, a Belgian journalist and myself entered the
town, which was still in some disorder. The Belgian had been broadcasting throughout
the war for the European Service of the BBC, and, like nearly all Frenchmen or Belgians,
he had a very much tougher attitude towards "the Boche" than an Englishman or an
American would have. All the main bridges into town had been blown up, and we had to
enter by a small footbridge which the Germans had evidently mad efforts to defend. A
dead German soldier was lying supine at the foot of the steps. His face was a waxy
yellow. On his breast someone had laid a bunch of the lilac which was blooming
everywhere.
The Belgian averted his face as we went past. When we were well over the bridge he
confided to me that this was the first time he had seen a dead man. I suppose he was
thirty five years old, and for four years he had been doing war propaganda over the radio.
For several days after this, his attitude was quite different from what it had been earlier.
He looked with disgust at the bomb-wrecked town and the humiliation the Germans were
undergoing, and even on one occasion intervened to prevent a particularly bad bit of
looting. When he left, he gave the residue of the coffee we had brought with us to the
Germans on whom we were billeted. A week earlier he would probably have been
scandalized at the idea of giving coffee to a "Boche. " But his feelings, he told me, had
undergone a change at the sight of ce pauvre mort beside the bridge: it had suddenly
brought home to him the meaning of war. And yet, if we had happened to enter the town
by another route, he might have been spared the experience of seeing one corpse out of
the — perhaps — twenty million that the war has produced.
George Orwell
A Hanging
It was in Burma, a sodden morning of the rains. A sickly light, like yellow tinfoil, was slanting
over the high walls into the jail yard. We were waiting outside the condemned cells, a row of
sheds fronted with double bars, like small animal cages. Each cell measured about ten feet by
ten and was quite bare within except for a plank bed and a pot of drinking water. In some of
them brown silent men were squatting at the inner bars, with their blankets draped round
them. These were the condemned men, due to be hanged within the next week or two.
One prisoner had been brought out of his cell. He was a Hindu, a puny wisp of a man, with a
shaven head and vague liquid eyes. He had a thick, sprouting moustache, absurdly too big for
his body, rather like the moustache of a comic man on the films. Six tall Indian warders were
guarding him and getting him ready for the gallows. Two of them stood by with rifles and
fixed bayonets, while the others handcuffed him, passed a chain through his handcuffs and
fixed it to their belts, and lashed his arms tight to his sides. They crowded very close about
him, with their hands always on him in a careful, caressing grip, as though all the while
feeling him to make sure he was there. It was like men handling a fish which is still alive and
may jump back into the water. But he stood quite unresisting, yielding his arms limply to the
ropes, as though he hardly noticed what was happening.
Eight o'clock struck and a bugle call, desolately thin in the wet air, floated from the distant
barracks. The superintendent of the jail, who was standing apart from the rest of us, moodily
prodding the gravel with his stick, raised his head at the sound. He was an army doctor, with
a grey toothbrush moustache and a gruff voice. ‘For God's sake hurry up, Francis,’ he said
irritably. ‘The man ought to have been dead by this time. Aren't you ready yet? ’
Francis, the head jailer, a fat Dravidian in a white drill suit and gold spectacles, waved his
black hand. ‘Yes sir, yes sir,’ he bubbled. ‘All iss satisfactorily prepared. The hangman iss
waiting. We shall proceed. ’
‘Well, quick march, then. The prisoners can't get their breakfast till this job's over. ’
We set out for the gallows. Two warders marched on either side of the prisoner, with their
rifles at the slope; two others marched close against him, gripping him by arm and shoulder,
as though at once pushing and supporting him. The rest of us, magistrates and the like,
followed behind. Suddenly, when we had gone ten yards, the procession stopped short
without any order or warning. A dreadful thing had happened — a dog, come goodness knows
whence, had appeared in the yard. It came bounding among us with a loud volley of barks,
and leapt round us wagging its whole body, wild with glee at finding so many human beings
together. It was a large woolly dog, half Airedale, half pariah. For a moment it pranced round
us, and then, before anyone could stop it, it had made a dash for the prisoner, and jumping up
tried to lick his face. Everyone stood aghast, too taken aback even to grab at the dog.
‘Who let that bloody brute in here? ’ said the superintendent angrily. ‘Catch it, someone! ’
A warder, detached from the escort, charged clumsily after the dog, but it danced and
gambolled just out of his reach, taking everything as part of the game. A young Eurasian jailer
picked up a handful of gravel and tried to stone the dog away, but it dodged the stones and
came after us again. Its yaps echoed from the jail wails. The prisoner, in the grasp of the two
warders, looked on incuriously, as though this was another formality of the hanging. It was
several minutes before someone managed to catch the dog. Then we put my handkerchief
through its collar and moved off once more, with the dog still straining and whimpering.
It was about forty yards to the gallows. I watched the bare brown back of the prisoner
marching in front of me. He walked clumsily with his bound arms, but quite steadily, with
that bobbing gait of the Indian who never straightens his knees.
