The Latin type of
latrine, at which you have to squat, is bad enough at its best, but these were made of some
kind of polished stone so slippery that it was all you could do to keep on your feet.
latrine, at which you have to squat, is bad enough at its best, but these were made of some
kind of polished stone so slippery that it was all you could do to keep on your feet.
Orwell
The “semi-apes” of whom Hitler
speaks with such loathing will be flying aeroplanes and manufacturing machine-guns.
The Fascist dream of a slave empire will be at an end. On the other hand, if we are
defeated we simply hand over our own victims to new masters who come fresh to the job
and have not developed any scruples.
But more is involved than the fate of the coloured peoples. Two incompatible visions of
life are fighting one another. “Between democracy and totalitarianism,” says Mussolini,
“there can be no compromise. ” The two creeds cannot even, for any length of time, live
side by side. So long as democracy exists, even in its very imperfect English form,
totalitarianism is in deadly danger. The whole English-speaking world is haunted by the
idea of human equality, and though it would be simply a lie to say that either we or the
Americans have ever acted up to our professions, still, the IDEA is there, and it is capable
of one day becoming a reality. From the English-speaking culture, if it does not perish, a
society of free and equal human beings will ultimately arise. But it is precisely the idea of
human equality — the “Jewish” or “Judaeo-Christian” idea of equality — that Hitler came
into the world to destroy. He has, heaven knows, said so often enough. The thought of a
world in which black men would be as good as white men and Jews treated as human
beings brings him the same horror and despair as the thought of endless slavery brings to
us.
It is important to keep in mind how irreconcilable these two viewpoints are. Some time
within the next year a pro-Hitler reaction within the left-wing intelligentsia is likely
enough. There are premonitory signs of it already. Hitler’s positive achievement appeals
to the emptiness of these people, and, in the case of those with pacifist leanings, to their
masochism. One knows in advance more or less what they will say. They will start by
refusing to admit that British capitalism is evolving into something different, or that the
defeat of Hitler can mean any more than a victory for the British and American
millionaires. And from that they will proceed to argue that, after all, democracy is “just
the same as” or “just as bad as” totalitarianism. There is NOT MUCH freedom of speech
in England; therefore there is NO MORE than exists in Germany. To be on the dole is a
horrible experience; therefore it is NO WORSE to be in the torture-chambers of the
Gestapo. In general, two blacks make a white, half a loaf is the same as no bread.
But in reality, whatever may be true about democracy and totalitarianism, it is not true
that they are the same. It would not be true, even if British democracy were incapable of
evolving beyond its present stage. The whole conception of the militarised continental
state, with its secret police, its censored literature and its conscript labour, is utterly
different from that of the loose maritime democracy, with its slums and unemployment,
its strikes and party politics. It is the difference between land power and sea power,
between cruelty and inefficiency, between lying and self-deception, between the SS man
and the rent-collector. And in choosing between them one chooses not so much on the
strength of what they now are as of what they are capable of becoming. But in a sense it
is irrelevant whether democracy, at its higher or at its lowest, is “better” than
totalitarianism. To decide that one would have to have access to absolute standards. The
only question that matters is where one’s real sympathies will lie when the pinch comes.
The intellectuals who are so fond of balancing democracy against totalitarianism and
“proving” that one is as bad as the other are simply frivolous people who have never been
shoved up against realities. They show the same shallow misunderstanding of Fascism
now, when they are beginning to flirt with it, as a year or two ago, when they were
squealing against it. The question is not, “Can you make out a debating-society ‘case’ in
favour of Hitler? ” The question is, “Do you genuinely accept that case? Are you willing
to submit to Hitler’s rule? Do you want to see England conquered, or don’t you? ” It
would be better to be sure on that point before frivolously siding with the enemy. For
there is no such thing as neutrality in war; in practice one must help one side or the other.
When the pinch comes, no one bred in the western tradition can accept the Fascist vision
of life. It is important to realise that now, and to grasp what it entails. With all its sloth,
hypocrisy and injustice, the Englishspeaking civilisation is the only large obstacle in
Hitler’s path. It is a living contradiction of all the “infallible” dogmas of Fascism. That is
why all Fascist writers for years past have agreed that England’s power must be
destroyed. England must be “exterminated”, must be “annihilated”, must “cease to exist”.
Strategically it would be possible for this war to end with Hitler in secure possession of
Europe, and with the British Empire intact and British sea-power barely affected. But
ideologically it is not possible; were Hitler to make an offer along those lines, it could
only be treacherously, with a view to conquering England indirectly or renewing the
attack at some more favourable moment. England cannot possibly be allowed to remain
as a sort of funnel through which deadly ideas from beyond the Atlantic flow into the
police states of Europe. And turning it round to our own point of view, we see the
vastness of the issue before us, the all-importance of preserving our democracy more or
less as we have known it. But to PRESERVE is always to EXTEND. The choice before
us is not so much between victory and defeat as between revolution and apathy. If the
thing we are fighting for is altogether destroyed, it will have been destroyed partly by our
own act.
It could happen that England could introduce the beginnings of Socialism, turn this war
into a revolutionary war, and still be defeated. That is at any rate thinkable. But, terrible
as it would be for anyone who is now adult, it would be far less deadly than the
“compromise peace” which a few rich men and their hired liars are hoping for. The final
ruin of England could only be accomplished by an English government acting under
orders from Berlin. But that cannot happen if England has awakened beforehand. For in
that case the defeat would be unmistakable, the struggle would continue, the IDEA would
survive. The difference between going down fighting, and surrendering without a fight, is
by no means a question of “honour” and schoolboy heroics. Hitler said once that to
ACCEPT defeat destroys the soul of a nation. This sounds like a piece of claptrap, but it
is strictly true. The defeat of 1870 did not lessen the world-influence of France. The
Third Republic had more influence, intellectually, than the France of Napoleon III. But
the sort of peace that Petain, Laval and Co have accepted can only be purchased by
deliberately wiping out the national culture. The Vichy Government will enjoy a spurious
independence only on condition that it destroys the distinctive marks of French culture:
republicanism, secularism, respect for the intellect, absence of colour prejudice. We
cannot be UTTERLY defeated if we have made our revolution beforehand. We may see
German troops marching down Whitehall, but another process, ultimately deadly to the
German power-dream, will have been started. The Spanish people were defeated, but the
things they learned during those two and a half memorable years will one day come back
upon the Spanish Fascists like a boomerang.
A piece of Shakespearean bombast was much quoted at the beginning of the war. Even
Mr Chamberlain quoted it once, if my memory does not deceive me:
Come the four comers of the world in arms And we shall shock them: naught shall make
us me If England to herself do rest but true.
It is right enough, if you interpret it rightly. But England has got to be true to herself. She
is not being true to herself while the refugees who have sought our shores are penned up
in concentration camps, and company directors work out subtle schemes to dodge their
Excess Profits Tax. It is goodbye to the TATLER and the BYSTANDER, and farewell to
the lady in the Rolls-Royce car. The heirs of Nelson and of Cromwell are not in the
House of Lords. They are in the fields and the streets, in the factories and the armed
forces, in the four-ale bar and the suburban back garden; and at present they are still kept
under by a generation of ghosts. Compared with the task of bringing the real England to
the surface, even the winning of the war, necessary though it is, is secondary. By
revolution we become more ourselves, not less. There is no question of stopping short,
striking a compromise, salvaging “democracy”, standing still. Nothing ever stands still.
We must add to our heritage or lose it, we must grow greater or grow less, we must go
forward or backward. I believe in England, and I believe that we shall go forward.
WELLS, HITLER AND THE WORLD STATE (1941)
“In March or April, say the wiseacres, there is to be a stupendous knockout blow at
Britain. . . . What Hitler has to do it with, I cannot imagine. His ebbing and dispersed
military resources are now probably not so very much greater than the Italians’ before
they were put to the test in Greece and Africa. ”
“The Gennan air power has been largely spent. It is behind the times and its first-rate
men are mostly dead or disheartened or worn out. ”
“In 1914 the Hohenzollem army was the best in the world. Behind that screaming little
defective in Berlin there is nothing of the sort. . . . Yet our military ‘experts’ discuss the
waiting phantom. In their imaginations it is perfect in its equipment and invincible in
discipline. Sometimes it is to strike a decisive ‘blow’ through Spain and North Africa and
on, or march through the Balkans, march from the Danube to Ankara, to Persia, to India,
or ‘crush Russia’, or ‘pour’ over the Brenner into Italy. The weeks pass and the phantom
does none of these things — for one excellent reason. It does not exist to that extent. Most
of such inadequate guns and munitions as it possessed must have been taken away from it
and fooled away in Hitler’s silly feints to invade Britain. And its raw jerry-built discipline
is wilting under the creeping realisation that the Blitzkrieg is spent, and the war is coming
home to roost. ”
These quotations are not taken from the CAVALRY QUARTERLY but from a series of
newspaper articles by Mr H. G. Wells, written at the beginning of this year and now
reprinted in a book entitled GUIDE TO THE NEW WORLD. Since they were written,
the German army has overrun the Balkans and reconquered Cyrenaica, it can march
through Turkey or Spain at such time as may suit it, and it has undertaken the invasion of
Russia. How that campaign will turn out I do not know, but it is worth noticing that the
German general staff, whose opinion is probably worth something, would not have begun
it if they had not felt fairly certain of finishing it within three months. So much for the
idea that the German army is a bogey, its equipment inadequate, its morale breaking
down, etc etc.
What has Wells to set against the “screaming little defective in Berlin”? The usual
rigmarole about a World State, plus the Sankey Declaration, which is an attempted
definition of fundamental human rights, of anti-totalitarian tendency. Except that he is
now especially concerned with federal world control of air power, it is the same gospel as
he has been preaching almost without interruption for the past forty years, always with an
air of angry surprise at the human beings who can fail to grasp anything so obvious.
