Poison gas, the
machine-gun, the submarine, gunpowder, and even the crossbow were similarly denounced in their day.
machine-gun, the submarine, gunpowder, and even the crossbow were similarly denounced in their day.
Orwell
Even a single taboo can have an
all-round crippling effect upon the mind, because there is always the danger that any
thought which is freely followed up may lead to the forbidden thought. It follows that the
atmosphere of totalitarianism is deadly to any kind of prose writer, though a poet, at any
rate a lyric poet, might possibly find it breathable. And in any totalitarian society that
survives for more than a couple of generations, it is probable that prose literature, of the
kind that has existed during the past four hundred years, must actually come to an end.
Literature has sometimes flourished under despotic regimes, but, as has often been
pointed out, the despotisms of the past were not totalitarian. Their repressive apparatus
was always inefficient, their ruling classes were usually either corrupt or apathetic or
half-liberal in outlook, and the prevailing religious doctrines usually worked against
perfectionism and the notion of human infallibility. Even so it is broadly true that prose
literature has reached its highest levels in periods of democracy and free speculation.
What is new in totalitarianism is that its doctrines are not only unchallengeable but also
unstable. They have to be accepted on pain of damnation, but on the other hand, they are
always liable to be altered on a moment's notice. Consider, for example, the various
attitudes, completely incompatible with one another, which an English Communist or
"fellow-traveler" has had to adopt toward the war between Britain and Germany. For
years before September, 1939, he was expected to be in a continuous stew about "the
horrors of Nazism" and to twist everything he wrote into a denunciation of Hitler: after
September, 1939, for twenty months, he had to believe that Germany was more sinned
against than sinning, and the word "Nazi," at least as far as print went, had to drop right
out of his vocabulary. Immediately after hearing the 8 o'clock news bulletin on the
morning of June 22, 1941, he had to start believing once again that Nazism was the most
hideous evil the world had ever seen. Now, it is easy for the politician to make such
changes: for a writer the case is somewhat different. If he is to switch his allegiance at
exactly the right moment, he must either tell lies about his subjective feelings, or else
suppress them altogether. In either case he has destroyed his dynamo. Not only will ideas
refuse to come to him, but the very words he uses will seem to stiffen under his touch.
Political writing in our time consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted
together like the pieces of a child's Meccano set. It is the unavoidable result of self-
censorship. To write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one
thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox. It might be otherwise in an "age of
faith," when the prevailing orthodoxy has long been established and is not taken too
seriously. In that case it would be possible, or might be possible, for large areas of one's
mind to remain unaffected by what one officially believed. Even so, it is worth noticing
that prose literature almost disappeared during the only age of faith that Europe has ever
enjoyed. Throughout the whole of the Middle Ages there was almost no imaginative
prose literature and very little in the way of historical writing; and the intellectual leaders
of society expressed their most serious thoughts in a dead language which barley altered
during a thousand years.
Totalitarianism, however, does not so much promise an age of faith as an age of
schizophrenia. A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly
artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to
power by force or fraud. Such a society, no matter how long it persists, can never afford
to become either tolerant or intellectually stable. It can never permit either the truthful
recording of facts or the emotional sincerity that literary creation demands. But to be
corrupted by totalitarianism one does not have to live in a totalitarian country. The mere
prevalence of certain ideas can spread a kind of poison that makes one subject after
another impossible for literary purposes. Wherever there is an enforced orthodoxy — or
even two orthodoxies, as often happens — good writing stops. This was well illustrated by
the Spanish civil war. To many English intellectuals the war was a deeply moving
experience, but not an experience about which they could write sincerely. There were
only two things that you were allowed to say, and both of them were palpable lies: as a
result, the war produced acres of print but almost nothing worth reading.
It is not certain whether the effects of totalitarianism upon verse need be so deadly as its
effects on prose. There is a whole series of converging reasons why it is somewhat easier
for a poet than a prose writer to feel at home in an authoritarian society. To begin with,
bureaucrats and other "practical" men usually despise the poet too deeply to be much
interested in what he is saying. Secondly, what the poet is saying — that is, what his poem
"means" if translated into prose — is relatively unimportant, even to himself. The thought
contained in a poem is always simple, and is no more the primary purpose of the poem
than the anecdote is the primary purpose of the picture. A poem is an arrangement of
sounds and associations, as a painting is an arrangement of brushmarks. For short
snatches, indeed, as in the refrain of a song, poetry can even dispense with meaning
altogether. It is therefore fairly easy for a poet to keep away from dangerous subjects and
avoid uttering heresies; and even when he does utter them, they may escape notice. But
above all, good verse, unlike good prose, is not necessarily and individual product.
Certain kinds of poems, such as ballads, or, on the other hand, very artificial verse forms,
can be composed co-operatively by groups of people. Whether the ancient English and
Scottish ballads were originally produced by individuals, or by the people at large, is
disputed; but at any rate they are non-individual in the sense that they constantly change
in passing from mouth to mouth. Even in print no two versions of a ballad are ever quite
the same. Many primitive peoples compose verse communally. Someone begins to
improvise, probably accompanying himself on a musical instalment, somebody else chips
in with a line or a rhyme when the first singer breaks down, and so the process continues
until there exists a whole song or ballad which has no identifiable author.
In prose, this kind of intimate collaboration is quite impossible. Serious prose, in any
case, has to be composed in solitude, whereas the excitement of being part of a group is
actually an aid to certain kinds of versification. Verse — and perhaps good verse of its
own kind, though it would not be the highest kind — might survive under even the most
inquisitorial regime. Even in a society where liberty and individuality had been
extinguished, there would still be a need either for patriotic songs and heroic ballads
celebrating victories, or for elaborate exercises in flattery; and these are the kinds of
poems that can be written to order, or composed communally, without necessarily lacking
artistic value. Prose is a different matter, since the prose writer cannot narrow the range
of his thoughts without killing his inventiveness. But the history of totalitarian societies,
or of groups of people who have adopted the totalitarian outlook, suggests that loss of
liberty is inimical to all forms of literature. German literature almost disappeared during
the Hitler regime, and the case was not much better in Italy. Russian literature, so far as
one can judge by translations, has deteriorated markedly since the early days of the
revolution, though some of the verse appears to be better than the prose. Few if any
Russian novels that it is possible to take seriously have been translated for about fifteen
years. In western Europe and America large sections of the literary intelligentsia have
either passed through the Communist Party or have been warmly sympathetic to it, but
this whole leftward movement has produced extraordinarily few books worth reading.
Orthodox Catholicism, again, seems to have a crushing effect upon certain literary forms,
especially the novel. During a period of three hundred years, how many people have been
at once good novelists and good Catholics? The fact is that certain themes cannot be
celebrated in words, and tyranny is one of them. No one ever wrote a good book in praise
of the Inquisition. Poetry might survive in a totalitarian age, and certain arts or half-arts,
such as architecture, might even find tyranny beneficial, but the prose writer would have
no choice between silence or death. Prose literature as we know it is the product of
rationalism, of the Protestant centuries, of the autonomous individual. And the
destruction of intellectual liberty cripples the journalist, the sociological writer, the
historian, the novelist, the critic, and the poet, in that order. In the future it is possible that
a new kind of literature, not involving individual feeling or truthful observation, may
arise, but no such thing is at present imaginable. It seems much likelier that if the liberal
culture that we have lived in since the Renaissance comes to an end, the literary art will
perish with it.
Of course, print will continue to be used, and it is interesting to speculate what kinds of
reading matter would survive in a rigidly totalitarian society. Newspapers will
presumably continue until television technique reaches a higher level, but apart from
newspapers it is doubtful even now whether the great mass of people in the industrialized
countries feel the need for any kind of literature. They are unwilling, at any rate, to spend
anywhere near as much on reading matter as they spend on several other recreations.
Probably novels and stories will be completely superseded by film and radio productions.
Or perhaps some kind of low grade sensational fiction will survive, produced by a sort of
conveyor-belt process that reduces human initiative to the minimum.
It would probably not be beyond human ingenuity to write books by machinery. But a
sort of mechanizing process can already be seen at work in the film and radio, in
publicity and propaganda, and in the lower reaches of journalism. The Disney films, for
instance, are produced by what is essentially a factory process, the work being done
partly mechanically and partly by teams of artists who have to subordinate their
individual style. Radio features are commonly written by tired hacks to whom the subject
and the manner of treatment are dictated beforehand: even so, what they write is merely a
kind of raw material to be chopped into shape by producers and censors. So also with the
innumerable books and pamphlets commissioned by government departments. Even more
machine-like is the production of short stories, serials, and poems for the very cheap
magazines. Papers such as the Writer abound with advertisements of literary schools, all
of them offering you ready-made plots at a few shillings a time. Some, together with the
plot, supply the opening and closing sentences of each chapter. Others furnish you with a
sort of algebraical formula by the use of which you can construct plots for yourself.
Others have packs of cards marked with characters and situations, which have only to be
shuffled and dealt in order to produce ingenious stories automatically. It is probably in
some such way that the literature of a totalitarian society would be produced, if literature
were still felt to be necessary. Imagination — even consciousness, so far as possible —
would be eliminated from the process of writing. Books would be planned in their broad
lines by bureaucrats, and would pass through so many hands that when finished they
would be no more an individual product than a Ford car at the end of the assembly line. It
goes without saying that anything so produced would be rubbish; but anything that was
not rubbish would endanger the structure of the state. As for the surviving literature of the
past, it would have to be suppressed or at least elaborately rewritten.