What is the use of saying that we need federal world control of the air? The whole
question is how we are to get it. What is the use of pointing out that a World State is
desirable? What matters is that not one of the five great military powers would think of
submitting to such a thing. All sensible men for decades past have been substantially in
agreement with what Mr Wells says; but the sensible men have no power and, in too
many cases, no disposition to sacrifice themselves. Hitler is a criminal lunatic, and Hitler
has an anny of millions of men, aeroplanes in thousands, tanks in tens of thousands. For
his sake a great nation has been willing to overwork itself for six years and then to fight
for two years more, whereas for the commonsense, essentially hedonistic world-view
which Mr Wells puts forward, hardly a human creature is willing to shed a pint of blood.
Before you can even talk of world reconstruction, or even of peace, you have got to
eliminate Hitler, which means bringing into being a dynamic not necessarily the same as
that of the Nazis, but probably quite as unacceptable to “enlightened” and hedonistic
people. What has kept England on its feet during the past year? In part, no doubt, some
vague idea about a better future, but chiefly the atavistic emotion of patriotism, the
ingrained feeling of the English-speaking peoples that they are superior to foreigners. For
the last twenty years the main object of English left-wing intellectuals has been to break
this feeling down, and if they had succeeded, we might be watching the SS men
patrolling the London streets at this moment. Similarly, why are the Russians fighting
like tigers against the German invasion? In part, perhaps, for some half-remembered ideal
of Utopian Socialism, but chiefly in defence of Holy Russia (the “sacred soil of the
Fatherland”, etc etc), which Stalin has revived in an only slightly altered form. The
energy that actually shapes the world springs from emotions — racial pride, leader-
worship, religious belief, love of war — which liberal intellectuals mechanically write off
as anachronisms, and which they have usually destroyed so completely in themselves as
to have lost all power of action.
The people who say that Hitler is Antichrist, or alternatively, the Holy Ghost, are nearer
an understanding of the truth than the intellectuals who for ten dreadful years have kept it
up that he is merely a figure out of comic opera, not worth taking seriously. All that this
idea really reflects is the sheltered conditions of English life. The Left Book Club was at
bottom a product of Scotland Yard, just as the Peace Pledge Union is a product of the
navy. One development of the last ten years has been the appearance of the “political
book”, a sort of enlarged pamphlet combining history with political criticism, as an
important literary form. But the best writers in this line — Trotsky, Rauschning,
Rosenberg, Silone, Borkenau, Koestler and others — have none of them been Englishmen,
and nearly all of them have been renegades from one or other extremist party, who have
seen totalitarianism at close quarters and known the meaning of exile and persecution.
Only in the English-speaking countries was it fashionable to believe, right up to the
outbreak of war, that Hitler was an unimportant lunatic and the German tanks made of
cardboard. Mr Wells, it will be seen from the quotations I have given above, believes
something of the kind still. I do not suppose that either the bombs or the German
campaign in Greece have altered his opinion. A lifelong habit of thought stands between
him and an understanding of Hitler’s power.
Mr Wells, like Dickens, belongs to the non-military middle class. The thunder of guns,
the jingle of spurs, the catch in the throat when the old flag goes by, leave him manifestly
cold. He has an invincible hatred of the fighting, hunting, swashbuckling side of life,
symbolised in all his early books by a violent propaganda against horses. The principal
villain of his OUTLINE OF HISTORY is the military adventurer, Napoleon. If one looks
through nearly any book that he has written in the last forty years one finds the same idea
constantly recurring: the supposed antithesis between the man of science who is working
towards a planned World State and the reactionary who is trying to restore a disorderly
past. In novels, Utopias, essays, fdms, pamphlets, the antithesis crops up, always more or
less the same. On the one side science, order, progress, internationalism, aeroplanes,
steel, concrete, hygiene: on the other side war, nationalism, religion, monarchy, peasants,
Greek professors, poets, horses. History as he sees it is a series of victories won by the
scientific man over the romantic man. Now, he is probably right in assuming that a
“reasonable”, planned form of society, with scientists rather than witch-doctors in
control, will prevail sooner or later, but that is a different matter from assuming that it is
just round the corner. There survives somewhere or other an interesting controversy
which took place between Wells and Churchill at the time of the Russian Revolution.
Wells accuses Churchill of not really believing his own propaganda about the Bolsheviks
being monsters dripping with blood etc, but of merely fearing that they were going to
introduce an era of common sense and scientific control, in which flag-wavers like
Churchill himself would have no place. Churchill’s estimate of the Bolsheviks, however,
was nearer the mark than Wells’s. The early Bolshevik s may have been angels or
demons, according as one chooses to regard them, but at any rate they were not sensible
men. They were not introducing a Wellsian Utopia but a Rule of the Saints, which, like
the English Rule of the Saints, was a military despotism enlivened by witchcraft trials.
The same misconception reappears in an inverted fonn in Wells’s attitude to the Nazis.
Hitler is all the war-lords and witchdoctors in history rolled into one. Therefore, argues
Wells, he is an absurdity, a ghost from the past, a creature doomed to disappear almost
immediately. But unfortunately the equation of science with common sense does not
really hold good. The aeroplane, which was looked forward to as a civilising influence
but in practice has hardly been used except for dropping bombs, is the symbol of that
fact. Modern Germany is far more scientific than England, and far more barbarous. Much
of what Wells has imagined and worked for is physically there in Nazi Germany. The
order, the planning, the State encouragement of science, the steel, the concrete, the
aeroplanes, are all there, but all in the service of ideas appropriate to the Stone Age.
Science is lighting on the side of superstition. But obviously it is impossible for Wells to
accept this. It would contradict the world-view on which his own works are based. The
war-lords and the witch-doctors MUST fail, the common-sense World State, as seen by a
nineteenth-century liberal whose heart does not leap at the sound of bugles, MUST
triumph. Treachery and defeatism apart, Hitler CANNOT be a danger. That he should
finally win would be an impossible reversal of history, like a Jacobite restoration.
But is it not a sort of parricide for a person of my age (thirty-eight) to find fault with H. G.
Wells? Thinking people who were born about the beginning of this century are in some
sense Wells’s own creation. How much influence any mere writer has, and especially a
“popular” writer whose work takes effect quickly, is questionable, but I doubt whether
anyone who was writing books between 1900 and 1920, at any rate in the English
language, influenced the young so much. The minds of all of us, and therefore the
physical world, would be perceptibly different if Wells had never existed. Only, just the
singleness of mind, the one-sided imagination that made him seem like an inspired
prophet in the Edwardian age, make him a shallow, inadequate thinker now. When Wells
was young, the antithesis between science and reaction was not false. Society was ruled
by narrow-minded, profoundly incurious people, predatory businessmen, dull squires,
bishops, politicians who could quote Horace but had never heard of algebra. Science was
faintly disreputable and religious belief obligatory. Traditionalism, stupidity,
snobbishness, patriotism, superstition and love of war seemed to be all on the same side;
there was need of someone who could state the opposite point of view. Back in the
nineteen-hundreds it was a wonderful experience for a boy to discover H. G. Wells. There
you were, in a world of pedants, clergymen and golfers, with your future employers
exhorting you to “get on or get out”, your parents systematically warping your sexual life,
and your dull-witted schoolmasters sniggering over their Latin tags; and here was this
wonderful man who could tell you about the inhabitants of the planets and the bottom of
the sea, and who knew that the future was not going to be what respectable people
imagined. A decade or so before aeroplanes were technically feasible Wells knew that
within a little while men would be able to fly. He knew that because he himself wanted to
be able to fly, and therefore felt sure that research in that direction would continue. On
the other hand, even when I was a little boy, at a time when the Wright brothers had
actually lifted their machine off the ground for fifty-nine seconds, the generally accepted
opinion was that if God had meant us to fly He would have given us wings. Up to 1914
Wells was in the main a true prophet. In physical details his vision of the new world has
been fulfilled to a surprising extent.
But because he belonged to the nineteenth century and to a non-military nation and class,
he could not grasp the tremendous strength of the old world which was symbolised in his
mind by fox-hunting Tories. He was, and still is, quite incapable of understanding that
nationalism, religious bigotry and feudal loyalty are far more powerful forces than what
he himself would describe as sanity. Creatures out of the Dark Ages have come marching
into the present, and if they are ghosts they are at any rate ghosts which need a strong
magic to lay them. The people who have shown the best understanding of Fascism are
either those who have suffered under it or those who have a Fascist streak in themselves.
A crude book like THE IRON HEEL, written nearly thirty years ago, is a truer prophecy
of the future than either BRAVE NEW WORLD or THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO
COME. If one had to choose among Wells’s own contemporaries a writer who could
stand towards him as a corrective, one might choose Kipling, who was not deaf to the evil
voices of power and military “glory”. Kipling would have understood the appeal of
Hitler, or for that matter of Stalin, whatever his attitude towards them might be. Wells is
too sane to understand the modern world. The succession of lower-middle-class novels
which are his greatest achievement stopped short at the other war and never really began
again, and since 1920 he has squandered his talents in slaying paper dragons. But how
much it is, after all, to have any talents to squander.
LOOKING BACK ON THE SPANISH WAR (1942)
1
First of all the physical memories, the sounds, the smells and the surfaces of things.
It is curious that more vividly than anything that came afterwards in the Spanish war I
remember the week of so-called training that we received before being sent to the front —
the huge cavalry barracks in Barcelona with its draughty stables and cobbled yards, the
icy cold of the pump where one washed, the filthy meals made tolerable by pannikins of
wine, the Trousered militia-women chopping firewood, and the roll-call in the early
mornings where my prosaic English name made a sort of comic interlude among the
resounding Spanish ones, Manuel Gonzalez, Pedro Aguilar, Ramon Fenellosa, Roque
Ballaster, Jaime Domenech, Sebastian Viltron, Ramon Nuvo Bosch. I name those
particular men because I remember the faces of all of them. Except for two who were
mere riff-raff and have doubtless become good Falangists by this time, it is probable that
all of them are dead. Two of them I know to be dead. The eldest would have been about
twenty-five, the youngest sixteen.
One of the essential experiences of war is never being able to escape from disgusting
smells of human origin. Latrines are an overworked subject in war literature, and I would
not mention them if it were not that the latrine in our barracks did its necessary bit
towards puncturing my own illusions about the Spanish civil war.
The Latin type of
latrine, at which you have to squat, is bad enough at its best, but these were made of some
kind of polished stone so slippery that it was all you could do to keep on your feet. In
addition they were always blocked. Now I have plenty of other disgusting things in my
memory, but I believe it was these latrines that first brought home to me the thought, so
often to recur: ‘Here we are, soldiers of a revolutionary army, defending Democracy
against Fascism, fighting a war which is ABOUT something, and the detail of our lives is
just as sordid and degrading as it could be in prison, let alone in a bourgeois army. ’ Many
other things reinforced this impression later; for instance, the boredom and animal hunger
of trench life, the squalid intrigues over scraps of food, the mean, nagging quarrels which
people exhausted by lack of sleep indulge in.
The essential horror of anny life (whoever has been a soldier will know what I mean by
the essential horror of army life) is barely affected by the nature of the war you happen to
be fighting in. Discipline, for instance, is ultimately the same in all annies. Orders have
to be obeyed and enforced by punishment if necessary, the relationship of officer and
man has to be the relationship of superior and inferior. The picture of war set forth in
books like ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT is substantially true. Bullets hurt,
corpses stink, men under fire are often so frightened that they wet their trousers. It is true
that the social background from which an army springs will colour its training, tactics and
general efficiency, and also that the consciousness of being in the right can bolster up
morale, though this affects the civilian population more than the troops. (People forget
that a soldier anywhere near the front line is usually too hungry, or frightened, or cold, or,
above all, too tired to bother about the political origins of the war. ) But the laws of nature
are not suspended for a ‘red’ army any more than for a ‘white’ one. A louse is a louse and
a bomb is a bomb, even though the cause you are fighting for happens to be just.
Why is it worth while to point out anything so obvious? Because the bulk of the British
and American intelligentsia were manifestly unaware of it then, and are now. Our
memories are short nowadays, but look back a bit, dig out the files of NEW MASSES or
the DAILY WORKER, and just have a look at the romantic warmongering muck that our
left-wingers were spilling at that time. All the stale old phrases! And the unimaginative
callousness of it! The sang-froid with which London faced the bombing of Madrid! Here
I am not bothering about the counter-propagandists of the Right, the Lunns, Garvins ET
HOC GENUS; they go without saying. But here were the very people who for twenty
years had hooted and jeered at the ‘glory’ of war, at atrocity stories, at patriotism, even at
physical courage, coming out with stuff that with the alteration of a few names would
have fitted into the DAILY MAIL of 1918. If there was one thing that the British
intelligentsia were committed to, it was the debunking version of war, the theory that war
is all corpses and latrines and never leads to any good result. Well, the same people who
in 1933 sniggered pityingly if you said that in certain circumstances you would fight for
your country, in 1937 were denouncing you as a Trotsky-Fascist if you suggested that the
stories in NEW MASSES about freshly wounded men clamouring to get back into the
fighting might be exaggerated. And the Left intelligentsia made their swing-over from
‘War is hell’ to ‘War is glorious’ not only with no sense of incongruity but almost
without any intervening stage. Later the bulk of them were to make other transitions
equally violent. There must be a quite large number of people, a sort of central core of the
intelligentsia, who approved the ‘King and Country’ declaration in 1935, shouted for a’
firm line against Germany’ in 1937, supported the People’s Convention in 1940, and are
demanding a Second Front now.
As far as the mass of the people go, the extraordinary swings of opinion which occur
nowadays, the emotions which can be turned on and off like a tap, are the result of
newspaper and radio hypnosis. In the intelligentsia I should say they result rather from
money and mere physical safety. At a given moment they may be ‘pro-war’ or ‘ anti-war
but in either case they have no realistic picture of war in their minds. When they enthused
over the Spanish war they knew, of course, that people were being killed and that to be
killed is unpleasant, but they did feel that for a soldier in the Spanish Republican army
the experience of war was somehow not degrading. Somehow the latrines stank less,
discipline was less irksome. You have only to glance at the NEW STATESMAN to see
that they believed that; exactly similar blah is being written about the Red Army at this
moment. We have become too civilized to grasp the obvious. For the truth is very simple.
To survive you often have to fight, and to fight you have to dirty yourself. War is evil,
and it is often the lesser evil. Those who take the sword perish by the sword, and those
who don’t take the sword perish by smelly diseases. The fact that such a platitude is
worth writing down shows what the years of RENTIER capitalism have done to us.
2
In connexion with what I have just said, a footnote, on atrocities.
I have little direct evidence about the atrocities in the Spanish civil war. I know that some
were committed by the Republicans, and far more (they are still continuing) by the
Fascists. But what impressed me then, and has impressed me ever since, is that atrocities
are believed in or disbelieved in solely on grounds of political predilection. Everyone
believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side, without
ever bothering to examine the evidence. Recently I drew up a table of atrocities during
the period between 1918 and the present; there was never a year when atrocities were not
occurring somewhere or other, and there was hardly a single case when the Left and the
Right believed in the same stories simultaneously. And stranger yet, at any moment the
situation can suddenly reverse itself and yesterday’s proved-to-the-hilt atrocity story can
become a ridiculous lie, merely because the political landscape has changed.
In the present war we are in the curious situation that our ‘atrocity campaign’ was done
largely before the war started, and done mostly by the Left, the people who normally
pride themselves on their incredulity. In the same period the Right, the atrocity-mongers
of 1914-18, were gazing at Nazi Germany and flatly refusing to see any evil in it. Then as
soon as war broke out it was the pro-Nazis of yesterday who were repeating horror
stories, while the anti-Nazis suddenly found themselves doubting whether the Gestapo
really existed. Nor was this solely the result of the Russo-German Pact. It was partly
because before the war the Left had wrongly believed that Britain and Gennany would
never fight and were therefore able to be anti-German and anti-British simultaneously;
partly also because official war-propaganda, with its disgusting hypocrisy and self-
righteousness, always tends to make thinking people sympathize with the enemy. Part of
the price we paid for the systematic lying of 1914-17 was the exaggerated pro-German
reaction which followed. During the years 1918-33 you were hooted at in left-wing
circles if you suggested that Gennany bore even a fraction of responsibility for the war.
In all the denunciations of Versailles I listened to during those years I don’t think I ever
once heard the question, ‘What would have happened if Germany had won? ’ even
mentioned, let alone discussed. So also with atrocities. The truth, it is felt, becomes
untruth when your enemy utters it. Recently I noticed that the very people who
swallowed any and every horror story about the Japanese in Nanking in 1937 refused to
believe exactly the same stories about Hong Kong in 1942. There was even a tendency to
feel that the Nanking atrocities had become, as it were, retrospectively untrue because the
British Government now drew attention to them.
But unfortunately the truth about atrocities is far worse than that they are lied about and
made into propaganda. The truth is that they happen. The fact often adduced as a reason
for scepticism — that the same horror stories come up in war after war — merely makes it
rather more likely that these stories are true. Evidently they are widespread fantasies, and
war provides an opportunity of putting them into practice. Also, although it has ceased to
be fashionable to say so, there is little question that what one may roughly call the
‘whites’ commit far more and worse atrocities than the ‘reds’. There is not the slightest
doubt, for instance, about the behaviour of the Japanese in China. Nor is there much
doubt about the long tale of Fascist outrages during the last ten years in Europe. The
volume of testimony is enormous, and a respectable proportion of it comes from the
Gennan press and radio. These things really happened, that is the thing to keep one’s eye
on. They happened even though Lord Halifax said they happened. The raping and
butchering in Chinese cities, the tortures in the cellars of the Gestapo, the elderly Jewish
professors flung into cesspools, the machine-gunning of refugees along the Spanish
roads — they all happened, and they did not happen any the less because the DAILY
TELEGRAPH has suddenly found out about them when it is live years too late.
3
Two memories, the first not proving anything in particular, the second, I think, giving one
a certain insight into the atmosphere of a revolutionary period:
Early one morning another man and I had gone out to snipe at the Fascists in the trenches
outside Huesca. Their line and ours here lay three hundred yards apart, at which range
our aged rifles would not shoot accurately, but by sneaking out to a spot about a hundred
yards from the Fascist trench you might, if you were lucky, get a shot at someone through
a gap in the parapet. Unfortunately the ground between was a flat beet field with no cover
except a few ditches, and it was necessary to go out while it was still-dark and return
soon after dawn, before the light became too good. This time no Fascists appeared, and
we stayed too long and were caught by the dawn. We were in a ditch, but behind us were
two hundred yards of flat ground with hardly enough cover for a rabbit. We were still
trying to nerve ourselves to make a dash for it when there was an uproar and a blowing of
whistles in the Fascist trench. Some of our aeroplanes were coming over. At this moment,
a man presumably carrying a message to an officer, jumped out of the trench and ran
along the top of the parapet in full view. He was half-dressed and was holding up his
trousers with both hands as he ran. I refrained from shooting at him. It is true that I am a
poor shot and unlikely to hit a running man at a hundred yards, and also that I was
thinking chiefly about getting back to our trench while the Fascists had their attention
fixed on the aeroplanes. Still, I did not shoot partly because of that detail about the
trousers. I had come here to shoot at ‘Fascists’; but a man who is holding up his trousers
isn’t a ‘Fascist’, he is visibly a fellow-creature, similar to yourself, and you don’t feel like
shooting at him.