Meanwhile, totalitarianism has not fully triumphed anywhere. Our own society is still,
broadly speaking, liberal. To exercise your right of free speech you have to fight against
economic pressure and against strong sections of public opinion, but not, as yet, against a
secret police force. You can say or print almost anything so long as you are willing to do
it in a hole-and-corner way. But what is sinister, as I said at the beginning of this essay, is
that the conscious enemies of liberty are those to whom liberty ought to mean most. The
big public do not care about the matter one way or the other. They are not in favour of
persecuting the heretic, and they will not exert themselves to defend him. They are at
once too sane and too stupid to acquire the totalitarian outlook. The direct, conscious
attack on intellectual decency comes from the intellectuals themselves.
It is possible that the Russophile intelligentsia, if they had not succumbed to that
particular myth, would have succumbed to another of much the same kind. But at any
rate the Russian myth is there, and the corruption it causes stinks. When one sees highly
educated men looking on indifferently at oppression and persecution, one wonders which
to despise more, their cynicism or their shortsightedness. Many scientists, for example,
are the uncritical admirers of the U. S. S. R. They appear to think that the destruction of
liberty is of no importance so long as their own line of work is for the moment
unaffected. The U. S. S. R. is a large, rapidly developing country which has an acute need
of scientific workers and, consequently, treats them generously. Provided that they steer
clear of dangerous subjects such as psychology, scientists are privileged persons. Writers,
on the other hand, are viciously persecuted. It is true that literary prostitutes like Ilya
Ehrenburg or Alexei Tolstoy are paid huge sums of money, but the only thing which is of
any value to the writer as such — his freedom of expression — is taken away from him.
Some, at least, of the English scientists who speak so enthusiastically of the opportunities
to be enjoyed by scientists in Russia are capable of understanding this. But their
reflection appears to be: "Writers are persecuted in Russia. So what? I am not a writer. "
They do not see that any attack on intellectual liberty, and on the concept of objective
truth, threatens in the long run every department of thought.
For the moment the totalitarian state tolerates the scientist because it needs him. Even in
Nazi Germany, scientists, other than Jews, were relatively well treated and the German
scientific community, as a whole, offered no resistance to Hitler. At this stage of history,
even the most autocratic ruler is forced to take account of physical reality, partly because
of the lingering-on of liberal habits of thought, partly because of the need to prepare for
war. So long as physical reality cannot altogether be ignored, so long as two and two
have to make four when you are, for example, drawing the blueprint of an aeroplane, the
scientist has his function, and can even be allowed a measure of liberty. His awakening
will come later, when the totalitarian state is firmly established. Meanwhile, if he wants
to safeguard the integrity of science, it is his job to develop some kind of solidarity with
his literary colleagues and not disregard it as a matter of indifference when writers are
silenced or driven to suicide, and newspapers systematically falsified.
But however it may be with the physical sciences, or with music, painting and
architecture, it is — as I have tried to show — certain that literature is doomed if liberty of
thought perishes. Not only is it doomed in any country which retains a totalitarian
structure; but any writer who adopts the totalitarian outlook, who finds excuses for
persecution and the falsification of reality, thereby destroys himself as a writer. There is
no way out of this. No tirades against "individualism" and the "ivory tower," no pious
platitudes to the effect that "true individuality is only attained through identification with
the community," can get over the fact that a bought mind is a spoiled mind. Unless
spontaneity enters at some point or another, literary creation is impossible, and language
itself becomes something totally different from what it is now, we may learn to separate
literary creation from intellectual honesty. At present we know only that the imagination,
like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity. Any writer or journalist who denies
that fact — and nearly all the current praise of the Soviet Union contains or implies such a
denial — is, in effect, demanding his own destruction.
As I Please
Tribune, 4 February 1944
When Sir Walter Raleigh was imprisoned in the Tower of London, he occupied himself
with writing a history of the world. He had finished the first volume and was at work on
the second when there was a scuffle between some workmen beneath the window of his
cell, and one of the men was killed. In spite of diligent enquiries, and in spite of the fact
that he had actually seen the thing happen, Sir Walter was never able to discover what the
quarrel was about; whereupon, so it is said — and if the story is not true it certainly ought
to be — he burned what he had written and abandoned his project.
This story has come into my head I do not know how many times during the past ten
years, but always with the reflection that Raleigh was probably wrong. Allowing for all
the difficulties of research at that date, and the special difficulty of conducting research in
prison, he could probably have produced a world history which had some resemblance to
the real course of events. Up to a fairly recent date, the major events recorded in the
history books probably happened. It is probably true that the battle of Hastings was
fought in 1066, that Columbus discovered America, that Henry VIII had six wives, and
so on. A certain degree of truthfulness was possible so long as it was admitted that a
fact may be true even if you don't like it. Even as late as the last war it was possible for
the Encyclopedia Britannica, for instance, to compile its articles on the various
campaigns partly from German sources. Some of the facts — the casualty figures, for
instance — were regarded as neutral and in substance accepted by everybody. No such
thing would be possible now. A Nazi and a non-Nazi version of the present war would
have no resemblance to one another, and which of them finally gets into the history books
will be decided not by evidential methods but on the battlefield.