What does this incident demonstrate? Nothing very much, because it is the kind of thing
that happens all the time in all wars. The other is different. I don’t suppose that in telling
it I can make it moving to you who read it, but I ask you to believe that it is moving to
me, as an incident characteristic of the moral atmosphere of a particular moment in time.
One of the recruits who joined us while I was at the barracks was a wild-looking boy
from the back streets of Barcelona. He was ragged and barefooted. He was also extremely
dark (Arab blood, I dare say), and made gestures you do not usually see a European
make; one in particular — the ann outstretched, the palm vertical — was a gesture
characteristic of Indians. One day a bundle of cigars, which you could still buy dirt cheap
at that time, was stolen out of my bunk. Rather foolishly I reported this to the officer, and
one of the scallywags I have already mentioned promptly came forward and said quite
untruly that twenty-five pesetas had been stolen from his bunk. For some reason the
officer instantly decided that the brown-faced boy must be the thief. They were very hard
on stealing in the militia, and in theory people could be shot for it. The wretched boy
allowed himself to be led off to the guardroom to be searched. What most struck me was
that he barely attempted to protest his innocence. In the fatalism of his attitude you could
see the desperate poverty in which he had been bred. The officer ordered him to take his
clothes off. With a humility which was horrible to me he stripped himself naked, and his
clothes were searched. Of course neither the cigars nor the money were there; in fact he
had not stolen them. What was most painful of all was that he seemed no less ashamed
after his innocence had been established. That night I took him to the pictures and gave
him brandy and chocolate. But that too was horrible — I mean the attempt to wipe out an
injury with money. For a few minutes I had half believed him to be a thief, and that could
not be wiped out.
Well, a few weeks later at the front I had trouble with one of the men in my section. By
this time I was a ‘cabo’, or corporal, in command of twelve men. It was static warfare,
horribly cold, and the chief job was getting sentries to stay awake at their posts. One day
a man suddenly refused to go to a certain post, which he said quite truly was exposed to
enemy fire. He was a feeble creature, and I seized hold of him and began to drag him
towards his post. This roused the feelings of the others against me, for Spaniards, I think,
resent being touched more than we do. Instantly I was surrounded by a ring of shouting
men:’ Fascist! Fascist! Let that man go! This isn’t a bourgeois army. Fascist! ’ etc. , etc.
As best I could in my bad Spanish I shouted back that orders had got to be obeyed, and
the row developed into one of those enormous arguments by means of which discipline is
gradually hammered out in revolutionary armies. Some said I was right, others said I was
wrong. But the point is that the one who took my side the most warmly of all was the
brown-faced boy. As soon as he saw what was happening he sprang into the ring and
began passionately defending me. With his strange, wild, Indian gesture he kept
exclaiming, ‘He’s the best corporal we’ve got! ’ (NO HAY CABO COMO EL! ) Later on
he applied for leave to exchange into my section.
Why is this incident touching to me? Because in any normal circumstances it would have
been impossible for good feelings ever to be re-established between this boy and myself.
The implied accusation of theft would not have been made any better, probably
somewhat worse, by my efforts to make amends. One of the effects of safe and civilized
life is an immense oversensitiveness which makes all the primary emotions seem
somewhat disgusting. Generosity is as painful as meanness, gratitude as hateful as
ingratitude. But in Spain in 1936 we were not living in a nonnal time. It was a time when
generous feelings and gestures were easier than they ordinarily are. I could relate a dozen
similar incidents, not really communicable but bound up in my own mind with the special
atmosphere of the time, the shabby clothes and the gay-coloured revolutionary posters,
the universal use of the word ‘comrade’, the anti-Fascist ballads printed on flimsy paper
and sold for a penny, the phrases like ‘international proletarian solidarty’, pathetically
repeated by ignorant men who believed them to mean something. Could you feel friendly
towards somebody, and stick up for him in a quarrel, after you had been ignominiously
searched in his presence for property you were supposed to have stolen from him? No,
you couldn’t; but you might if you had both been through some emotionally widening
experience. That is one of the by-products of revolution, though in this case it was only
the beginnings of a revolution, and obviously foredoomed to failure.
4
The struggle for power between the Spanish Republican parties is an unhappy, far-off
thing which I have no wish to revive at this date. I only mention it in order to say: believe
nothing, or next to nothing, of what you read about internal affairs on the Government
side. It is all, from whatever source, party propaganda — that is to say, lies. The broad
truth about the war is simple enough. The Spanish bourgeoisie saw their chance of
crushing the labour movement, and took it, aided by the Nazis and by the forces of
reaction all over the world. It is doubtful whether more than that will ever be established.
I remember saying once to Arthur Koestler, ‘History stopped in 1936’, at which he
nodded in immediate understanding. We were both thinking of totalitarianism in general,
but more particularly of the Spanish civil war. Early in life I have noticed that no event is
ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper
reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is
implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting,
and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had
fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot
fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London
retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events
that had never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what
happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines’. Yet in a
way, horrible as all this was, it was unimportant. It concerned secondary issues —
namely, the struggle for power between the Comintern and the Spanish left-wing parties,
and the efforts of the Russian Government to prevent revolution in Spain. But the broad
picture of the war which the Spanish Government presented to the world was not
untruthful. The main issues were what it said they were. But as for the Fascists and their
backers, how could they come even as near to the truth as that? How could they possibly
mention their real aims? Their version of the war was pure fantasy, and in the
circumstances it could not have been otherwise.
The only propaganda line open to the Nazis and Fascists was to represent themselves as
Christian patriots saving Spain from a Russian dictatorship. This involved pretending that
life in Government Spain was just one long massacre (VIDE the CATHOLIC HERALD
or the DAILY MAIL — but these were child’s play compared with the Continental Fascist
press), and it involved immensely exaggerating the scale of Russian intervention. Out of
the huge pyramid of lies which the Catholic and reactionary press all over the world built
up, let me take just one point — the presence in Spain of a Russian army. Devout Franco
partisans all believed in this; estimates of its strength went as high as half a million. Now,
there was no Russian army in Spain. There may have been a handful of airmen and other
technicians, a few hundred at the most, but an army there was not. Some thousands of
foreigners who fought in Spain, not to mention millions of Spaniards, were witnesses of
this. Well, their testimony made no impression at all upon the Franco propagandists, not
one of whom had set foot in Government Spain. Simultaneously these people refused
utterly to admit the fact of German or Italian intervention at the same time as the
Gennany and Italian press were openly boasting about the exploits of their’ legionaries’. I
have chosen to mention only one point, but in fact the whole of Fascist propaganda about
the war was on this level.
This kind of thing is frightening to me, because it often gives me the feeling that the very
concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. After all, the chances are that those
lies, or at any rate similar lies, will pass into history. How will the history of the Spanish
war be written? If Franco remains in power his nominees will write the history books,
and (to stick to my chosen point) that Russian army which never existed will become
historical fact, and schoolchildren will leam about it generations hence. But suppose
Fascism is finally defeated and some kind of democratic government restored in Spain in
the fairly near future; even then, how is the history of the war to be written? What kind of
records will Franco have left behind him? Suppose even that the records kept on the
Government side are recoverable — even so, how is a true history of the war to be written?
For, as I have pointed out already, the Government, also dealt extensively in lies. From
the anti-Fascist angle one could write a broadly truthful history of the war, but it would
be a partisan history, unreliable on every minor point. Yet, after all, some kind of history
will be written, and after those who actually remember the war are dead, it will be
universally accepted. So for all practical purposes the lie will have become truth.
I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to
believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our
own age is the abandonment of the idea that history COULD be truthfully written. In the
past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they
struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each
case they believed that ‘facts’ existed and were more or less discoverable. And in practice
there was always a considerable body of fact which would have been agreed to by almost
everyone. If you look up the history of the last war in, for instance, the
ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA, you will find that a respectable amount of the
material is drawn from German sources. A British and a Gennan historian would disagree
deeply on many things, even on fundamentals, but there would still be that body of, as it
were, neutral fact on which neither would seriously challenge the other. It is just this
common basis of agreement, with its implication that human beings are all one species of
animal, that totalitarianism destroys. Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a
thing as ‘the truth’ exists. There is, for instance, no such thing as ‘Science’. There is only
‘German Science’, ‘Jewish Science’, etc. The implied objective of this line of thought is a
nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future
but THE PAST. If the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened’ — well,
it never happened. If he says that two and two are five — well, two and two are five. This
prospect frightens me much more than bombs — and after our experiences of the last few
years that is not a frivolous statement.
But is it perhaps childish or morbid to terrify oneself with visions of a totalitarian future?
Before writing off the totalitarian world as a nightmare that can’t come true, just
remember that in 1925 the world of today would have seemed a nightmare that couldn’t
come true. Against that shifting phantasmagoric world in which black may be white
tomorrow and yesterday’s weather can be changed by decree, there are in reality only two
safeguards. One is that however much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing, as it
were, behind your back, and you consequently can’t violate it in ways that impair military
efficiency. The other is that so long as some parts of the earth remain unconquered, the
liberal tradition can be kept alive. Let Fascism, or possibly even a combination of several
Fascisms, conquer the whole world, and those two conditions no longer exist. We in
England underrate the danger of this kind of thing, because our traditions and our past
security have given us a sentimental belief that it all comes right in the end and the thing
you most fear never really happens. Nourished for hundreds of years on a literature in
which Right invariably triumphs in the last chapter, we believe half-instinctively that evil
always defeats itself in the long run. Pacifism, for instance, is founded largely on this
belief. Don’t resist evil, and it will somehow destroy itself. But why should it? What
evidence is there that it does? And what instance is there of a modem industrialized state
collapsing unless conquered from the outside by military force?
speaks with such loathing will be flying aeroplanes and manufacturing machine-guns.
The Fascist dream of a slave empire will be at an end. On the other hand, if we are
defeated we simply hand over our own victims to new masters who come fresh to the job
and have not developed any scruples.
But more is involved than the fate of the coloured peoples. Two incompatible visions of
life are fighting one another. “Between democracy and totalitarianism,” says Mussolini,
“there can be no compromise. ” The two creeds cannot even, for any length of time, live
side by side. So long as democracy exists, even in its very imperfect English form,
totalitarianism is in deadly danger. The whole English-speaking world is haunted by the
idea of human equality, and though it would be simply a lie to say that either we or the
Americans have ever acted up to our professions, still, the IDEA is there, and it is capable
of one day becoming a reality. From the English-speaking culture, if it does not perish, a
society of free and equal human beings will ultimately arise. But it is precisely the idea of
human equality — the “Jewish” or “Judaeo-Christian” idea of equality — that Hitler came
into the world to destroy. He has, heaven knows, said so often enough. The thought of a
world in which black men would be as good as white men and Jews treated as human
beings brings him the same horror and despair as the thought of endless slavery brings to
us.
It is important to keep in mind how irreconcilable these two viewpoints are. Some time
within the next year a pro-Hitler reaction within the left-wing intelligentsia is likely
enough. There are premonitory signs of it already. Hitler’s positive achievement appeals
to the emptiness of these people, and, in the case of those with pacifist leanings, to their
masochism. One knows in advance more or less what they will say. They will start by
refusing to admit that British capitalism is evolving into something different, or that the
defeat of Hitler can mean any more than a victory for the British and American
millionaires. And from that they will proceed to argue that, after all, democracy is “just
the same as” or “just as bad as” totalitarianism. There is NOT MUCH freedom of speech
in England; therefore there is NO MORE than exists in Germany. To be on the dole is a
horrible experience; therefore it is NO WORSE to be in the torture-chambers of the
Gestapo. In general, two blacks make a white, half a loaf is the same as no bread.
But in reality, whatever may be true about democracy and totalitarianism, it is not true
that they are the same. It would not be true, even if British democracy were incapable of
evolving beyond its present stage. The whole conception of the militarised continental
state, with its secret police, its censored literature and its conscript labour, is utterly
different from that of the loose maritime democracy, with its slums and unemployment,
its strikes and party politics. It is the difference between land power and sea power,
between cruelty and inefficiency, between lying and self-deception, between the SS man
and the rent-collector. And in choosing between them one chooses not so much on the
strength of what they now are as of what they are capable of becoming. But in a sense it
is irrelevant whether democracy, at its higher or at its lowest, is “better” than
totalitarianism. To decide that one would have to have access to absolute standards. The
only question that matters is where one’s real sympathies will lie when the pinch comes.
The intellectuals who are so fond of balancing democracy against totalitarianism and
“proving” that one is as bad as the other are simply frivolous people who have never been
shoved up against realities. They show the same shallow misunderstanding of Fascism
now, when they are beginning to flirt with it, as a year or two ago, when they were
squealing against it. The question is not, “Can you make out a debating-society ‘case’ in
favour of Hitler? ” The question is, “Do you genuinely accept that case? Are you willing
to submit to Hitler’s rule? Do you want to see England conquered, or don’t you? ” It
would be better to be sure on that point before frivolously siding with the enemy. For
there is no such thing as neutrality in war; in practice one must help one side or the other.
When the pinch comes, no one bred in the western tradition can accept the Fascist vision
of life. It is important to realise that now, and to grasp what it entails. With all its sloth,
hypocrisy and injustice, the Englishspeaking civilisation is the only large obstacle in
Hitler’s path. It is a living contradiction of all the “infallible” dogmas of Fascism. That is
why all Fascist writers for years past have agreed that England’s power must be
destroyed. England must be “exterminated”, must be “annihilated”, must “cease to exist”.
Strategically it would be possible for this war to end with Hitler in secure possession of
Europe, and with the British Empire intact and British sea-power barely affected. But
ideologically it is not possible; were Hitler to make an offer along those lines, it could
only be treacherously, with a view to conquering England indirectly or renewing the
attack at some more favourable moment. England cannot possibly be allowed to remain
as a sort of funnel through which deadly ideas from beyond the Atlantic flow into the
police states of Europe. And turning it round to our own point of view, we see the
vastness of the issue before us, the all-importance of preserving our democracy more or
less as we have known it. But to PRESERVE is always to EXTEND. The choice before
us is not so much between victory and defeat as between revolution and apathy. If the
thing we are fighting for is altogether destroyed, it will have been destroyed partly by our
own act.
It could happen that England could introduce the beginnings of Socialism, turn this war
into a revolutionary war, and still be defeated. That is at any rate thinkable. But, terrible
as it would be for anyone who is now adult, it would be far less deadly than the
“compromise peace” which a few rich men and their hired liars are hoping for. The final
ruin of England could only be accomplished by an English government acting under
orders from Berlin. But that cannot happen if England has awakened beforehand. For in
that case the defeat would be unmistakable, the struggle would continue, the IDEA would
survive. The difference between going down fighting, and surrendering without a fight, is
by no means a question of “honour” and schoolboy heroics. Hitler said once that to
ACCEPT defeat destroys the soul of a nation. This sounds like a piece of claptrap, but it
is strictly true. The defeat of 1870 did not lessen the world-influence of France. The
Third Republic had more influence, intellectually, than the France of Napoleon III. But
the sort of peace that Petain, Laval and Co have accepted can only be purchased by
deliberately wiping out the national culture. The Vichy Government will enjoy a spurious
independence only on condition that it destroys the distinctive marks of French culture:
republicanism, secularism, respect for the intellect, absence of colour prejudice. We
cannot be UTTERLY defeated if we have made our revolution beforehand. We may see
German troops marching down Whitehall, but another process, ultimately deadly to the
German power-dream, will have been started. The Spanish people were defeated, but the
things they learned during those two and a half memorable years will one day come back
upon the Spanish Fascists like a boomerang.
A piece of Shakespearean bombast was much quoted at the beginning of the war. Even
Mr Chamberlain quoted it once, if my memory does not deceive me:
Come the four comers of the world in arms And we shall shock them: naught shall make
us me If England to herself do rest but true.
It is right enough, if you interpret it rightly. But England has got to be true to herself. She
is not being true to herself while the refugees who have sought our shores are penned up
in concentration camps, and company directors work out subtle schemes to dodge their
Excess Profits Tax. It is goodbye to the TATLER and the BYSTANDER, and farewell to
the lady in the Rolls-Royce car. The heirs of Nelson and of Cromwell are not in the
House of Lords. They are in the fields and the streets, in the factories and the armed
forces, in the four-ale bar and the suburban back garden; and at present they are still kept
under by a generation of ghosts. Compared with the task of bringing the real England to
the surface, even the winning of the war, necessary though it is, is secondary. By
revolution we become more ourselves, not less. There is no question of stopping short,
striking a compromise, salvaging “democracy”, standing still. Nothing ever stands still.
We must add to our heritage or lose it, we must grow greater or grow less, we must go
forward or backward. I believe in England, and I believe that we shall go forward.
WELLS, HITLER AND THE WORLD STATE (1941)
“In March or April, say the wiseacres, there is to be a stupendous knockout blow at
Britain. . . . What Hitler has to do it with, I cannot imagine. His ebbing and dispersed
military resources are now probably not so very much greater than the Italians’ before
they were put to the test in Greece and Africa. ”
“The Gennan air power has been largely spent. It is behind the times and its first-rate
men are mostly dead or disheartened or worn out. ”
“In 1914 the Hohenzollem army was the best in the world. Behind that screaming little
defective in Berlin there is nothing of the sort. . . . Yet our military ‘experts’ discuss the
waiting phantom. In their imaginations it is perfect in its equipment and invincible in
discipline. Sometimes it is to strike a decisive ‘blow’ through Spain and North Africa and
on, or march through the Balkans, march from the Danube to Ankara, to Persia, to India,
or ‘crush Russia’, or ‘pour’ over the Brenner into Italy. The weeks pass and the phantom
does none of these things — for one excellent reason. It does not exist to that extent. Most
of such inadequate guns and munitions as it possessed must have been taken away from it
and fooled away in Hitler’s silly feints to invade Britain. And its raw jerry-built discipline
is wilting under the creeping realisation that the Blitzkrieg is spent, and the war is coming
home to roost. ”
These quotations are not taken from the CAVALRY QUARTERLY but from a series of
newspaper articles by Mr H. G. Wells, written at the beginning of this year and now
reprinted in a book entitled GUIDE TO THE NEW WORLD. Since they were written,
the German army has overrun the Balkans and reconquered Cyrenaica, it can march
through Turkey or Spain at such time as may suit it, and it has undertaken the invasion of
Russia. How that campaign will turn out I do not know, but it is worth noticing that the
German general staff, whose opinion is probably worth something, would not have begun
it if they had not felt fairly certain of finishing it within three months. So much for the
idea that the German army is a bogey, its equipment inadequate, its morale breaking
down, etc etc.
What has Wells to set against the “screaming little defective in Berlin”? The usual
rigmarole about a World State, plus the Sankey Declaration, which is an attempted
definition of fundamental human rights, of anti-totalitarian tendency. Except that he is
now especially concerned with federal world control of air power, it is the same gospel as
he has been preaching almost without interruption for the past forty years, always with an
air of angry surprise at the human beings who can fail to grasp anything so obvious.