During the Spanish civil war I found myself feeling very strongly that a true history of
this war never would or could be written. Accurate figures, objective accounts of what
was happening, simply did not exist. And if I felt that even in 1937, when the Spanish
Government was still in being, and the lies which the various Republican factions were
telling about each other and about the enemy were relatively small ones, how does the
case stand now? Even if Franco is overthrown, what kind of records will the future
historian have to go upon? And if Franco or anyone at all resembling him remains in
power, the history of the war will consist quite largely of "facts" which millions of people
now living know to be lies. One of these "facts," for instance, is that there was a
considerable Russian army in Spain. There exists the most abundant evidence that there
was no such army. Yet if Franco remains in power, and if Fascism in general survives,
that Russian army will go into the history books and future school children will believe in
it. So for practical purposes the lie will have become truth.
This kind of thing is happening all the time. Out of the milions of instances which must
be available, I will choose one which happens to be verifiable. During part of 1941 and
1942, when the Luftwaffe was busy in Russia, the German radio regaled its home
audiences with stories of devestating air raids on London. Now, we are aware that those
raids did not happen. But what use would our knowledge be if the Germans conquered
Britain? For the purposes of a future historian, did those raids happen, or didn't they? The
answer is: If Hitler survives, they happened, and if he falls they didn't happen. So with
innumerable other events of the past ten or twenty years. Is the Protocols of the Elders of
Zion a genuine document? Did Trotsky plot with the Nazis? How many German
aeroplanes were shot down in the Battle of Britain? Does Europe welcome the New
Order? In no case do you get one answer which is universally accepted because it is true:
in each case you get a number of totally incompatible answers, one of which is finally
adopted as the result of a physical struggle. History is written by the winners.
In the last analysis our only claim to victory is that if we win the war we shall tell fewer
lies about it than our adversaries. The really frightening thing about totalitarianism is not
that it commits "atrocities" but that it attacks the concept of objective truth; it claims to
control the past as well as the future. In spite of all the lying and self-righteousness that
war encourages, I do not honestly think it can be said that that habit of mind is growing in
Britain. Taking one thing with another, I should say that the press is slightly freer than it
was before the war. I know out of my own experience that you can print things now
which you couldn't print ten years ago. War resisters have probably been less maltreated
in this war than in the last one, and the expression of unpopular opinion in public is
certainly safer. There is some hope, therefore, that the liberal habit of mind, which thi nk s
of truth as something outside yourself, something to be discovered, and not as something
you can make up as you go along, will survive. But I still don't envy the future historian's
job. Is it not a strange commentary on our time that even the casualties in the present war
cannot be estimated within several millions?
No New Ideas?
Looking through Chesterton's Introduction to Hard Times in the Everyman Edition
(incidentally, Chesterton's Introductions to Dickens are about the best thing he ever
wrote) , I note the typically sweeping statement: "There are no new ideas. " Chesterton is
here claiming that the ideas which animated the French Revolution were not new ones
but simply a revival of doctrines which had flourished earlier and then had been
abandoned. But the claim that "there is nothing new under the sun" is one of the stock
arguments of intelligent reactionaries. Catholic apologists, in particular, use it almost
automatically. Everything that you can say or think has been said or thought before.
Every political theory from Liberalism to Trotskyism can be shown to be a development
of some heresy in the early Church. Every system of philosophy springs ultimately from
the Greeks. Every scientific theory (if we are to believe the popular Catholic press) was
anticipated by Roger Bacon and others in the thirteenth century. Some Hindu thinkers go
even further and claim that not merely the scientific theories, but the products of applied
science as well, aeroplanes, radio and the whole bag of tricks, were known to the ancient
Hindus, who afterward dropped them as being unworthy of their attention.
It is not very difficult to see that this idea is rooted in the fear of progress. If there is
nothing new under the sun, if the past in some shape or another always returns, then the
future when it comes will be something familiar. At any rate what will never come —
since it has never come before — is that hated, dreaded thing, a world of free and equal
human beings. Particularly comforting to reactionary thinkers is the idea of a cyclical
universe, in which the same chain of events happens over and over again. In such a
universe every seeming advance towards democracy simply means that the coming age of
tyranny and privilege is a little bit nearer. This belief, obviously superstitious though it is,
is widely held nowadays, and is common among Fascists and near-Fascists.