What is the use of saying that we need federal world control of the air? The whole
question is how we are to get it. What is the use of pointing out that a World State is
desirable? What matters is that not one of the five great military powers would think of
submitting to such a thing. All sensible men for decades past have been substantially in
agreement with what Mr Wells says; but the sensible men have no power and, in too
many cases, no disposition to sacrifice themselves. Hitler is a criminal lunatic, and Hitler
has an anny of millions of men, aeroplanes in thousands, tanks in tens of thousands. For
his sake a great nation has been willing to overwork itself for six years and then to fight
for two years more, whereas for the commonsense, essentially hedonistic world-view
which Mr Wells puts forward, hardly a human creature is willing to shed a pint of blood.
Before you can even talk of world reconstruction, or even of peace, you have got to
eliminate Hitler, which means bringing into being a dynamic not necessarily the same as
that of the Nazis, but probably quite as unacceptable to “enlightened” and hedonistic
people. What has kept England on its feet during the past year? In part, no doubt, some
vague idea about a better future, but chiefly the atavistic emotion of patriotism, the
ingrained feeling of the English-speaking peoples that they are superior to foreigners. For
the last twenty years the main object of English left-wing intellectuals has been to break
this feeling down, and if they had succeeded, we might be watching the SS men
patrolling the London streets at this moment. Similarly, why are the Russians fighting
like tigers against the German invasion? In part, perhaps, for some half-remembered ideal
of Utopian Socialism, but chiefly in defence of Holy Russia (the “sacred soil of the
Fatherland”, etc etc), which Stalin has revived in an only slightly altered form. The
energy that actually shapes the world springs from emotions — racial pride, leader-
worship, religious belief, love of war — which liberal intellectuals mechanically write off
as anachronisms, and which they have usually destroyed so completely in themselves as
to have lost all power of action.
The people who say that Hitler is Antichrist, or alternatively, the Holy Ghost, are nearer
an understanding of the truth than the intellectuals who for ten dreadful years have kept it
up that he is merely a figure out of comic opera, not worth taking seriously. All that this
idea really reflects is the sheltered conditions of English life. The Left Book Club was at
bottom a product of Scotland Yard, just as the Peace Pledge Union is a product of the
navy. One development of the last ten years has been the appearance of the “political
book”, a sort of enlarged pamphlet combining history with political criticism, as an
important literary form. But the best writers in this line — Trotsky, Rauschning,
Rosenberg, Silone, Borkenau, Koestler and others — have none of them been Englishmen,
and nearly all of them have been renegades from one or other extremist party, who have
seen totalitarianism at close quarters and known the meaning of exile and persecution.
Only in the English-speaking countries was it fashionable to believe, right up to the
outbreak of war, that Hitler was an unimportant lunatic and the German tanks made of
cardboard. Mr Wells, it will be seen from the quotations I have given above, believes
something of the kind still. I do not suppose that either the bombs or the German
campaign in Greece have altered his opinion. A lifelong habit of thought stands between
him and an understanding of Hitler’s power.
Mr Wells, like Dickens, belongs to the non-military middle class. The thunder of guns,
the jingle of spurs, the catch in the throat when the old flag goes by, leave him manifestly
cold. He has an invincible hatred of the fighting, hunting, swashbuckling side of life,
symbolised in all his early books by a violent propaganda against horses. The principal
villain of his OUTLINE OF HISTORY is the military adventurer, Napoleon. If one looks
through nearly any book that he has written in the last forty years one finds the same idea
constantly recurring: the supposed antithesis between the man of science who is working
towards a planned World State and the reactionary who is trying to restore a disorderly
past. In novels, Utopias, essays, fdms, pamphlets, the antithesis crops up, always more or
less the same. On the one side science, order, progress, internationalism, aeroplanes,
steel, concrete, hygiene: on the other side war, nationalism, religion, monarchy, peasants,
Greek professors, poets, horses. History as he sees it is a series of victories won by the
scientific man over the romantic man. Now, he is probably right in assuming that a
“reasonable”, planned form of society, with scientists rather than witch-doctors in
control, will prevail sooner or later, but that is a different matter from assuming that it is
just round the corner. There survives somewhere or other an interesting controversy
which took place between Wells and Churchill at the time of the Russian Revolution.
Wells accuses Churchill of not really believing his own propaganda about the Bolsheviks
being monsters dripping with blood etc, but of merely fearing that they were going to
introduce an era of common sense and scientific control, in which flag-wavers like
Churchill himself would have no place. Churchill’s estimate of the Bolsheviks, however,
was nearer the mark than Wells’s. The early Bolshevik s may have been angels or
demons, according as one chooses to regard them, but at any rate they were not sensible
men. They were not introducing a Wellsian Utopia but a Rule of the Saints, which, like
the English Rule of the Saints, was a military despotism enlivened by witchcraft trials.
The same misconception reappears in an inverted fonn in Wells’s attitude to the Nazis.
Hitler is all the war-lords and witchdoctors in history rolled into one. Therefore, argues
Wells, he is an absurdity, a ghost from the past, a creature doomed to disappear almost
immediately. But unfortunately the equation of science with common sense does not
really hold good. The aeroplane, which was looked forward to as a civilising influence
but in practice has hardly been used except for dropping bombs, is the symbol of that
fact. Modern Germany is far more scientific than England, and far more barbarous. Much
of what Wells has imagined and worked for is physically there in Nazi Germany. The
order, the planning, the State encouragement of science, the steel, the concrete, the
aeroplanes, are all there, but all in the service of ideas appropriate to the Stone Age.
Science is lighting on the side of superstition. But obviously it is impossible for Wells to
accept this. It would contradict the world-view on which his own works are based. The
war-lords and the witch-doctors MUST fail, the common-sense World State, as seen by a
nineteenth-century liberal whose heart does not leap at the sound of bugles, MUST
triumph. Treachery and defeatism apart, Hitler CANNOT be a danger. That he should
finally win would be an impossible reversal of history, like a Jacobite restoration.
But is it not a sort of parricide for a person of my age (thirty-eight) to find fault with H. G.
Wells? Thinking people who were born about the beginning of this century are in some
sense Wells’s own creation. How much influence any mere writer has, and especially a
“popular” writer whose work takes effect quickly, is questionable, but I doubt whether
anyone who was writing books between 1900 and 1920, at any rate in the English
language, influenced the young so much. The minds of all of us, and therefore the
physical world, would be perceptibly different if Wells had never existed. Only, just the
singleness of mind, the one-sided imagination that made him seem like an inspired
prophet in the Edwardian age, make him a shallow, inadequate thinker now. When Wells
was young, the antithesis between science and reaction was not false. Society was ruled
by narrow-minded, profoundly incurious people, predatory businessmen, dull squires,
bishops, politicians who could quote Horace but had never heard of algebra. Science was
faintly disreputable and religious belief obligatory. Traditionalism, stupidity,
snobbishness, patriotism, superstition and love of war seemed to be all on the same side;
there was need of someone who could state the opposite point of view. Back in the
nineteen-hundreds it was a wonderful experience for a boy to discover H. G. Wells. There
you were, in a world of pedants, clergymen and golfers, with your future employers
exhorting you to “get on or get out”, your parents systematically warping your sexual life,
and your dull-witted schoolmasters sniggering over their Latin tags; and here was this
wonderful man who could tell you about the inhabitants of the planets and the bottom of
the sea, and who knew that the future was not going to be what respectable people
imagined. A decade or so before aeroplanes were technically feasible Wells knew that
within a little while men would be able to fly. He knew that because he himself wanted to
be able to fly, and therefore felt sure that research in that direction would continue. On
the other hand, even when I was a little boy, at a time when the Wright brothers had
actually lifted their machine off the ground for fifty-nine seconds, the generally accepted
opinion was that if God had meant us to fly He would have given us wings. Up to 1914
Wells was in the main a true prophet. In physical details his vision of the new world has
been fulfilled to a surprising extent.
But because he belonged to the nineteenth century and to a non-military nation and class,
he could not grasp the tremendous strength of the old world which was symbolised in his
mind by fox-hunting Tories. He was, and still is, quite incapable of understanding that
nationalism, religious bigotry and feudal loyalty are far more powerful forces than what
he himself would describe as sanity. Creatures out of the Dark Ages have come marching
into the present, and if they are ghosts they are at any rate ghosts which need a strong
magic to lay them. The people who have shown the best understanding of Fascism are
either those who have suffered under it or those who have a Fascist streak in themselves.
A crude book like THE IRON HEEL, written nearly thirty years ago, is a truer prophecy
of the future than either BRAVE NEW WORLD or THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO
COME. If one had to choose among Wells’s own contemporaries a writer who could
stand towards him as a corrective, one might choose Kipling, who was not deaf to the evil
voices of power and military “glory”. Kipling would have understood the appeal of
Hitler, or for that matter of Stalin, whatever his attitude towards them might be. Wells is
too sane to understand the modern world. The succession of lower-middle-class novels
which are his greatest achievement stopped short at the other war and never really began
again, and since 1920 he has squandered his talents in slaying paper dragons. But how
much it is, after all, to have any talents to squander.
LOOKING BACK ON THE SPANISH WAR (1942)
1
First of all the physical memories, the sounds, the smells and the surfaces of things.
It is curious that more vividly than anything that came afterwards in the Spanish war I
remember the week of so-called training that we received before being sent to the front —
the huge cavalry barracks in Barcelona with its draughty stables and cobbled yards, the
icy cold of the pump where one washed, the filthy meals made tolerable by pannikins of
wine, the Trousered militia-women chopping firewood, and the roll-call in the early
mornings where my prosaic English name made a sort of comic interlude among the
resounding Spanish ones, Manuel Gonzalez, Pedro Aguilar, Ramon Fenellosa, Roque
Ballaster, Jaime Domenech, Sebastian Viltron, Ramon Nuvo Bosch. I name those
particular men because I remember the faces of all of them. Except for two who were
mere riff-raff and have doubtless become good Falangists by this time, it is probable that
all of them are dead. Two of them I know to be dead. The eldest would have been about
twenty-five, the youngest sixteen.