In fact, there are new ideas. The idea that an advanced civilization need not rest on
slavery is a relatively new idea, for instance; it is a good deal younger than the Christian
religion. But even if Chesterton's dictum were true, it would only be true in the sense that
a statue is contained in every block of stone. Ideas may not change, but emphasis shifts
constantly. It could be claimed, for example, that the most important part of Marx's
theory is contained in the saying: "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. "
But before Marx developed it, what force had that saying had? Who had paid any
attention to it? Who had inferred from it — what it certainly implies — that laws, religions
and moral codes are all a superstructure built over existing property relations? It was
Christ, according to the Gospel, who uttered the text, but it was Marx who brought it to
life. And ever since he did so the motives of politicians, priests, judges, moralists and
millionaires have been under the deepest suspicion — which, of course, is why they hate
him so much.
As I Please - Robot Bombs
Tribune, 30 June 1944
I notice that apart from the widespread complaint that the German pilotless planes "seem
so unnatural" (a bomb dropped by a live airman is quite natural, apparently), some
journalists are denouncing them as barbarous, inhumane and "an indiscriminate attack on
civilians. "
After what we have been doing to the Germans over the past two years, this seems a bit
thick, but it is the normal human response to every new weapon.
Poison gas, the
machine-gun, the submarine, gunpowder, and even the crossbow were similarly denounced in their day. Every weapon seems unfair until you have adopted it yourself.
But I would not deny that the pilotless plane, flying bomb, or whatever its correct name
may be, is an exceptionally unpleasant thing, because, unlike most other projectiles, it
gives you time to think. What is your first reaction when you hear that droning, zooming
noise? Inevitably it is a hope that the noise won 't stop. You want to hear the bomb pass
safely overhead and die away into the distance before the engine cuts out. In other words,
you are hoping it will fall on somebody else. So also when you dodge a shell or an
ordinary bomb — but in that case you have only about five seconds to take cover and no
time to speculate on the bottomless selfishness of the human being.
As I Please - Civilian Bombing
Tribune, 14 July 1944
I have received a number of letters, some of them quite violent ones, attacking me for my
remarks on Miss Vera Brittain's anti-bombing pamphlet. There are two points that seem
to need further comment.
First of all there is the charge, which is becoming quite a common one, that "we started
it," i. e. that Britain was the first country to practise systematic bombing of civilians. How
anyone can make this claim, with the history of the past dozen years in mind, is almost
beyond me. The first act in the present war — some hours, if I remember rightly, before
any declaration of war passed — was the German bombing of Warsaw. The Germans
bombed and shelled the city so intensively that, according to the Poles, at one time 700
fires were raging simultaneously. They made a film of the destruction of Warsaw, which
they entitled "Baptism of Fire" and sent all round the world with the object of terrorising
neutrals.
Several years earlier than this the Condor Legion, sent to Spain by Hitler, had bombed
one Spanish city after another. The "silent raids" on Barcelona in 1938 killed several
thousand people in a couple of days. Earlier than this the Italians had bombed entirely
defenseless Abyssinians and boasted of their explodes as something screamingly funny.
Bruno Mussolini wrote newspaper articles in which he described bombed Abyssinians
"bursting open like a rose," which he said was "most amusing. " And the Japanese ever
since 1931, and intensively since 1937, have been bombing crowded Chinese cities where
there are not even any ARP arrangements, let alone any AA guns or fighter aircraft.
I am not arguing that two blacks make a white, nor that Britain's record is a particularly
good one. In a number of "little wars" from about 1920 onwards the RAF has dropped its
bombs on Afghans, Indians and Arabs who had little or no power of hitting back. But it is
simply untruthful to say that large-scale bombing of crowded town areas, with the object
of causing panic, is a British invention. It was the Fascist states who started this practice,
and so long as the air war went in their favour they avowed their aims quite clearly.
The other thing that needs dealing with is the parrot cry "killing women and children. " I
pointed out before, but evidently it needs repeating, that it is probably somewhat better to
kill a cross-section of the population than to kill only the young men. If the figures
published by the Germans are true, and we have really killed 1,200,000 civilians in our
raids, that loss of life has probably harmed the German race somewhat less than a
corresponding loss on the Russian front or in Africa and Italy.
Any nation at war will do its best to protect its children, and the number of children killed
in raids probably does not correspond to their percentage of the general population.
Women cannot be protected to the same extent, but the outcry against killing women, if
you accept killing at all, is sheer sentimentality. Why is it worse to kill a woman than a
man? The argument usually advanced is that in killing women you are killing the
breeders, whereas men can be more easily spared. But this is a fallacy based on the notion
that human beings can be bred like animals. The idea behind it is that since one man is
capable of fertilizing a very large number of women, just as a prize ram fertilizes
thousands of ewes, the loss of male lives is comparatively unimportant. Human beings,
however, are not cattle. When the slaughter caused by war leaves a surplus of women, the
enormous majority of those women bear no children. Male lives are very nearly as
important, biologically, as female ones.