One of the essential experiences of war is never being able to escape from disgusting
smells of human origin. Latrines are an overworked subject in war literature, and I would
not mention them if it were not that the latrine in our barracks did its necessary bit
towards puncturing my own illusions about the Spanish civil war.
The Latin type of
latrine, at which you have to squat, is bad enough at its best, but these were made of some
kind of polished stone so slippery that it was all you could do to keep on your feet. In
addition they were always blocked. Now I have plenty of other disgusting things in my
memory, but I believe it was these latrines that first brought home to me the thought, so
often to recur: ‘Here we are, soldiers of a revolutionary army, defending Democracy
against Fascism, fighting a war which is ABOUT something, and the detail of our lives is
just as sordid and degrading as it could be in prison, let alone in a bourgeois army. ’ Many
other things reinforced this impression later; for instance, the boredom and animal hunger
of trench life, the squalid intrigues over scraps of food, the mean, nagging quarrels which
people exhausted by lack of sleep indulge in.
The essential horror of anny life (whoever has been a soldier will know what I mean by
the essential horror of army life) is barely affected by the nature of the war you happen to
be fighting in. Discipline, for instance, is ultimately the same in all annies. Orders have
to be obeyed and enforced by punishment if necessary, the relationship of officer and
man has to be the relationship of superior and inferior. The picture of war set forth in
books like ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT is substantially true. Bullets hurt,
corpses stink, men under fire are often so frightened that they wet their trousers. It is true
that the social background from which an army springs will colour its training, tactics and
general efficiency, and also that the consciousness of being in the right can bolster up
morale, though this affects the civilian population more than the troops. (People forget
that a soldier anywhere near the front line is usually too hungry, or frightened, or cold, or,
above all, too tired to bother about the political origins of the war. ) But the laws of nature
are not suspended for a ‘red’ army any more than for a ‘white’ one. A louse is a louse and
a bomb is a bomb, even though the cause you are fighting for happens to be just.
Why is it worth while to point out anything so obvious? Because the bulk of the British
and American intelligentsia were manifestly unaware of it then, and are now. Our
memories are short nowadays, but look back a bit, dig out the files of NEW MASSES or
the DAILY WORKER, and just have a look at the romantic warmongering muck that our
left-wingers were spilling at that time. All the stale old phrases! And the unimaginative
callousness of it! The sang-froid with which London faced the bombing of Madrid! Here
I am not bothering about the counter-propagandists of the Right, the Lunns, Garvins ET
HOC GENUS; they go without saying. But here were the very people who for twenty
years had hooted and jeered at the ‘glory’ of war, at atrocity stories, at patriotism, even at
physical courage, coming out with stuff that with the alteration of a few names would
have fitted into the DAILY MAIL of 1918. If there was one thing that the British
intelligentsia were committed to, it was the debunking version of war, the theory that war
is all corpses and latrines and never leads to any good result. Well, the same people who
in 1933 sniggered pityingly if you said that in certain circumstances you would fight for
your country, in 1937 were denouncing you as a Trotsky-Fascist if you suggested that the
stories in NEW MASSES about freshly wounded men clamouring to get back into the
fighting might be exaggerated. And the Left intelligentsia made their swing-over from
‘War is hell’ to ‘War is glorious’ not only with no sense of incongruity but almost
without any intervening stage. Later the bulk of them were to make other transitions
equally violent. There must be a quite large number of people, a sort of central core of the
intelligentsia, who approved the ‘King and Country’ declaration in 1935, shouted for a’
firm line against Germany’ in 1937, supported the People’s Convention in 1940, and are
demanding a Second Front now.
As far as the mass of the people go, the extraordinary swings of opinion which occur
nowadays, the emotions which can be turned on and off like a tap, are the result of
newspaper and radio hypnosis. In the intelligentsia I should say they result rather from
money and mere physical safety. At a given moment they may be ‘pro-war’ or ‘ anti-war
but in either case they have no realistic picture of war in their minds. When they enthused
over the Spanish war they knew, of course, that people were being killed and that to be
killed is unpleasant, but they did feel that for a soldier in the Spanish Republican army
the experience of war was somehow not degrading. Somehow the latrines stank less,
discipline was less irksome. You have only to glance at the NEW STATESMAN to see
that they believed that; exactly similar blah is being written about the Red Army at this
moment. We have become too civilized to grasp the obvious. For the truth is very simple.
To survive you often have to fight, and to fight you have to dirty yourself. War is evil,
and it is often the lesser evil. Those who take the sword perish by the sword, and those
who don’t take the sword perish by smelly diseases. The fact that such a platitude is
worth writing down shows what the years of RENTIER capitalism have done to us.
2
In connexion with what I have just said, a footnote, on atrocities.
I have little direct evidence about the atrocities in the Spanish civil war. I know that some
were committed by the Republicans, and far more (they are still continuing) by the
Fascists. But what impressed me then, and has impressed me ever since, is that atrocities
are believed in or disbelieved in solely on grounds of political predilection. Everyone
believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side, without
ever bothering to examine the evidence. Recently I drew up a table of atrocities during
the period between 1918 and the present; there was never a year when atrocities were not
occurring somewhere or other, and there was hardly a single case when the Left and the
Right believed in the same stories simultaneously. And stranger yet, at any moment the
situation can suddenly reverse itself and yesterday’s proved-to-the-hilt atrocity story can
become a ridiculous lie, merely because the political landscape has changed.
In the present war we are in the curious situation that our ‘atrocity campaign’ was done
largely before the war started, and done mostly by the Left, the people who normally
pride themselves on their incredulity. In the same period the Right, the atrocity-mongers
of 1914-18, were gazing at Nazi Germany and flatly refusing to see any evil in it. Then as
soon as war broke out it was the pro-Nazis of yesterday who were repeating horror
stories, while the anti-Nazis suddenly found themselves doubting whether the Gestapo
really existed. Nor was this solely the result of the Russo-German Pact. It was partly
because before the war the Left had wrongly believed that Britain and Gennany would
never fight and were therefore able to be anti-German and anti-British simultaneously;
partly also because official war-propaganda, with its disgusting hypocrisy and self-
righteousness, always tends to make thinking people sympathize with the enemy. Part of
the price we paid for the systematic lying of 1914-17 was the exaggerated pro-German
reaction which followed. During the years 1918-33 you were hooted at in left-wing
circles if you suggested that Gennany bore even a fraction of responsibility for the war.
In all the denunciations of Versailles I listened to during those years I don’t think I ever
once heard the question, ‘What would have happened if Germany had won? ’ even
mentioned, let alone discussed. So also with atrocities. The truth, it is felt, becomes
untruth when your enemy utters it. Recently I noticed that the very people who
swallowed any and every horror story about the Japanese in Nanking in 1937 refused to
believe exactly the same stories about Hong Kong in 1942. There was even a tendency to
feel that the Nanking atrocities had become, as it were, retrospectively untrue because the
British Government now drew attention to them.
But unfortunately the truth about atrocities is far worse than that they are lied about and
made into propaganda. The truth is that they happen. The fact often adduced as a reason
for scepticism — that the same horror stories come up in war after war — merely makes it
rather more likely that these stories are true. Evidently they are widespread fantasies, and
war provides an opportunity of putting them into practice. Also, although it has ceased to
be fashionable to say so, there is little question that what one may roughly call the
‘whites’ commit far more and worse atrocities than the ‘reds’. There is not the slightest
doubt, for instance, about the behaviour of the Japanese in China. Nor is there much
doubt about the long tale of Fascist outrages during the last ten years in Europe. The
volume of testimony is enormous, and a respectable proportion of it comes from the
Gennan press and radio. These things really happened, that is the thing to keep one’s eye
on. They happened even though Lord Halifax said they happened. The raping and
butchering in Chinese cities, the tortures in the cellars of the Gestapo, the elderly Jewish
professors flung into cesspools, the machine-gunning of refugees along the Spanish
roads — they all happened, and they did not happen any the less because the DAILY
TELEGRAPH has suddenly found out about them when it is live years too late.
3
Two memories, the first not proving anything in particular, the second, I think, giving one
a certain insight into the atmosphere of a revolutionary period:
Early one morning another man and I had gone out to snipe at the Fascists in the trenches
outside Huesca. Their line and ours here lay three hundred yards apart, at which range
our aged rifles would not shoot accurately, but by sneaking out to a spot about a hundred
yards from the Fascist trench you might, if you were lucky, get a shot at someone through
a gap in the parapet. Unfortunately the ground between was a flat beet field with no cover
except a few ditches, and it was necessary to go out while it was still-dark and return
soon after dawn, before the light became too good. This time no Fascists appeared, and
we stayed too long and were caught by the dawn. We were in a ditch, but behind us were
two hundred yards of flat ground with hardly enough cover for a rabbit. We were still
trying to nerve ourselves to make a dash for it when there was an uproar and a blowing of
whistles in the Fascist trench. Some of our aeroplanes were coming over. At this moment,
a man presumably carrying a message to an officer, jumped out of the trench and ran
along the top of the parapet in full view. He was half-dressed and was holding up his
trousers with both hands as he ran. I refrained from shooting at him. It is true that I am a
poor shot and unlikely to hit a running man at a hundred yards, and also that I was
thinking chiefly about getting back to our trench while the Fascists had their attention
fixed on the aeroplanes. Still, I did not shoot partly because of that detail about the
trousers. I had come here to shoot at ‘Fascists’; but a man who is holding up his trousers
isn’t a ‘Fascist’, he is visibly a fellow-creature, similar to yourself, and you don’t feel like
shooting at him.