In the last war the British Empire lost nearly a million men killed, of whome abou;three-
quarters came from these islands. Most of them will have been under thirty. If all those
young men had had only one child each whe should now have en extra 750,000 people
round about the age of twenty. France, which lost much more heavily, never recovered
from the slaughter of the last war, and it is doubtful whether Britain has fully recovered,
either. We can't yet calculate the casualties of the present war, but the last one killed
between ten and twenty million young men. Flad it been conducted, as the next one will
perhaps be, with flying bombs, rockets and other long-range weapons which kill old and
young, healthy and unhealthy, male and female impartially, it would probably have
damaged European civilization somewhat less than it did.
Contrary to what some of my correspondents seem to think, I have no enthusiasm for air
raids, either ours or the enemy's. Like a lot of other people in this country, I am growing
definitely tired of bombs. But I do object to the hypocrisy of accepting force as an
instrument while squealing against this or that individual weapon, or of denouncing war
while wanting to preserve the kind of soceity that makes war inevitable.
As I Please - My Country Right Or Wrong
Tribune, 24 December 1943
Attacking me in the Weekly Review for attacking Douglas Reed, Mr. A. K. Chesterton
remarks, "'My country — right or wrong' is a maxim which apparently has no place in Mr.
Orwell's philosophy. " He also states that "all of us believe that whatever her condition
Britain must win this war, or for that matter any other war in which she is engaged. "
The operative phrase is any other war. There are plenty of us who would defend our
own country, under no matter what government, if it seemed that we were in danger of
actual invasion and conquest. But "any war" is a different matter. How about the Boer
War, for instance? There is a neat little bit of historical irony here. Mr. A. K. Chesterton
is the nephew of G. K. Chesterton, who courageously opposed the Boer War, and once
remarked that "My country, right or wrong" was on the same moral level as "My mother,
drunk or sober. "
As I Please - Atrocity Pictures
Tribune, 8 September 1944
I have before me an exceptionally disgusting photograph, from the Star of August 29, of
two partially undressed women, with shaven heads and with swastikas painted on their
faces, being led through the streets of Paris amid grinning onlookers. The Star — not that I
am picking on the Star, for most of the press has behaved likewise — reproduces this
photograph with seeming approval.
I don't blame the French for doing this kind of thing. They have had four years of
suffering, and I can partially imagine how they feel towards the collaborators. But it is a
different matter when newspapers in this country try to persuade their readers that
shaving women's heads is a nice thing to do. As soon as I saw this Star photograph, I
thought, "Where have I seen something like this before? " Then I remembered. Just about
ten years ago, when the Nazi regime was beginning to get into its stride, very similar
pictures of humiliated Jews being led through the streets of German cities were exhibited
in the British press — but with this difference, that on that occasion we were not expected
to approve.
Recently another newspaper published photographs of the dangling corpses of Germans
hanged by the Russians in Kharkov, and carefully informed its readers that these
executions had been filmed and that the public would shortly be able to witness them at
the new theatres. (Were children admitted, I wonder? )
There is a saying of Nietzche which I have quoted before, but which is worth quoting
again:
He who fights too long against dragons becomes a dragon himself; and if you gaze too
long into the abyss, the abyss will gaze into you.
"Too long," in this context, should perhaps be taken as meaning "after the dragon is
beaten. "
As I Please -- Hell
14 April 1944
Attacking Mr. C. A. Smith and myself in the Malvern Torch for various remarks about
the Christian religion, Mr. Sidney Dark grows very angry because I have suggested that
the belief in personal immortality is decaying. "I would wager," he says, "that if a Gallup
poll were taken seventy-five percent (of the British population) would confess to a vague
belief in survival. " Writing elsewhere during the same week, Mr. Dark puts it at eighty-
five percent.
Now, I find it very rare to meet anyone, of whatever background, who admits to believing
in personal immortality. Still, I think it quite likely that if you asked everyone the
question and put pencil and paper in hands, a fairly large number (I am not so free with
my percentages as Mr. Dark) would admit the possibility that after death there might be
"something. " The point Mr. Dark has missed is that the belief, such as it is, hasn't the
actuality it had for our forefathers. Never, literally never in recent years, have I met
anyone who gave me the impression of believing in the next world as firmly as he
believed in the existence of, for instance, Australia. Belief in the next world does not
influence conduct as it would if it were genuine. With that endless existence beyond
death to look forward to, how trivial our lives here would seem! Most Christians profess
to believe in Hell. Yet have you ever met a Christian who seemed as afraid of Hell as he
was of cancer? Even very devout Christians will make jokes about Hell. They wouldn't
make jokes about leprosy, or RAF pilots with their faces burnt away: the subject is too
painful. Here there springs into my mind a little triolet by the late A. M. Currie:
It's a pity that Poppa has sold
his soul It makes him sizzle at breakfast so. The
money was useful, but still on the whole It's a
pity that Poppa has sold his soul When he might
have held on like the Baron de Coal And not
cleared out when the price was low. It's a pity
that Poppa has sold his soul It makes him sizzle
at breakfast so.
Currie, a Catholic, would presumably have said that he believed in Hell. If his next-door
neighbour had been burnt to death he would not have written a comic poem about it, yet
he can make jokes about somebody being fried for millions of years. I say that such belief
has no reality. It is a sham currency, like the money in Samuel Butler's Musical Banks.
As I Please - Conversation With A Pacifist
On the night in 1940 when the big ack-ack barrage was fired over London for the first
time, I was in Picadilly Circus when the guns opened up, and I fled into the Cafe Royal to
take cover. Among the crowd inside a good-looking, well-made youth of about twenty-
five was making somewhat of a nuisance of himself with a copy of Peace News, which
he was forcing upon the attention of everyone at the neighbouring tables. I got into
conversation with him, and the conversation went something like this:
The youth: "I tell you, it'll all be over by Christmas. There's obviously going to be a
compromise peace. I'm pinning my faith to Sir Samuel Hoare. It's degrading company to
be in, I admit, but still Hoare is on our side. So long as Hoare's in Madrid, there's always
hope of a sell-out. "
Orwell: "What about all those preparations that they're making against invasion — the pill
boxes that they're building everywhere, the Local Defense Volunteers and so forth? "
The youth: "Oh, that merely means they're getting ready to crush the working class when
the Germans get here. I suppose some of them might be fools enough to try to resist, but
Churchill and the Germans between them won't take long to settle them. Don't worry, it'll
soon be over. "
Orwell: "Do you really want to see your children grow up Nazis? "
The youth: "Nonsense! You don't suppose the Germans are going to encourage Fascism
in this country, do you? They don't want to breed up a race of warriors to fight against
them. Their object will be to turn us into slaves. That's why I’m a pacifist. They'll
encourage people like me. "
Orwell: "And shoot people like me? "
The youth: "That would be just too bad. "
Orwell: "But why are you so anxious to remain alive? "
The youth: "So that I can get on with my work, of course. "
It had come out in the conversation that the youth was a painter — whether good or bad I
do not know; but at any rate, sincerely interested in painting and quite ready to face
poverty in pursuit of it. As a painter, he would probably have been somewhat better off
under a German occupation than a writer or journalist would be. But still, what he said
contained a very dangerous fallacy, now very widespread in the countries where
totalitarianism has not actually established itself.
The fallacy is to believe that under a dictatorial government you can be free inside. Quite
a number of people console themselves with this thought, now that totalitarianism in one
form or another is visibly on the up-grade in every part of the world. Out in the street the
loudspeakers bellow, the flags flutter from the rooftops, the police with their tommy-guns
prowl to and fro, the face of the Leader, four feet wide, glares from every hoarding; but
up in the attics the secret enemies of the regime can record their thoughts in perfect
freedom — that is the idea, more or less. And many people are under the impression that
this is going on now in Germany and other dictatorial countries.
Why is this idea false? I pass over the fact that modem dictatorships don't, in fact, leave
the loopholes that the old-fashioned despotisms did; and also the probable weakening of
the desire for intellectual liberty owing to totalitarian methods of education. The greatest
mistake is to imagine that the human being is an autonomous individual. The secret
freedom which you can supposedly enjoy under a despotic government is nonsense,
because your thoughts are never entirely your own. Philosophers, writers, artists, even
scientists, not only need encouragement and an audience, they need constant stimulation
from other people. It is almost impossible to think without talking. If Defoe had really
lived on a desert island, he could not have written Robinson Crusoe, nor would he have
wanted to. Take away freedom of speech, and the creative faculties dry up. Had the
Germans really got to England my acquaintance of the Cafe Royal would soon have
found his painting deteriorating, even if the Gestapo had let him alone. And when the lid
is taken off Europe, I believe one of the things that will surprise us will be to find how
little worthwhile writing of any kind — even such things as diaries, for instance — has
been produced in secret under the dictators.
Partisan Review - Wishful Thinking
So far as I can see, all political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way.
People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most
grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome. For example, right up to
May of this year the more disaffected English intellectuals refused to believe that a
Second Front would be opened. They went on refusing while, bang in front of their faces,
the endless convoys of guns and landing-craft rumbled through London on their way to
the coast. One could point to countless other instances of people hugging quite manifest
delusions because the truth would be wounding to their pride. Hence the absence of
reliable political prediction. To name just one easily isolated example: who foresaw the
Russo-German pact of 1939? A few pessimistic Conservatives foretold an agreement
between Germany and Russia, but the wrong kind of agreement, and for the wrong
reasons. So far as I am aware, no intellectual of the Left, whether russophile or
russophobe, foresaw anything of the kind. For that matter, the Left as a whole failed to
foresee the rise of Fascism and failed to grasp that the Nazis were dangerous even when
they were on the verge of seizing power. To appreciate the danger of Fascism the Left
would have had to admit its own shortcomings, which was too painful; so the whole
phenomenon was ignored or misinterpreted, with disastrous results.