What does this incident demonstrate? Nothing very much, because it is the kind of thing
that happens all the time in all wars. The other is different. I don’t suppose that in telling
it I can make it moving to you who read it, but I ask you to believe that it is moving to
me, as an incident characteristic of the moral atmosphere of a particular moment in time.
One of the recruits who joined us while I was at the barracks was a wild-looking boy
from the back streets of Barcelona. He was ragged and barefooted. He was also extremely
dark (Arab blood, I dare say), and made gestures you do not usually see a European
make; one in particular — the ann outstretched, the palm vertical — was a gesture
characteristic of Indians. One day a bundle of cigars, which you could still buy dirt cheap
at that time, was stolen out of my bunk. Rather foolishly I reported this to the officer, and
one of the scallywags I have already mentioned promptly came forward and said quite
untruly that twenty-five pesetas had been stolen from his bunk. For some reason the
officer instantly decided that the brown-faced boy must be the thief. They were very hard
on stealing in the militia, and in theory people could be shot for it. The wretched boy
allowed himself to be led off to the guardroom to be searched. What most struck me was
that he barely attempted to protest his innocence. In the fatalism of his attitude you could
see the desperate poverty in which he had been bred. The officer ordered him to take his
clothes off. With a humility which was horrible to me he stripped himself naked, and his
clothes were searched. Of course neither the cigars nor the money were there; in fact he
had not stolen them. What was most painful of all was that he seemed no less ashamed
after his innocence had been established. That night I took him to the pictures and gave
him brandy and chocolate. But that too was horrible — I mean the attempt to wipe out an
injury with money. For a few minutes I had half believed him to be a thief, and that could
not be wiped out.
Well, a few weeks later at the front I had trouble with one of the men in my section. By
this time I was a ‘cabo’, or corporal, in command of twelve men. It was static warfare,
horribly cold, and the chief job was getting sentries to stay awake at their posts. One day
a man suddenly refused to go to a certain post, which he said quite truly was exposed to
enemy fire. He was a feeble creature, and I seized hold of him and began to drag him
towards his post. This roused the feelings of the others against me, for Spaniards, I think,
resent being touched more than we do. Instantly I was surrounded by a ring of shouting
men:’ Fascist! Fascist! Let that man go! This isn’t a bourgeois army. Fascist! ’ etc. , etc.
As best I could in my bad Spanish I shouted back that orders had got to be obeyed, and
the row developed into one of those enormous arguments by means of which discipline is
gradually hammered out in revolutionary armies. Some said I was right, others said I was
wrong. But the point is that the one who took my side the most warmly of all was the
brown-faced boy. As soon as he saw what was happening he sprang into the ring and
began passionately defending me. With his strange, wild, Indian gesture he kept
exclaiming, ‘He’s the best corporal we’ve got! ’ (NO HAY CABO COMO EL! ) Later on
he applied for leave to exchange into my section.
Why is this incident touching to me? Because in any normal circumstances it would have
been impossible for good feelings ever to be re-established between this boy and myself.
The implied accusation of theft would not have been made any better, probably
somewhat worse, by my efforts to make amends. One of the effects of safe and civilized
life is an immense oversensitiveness which makes all the primary emotions seem
somewhat disgusting. Generosity is as painful as meanness, gratitude as hateful as
ingratitude. But in Spain in 1936 we were not living in a nonnal time. It was a time when
generous feelings and gestures were easier than they ordinarily are. I could relate a dozen
similar incidents, not really communicable but bound up in my own mind with the special
atmosphere of the time, the shabby clothes and the gay-coloured revolutionary posters,
the universal use of the word ‘comrade’, the anti-Fascist ballads printed on flimsy paper
and sold for a penny, the phrases like ‘international proletarian solidarty’, pathetically
repeated by ignorant men who believed them to mean something. Could you feel friendly
towards somebody, and stick up for him in a quarrel, after you had been ignominiously
searched in his presence for property you were supposed to have stolen from him? No,
you couldn’t; but you might if you had both been through some emotionally widening
experience. That is one of the by-products of revolution, though in this case it was only
the beginnings of a revolution, and obviously foredoomed to failure.
4
The struggle for power between the Spanish Republican parties is an unhappy, far-off
thing which I have no wish to revive at this date. I only mention it in order to say: believe
nothing, or next to nothing, of what you read about internal affairs on the Government
side. It is all, from whatever source, party propaganda — that is to say, lies. The broad
truth about the war is simple enough. The Spanish bourgeoisie saw their chance of
crushing the labour movement, and took it, aided by the Nazis and by the forces of
reaction all over the world. It is doubtful whether more than that will ever be established.
I remember saying once to Arthur Koestler, ‘History stopped in 1936’, at which he
nodded in immediate understanding. We were both thinking of totalitarianism in general,
but more particularly of the Spanish civil war. Early in life I have noticed that no event is
ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper
reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is
implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting,
and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had
fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot
fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London
retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events
that had never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what
happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines’. Yet in a
way, horrible as all this was, it was unimportant. It concerned secondary issues —
namely, the struggle for power between the Comintern and the Spanish left-wing parties,
and the efforts of the Russian Government to prevent revolution in Spain. But the broad
picture of the war which the Spanish Government presented to the world was not
untruthful. The main issues were what it said they were. But as for the Fascists and their
backers, how could they come even as near to the truth as that? How could they possibly
mention their real aims? Their version of the war was pure fantasy, and in the
circumstances it could not have been otherwise.
The only propaganda line open to the Nazis and Fascists was to represent themselves as
Christian patriots saving Spain from a Russian dictatorship. This involved pretending that
life in Government Spain was just one long massacre (VIDE the CATHOLIC HERALD
or the DAILY MAIL — but these were child’s play compared with the Continental Fascist
press), and it involved immensely exaggerating the scale of Russian intervention. Out of
the huge pyramid of lies which the Catholic and reactionary press all over the world built
up, let me take just one point — the presence in Spain of a Russian army. Devout Franco
partisans all believed in this; estimates of its strength went as high as half a million. Now,
there was no Russian army in Spain. There may have been a handful of airmen and other
technicians, a few hundred at the most, but an army there was not. Some thousands of
foreigners who fought in Spain, not to mention millions of Spaniards, were witnesses of
this. Well, their testimony made no impression at all upon the Franco propagandists, not
one of whom had set foot in Government Spain. Simultaneously these people refused
utterly to admit the fact of German or Italian intervention at the same time as the
Gennany and Italian press were openly boasting about the exploits of their’ legionaries’. I
have chosen to mention only one point, but in fact the whole of Fascist propaganda about
the war was on this level.
This kind of thing is frightening to me, because it often gives me the feeling that the very
concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. After all, the chances are that those
lies, or at any rate similar lies, will pass into history. How will the history of the Spanish
war be written? If Franco remains in power his nominees will write the history books,
and (to stick to my chosen point) that Russian army which never existed will become
historical fact, and schoolchildren will leam about it generations hence. But suppose
Fascism is finally defeated and some kind of democratic government restored in Spain in
the fairly near future; even then, how is the history of the war to be written? What kind of
records will Franco have left behind him? Suppose even that the records kept on the
Government side are recoverable — even so, how is a true history of the war to be written?
For, as I have pointed out already, the Government, also dealt extensively in lies. From
the anti-Fascist angle one could write a broadly truthful history of the war, but it would
be a partisan history, unreliable on every minor point. Yet, after all, some kind of history
will be written, and after those who actually remember the war are dead, it will be
universally accepted. So for all practical purposes the lie will have become truth.
I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to
believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our
own age is the abandonment of the idea that history COULD be truthfully written. In the
past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they
struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each
case they believed that ‘facts’ existed and were more or less discoverable. And in practice
there was always a considerable body of fact which would have been agreed to by almost
everyone. If you look up the history of the last war in, for instance, the
ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA, you will find that a respectable amount of the
material is drawn from German sources. A British and a Gennan historian would disagree
deeply on many things, even on fundamentals, but there would still be that body of, as it
were, neutral fact on which neither would seriously challenge the other. It is just this
common basis of agreement, with its implication that human beings are all one species of
animal, that totalitarianism destroys. Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a
thing as ‘the truth’ exists. There is, for instance, no such thing as ‘Science’. There is only
‘German Science’, ‘Jewish Science’, etc. The implied objective of this line of thought is a
nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future
but THE PAST. If the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened’ — well,
it never happened. If he says that two and two are five — well, two and two are five. This
prospect frightens me much more than bombs — and after our experiences of the last few
years that is not a frivolous statement.
But is it perhaps childish or morbid to terrify oneself with visions of a totalitarian future?
Before writing off the totalitarian world as a nightmare that can’t come true, just
remember that in 1925 the world of today would have seemed a nightmare that couldn’t
come true. Against that shifting phantasmagoric world in which black may be white
tomorrow and yesterday’s weather can be changed by decree, there are in reality only two
safeguards. One is that however much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing, as it
were, behind your back, and you consequently can’t violate it in ways that impair military
efficiency. The other is that so long as some parts of the earth remain unconquered, the
liberal tradition can be kept alive. Let Fascism, or possibly even a combination of several
Fascisms, conquer the whole world, and those two conditions no longer exist. We in
England underrate the danger of this kind of thing, because our traditions and our past
security have given us a sentimental belief that it all comes right in the end and the thing
you most fear never really happens. Nourished for hundreds of years on a literature in
which Right invariably triumphs in the last chapter, we believe half-instinctively that evil
always defeats itself in the long run. Pacifism, for instance, is founded largely on this
belief. Don’t resist evil, and it will somehow destroy itself. But why should it? What
evidence is there that it does? And what instance is there of a modem industrialized state
collapsing unless conquered from the outside by military force?