The most one can say is that people can be fairly good prophets when their wishes are
realizable. But a truly objective approach is almost impossible, because in one form or
another almost everyone is a nationalist . . . The most intelligent people seem capable of
holding schizophrenic beliefs, or disregarding plain facts, of evading serious questions
with debating-society repartees, or swallowing baseless rumours and of looking on
indifferently while history is falsified. All these mental vices spring ultimately from the
nationalistic habit of mind, which is itself, I suppose, the product of fear and of the
ghastly emptiness of machine civilization. . . .
I believe that it is possible to be more objective than most of us are, but that it involves a
moral effort. One cannot get away from one's own subjective feelings, but at least one
can know what they are and make allowance for them.
Partisan Review, Winter 1945
As I Please - The Coming Age Of Superpowers
Tribune
2 February 1945
A not-too-distant explosion shakes the house, the windows rattle in their sockets, and in
the next room the class of 1964 wakes up and lets out a yell or two. Each time this
happens I find myself thinking, "Is it possible that human beings can continue with this
lunacy very much longer? " You know the answer, of course. Indeed, the difficulty
nowadays is to find anyone who thinks that there will not be another war in the fairly
near future.
Germany, I suppose, will be defeated this year, and when Germany is out of the way
Japan will not be able to stand up to the combined powers of Britain and the U. S. A. Then
there will be a peace of exhaustion, with only minor and unofficial wars raging all over
the place, and perhaps this so-called peace may last for decades. But after that, by the
way the world is actually shaping, it may well be that war will become permanent.
Already, quite visibly and more or less with the acquiescence of all of us, the world is
splitting up into the two or three huge super-states forecast in James Burnham's
Managerial Revolution. One cannot draw their exact boundaries as yet, but one can see
more or less what areas they will comprise. And if the world does settle down into this
pattern, it is likely that these vast states will be permanently at war with one another,
though it will not necessarily be a very intensive or bloody kind of war. Their problems,
both economic and psychological, will be a lot simpler if the doodlebugs are more or less
continually whizzing to and fro.
If these two or three super-states do establish themselves, not only will each of them be
too big to be conquered, but they will be under no necessity to trade with one another,
and in a position to prevent all contact between their nationals. Already, for a dozen years
or so, large areas of the earth have been cut off from one another, although technically at
peace.
Some months ago, in this column, I pointed out that modern scientific inventions have
tended to prevent rather than increase international communication. This brought me
several angry letters from readers, but none of them were able to show that what I had
said was false. They merely retorted that if we had Socialism, the aeroplane, the radio etc.
would not be perverted to wrong uses. Very true, but then we haven't Socialism. As it is,
the aeroplane is primarily a thing for dropping bombs and the radio primarily a thing for
whipping up nationalism. Even before the war there was enormously less contact
between the peoples of the earth than there had been thirty years earlier, and education
was perverted, history re-written and freedom of thought suppressed to an extent
undreamed of in earlier ages. And there is no sign whatever of these tendencies being
reversed.
Maybe I am pessimistic. But at any rate those are the thoughts that cross my mind (and a
lot of other people's too, I believe) every time the explosion of a V bomb booms through
the mist.
Review:
The Road to Serfdom by F. A. Hayek The Mirror of the Past by K. Zilliacus
Taken together, these two books give grounds for dismay. The first of them is an
eloquent defence of laissez-faire capitalism, the other is an even more vehement
denunciation of it. They cover to some extent the same ground, they frequently quote the
same authorities, and they even start out with the same premise, since each of them
assumes that Western civilization depends on the sanctity of the individual. Yet each
writer is convinced that the other's policy leads directly to slavery, and the alarming thing
is that they may both be right. . . .
all-round crippling effect upon the mind, because there is always the danger that any
thought which is freely followed up may lead to the forbidden thought. It follows that the
atmosphere of totalitarianism is deadly to any kind of prose writer, though a poet, at any
rate a lyric poet, might possibly find it breathable. And in any totalitarian society that
survives for more than a couple of generations, it is probable that prose literature, of the
kind that has existed during the past four hundred years, must actually come to an end.
Literature has sometimes flourished under despotic regimes, but, as has often been
pointed out, the despotisms of the past were not totalitarian. Their repressive apparatus
was always inefficient, their ruling classes were usually either corrupt or apathetic or
half-liberal in outlook, and the prevailing religious doctrines usually worked against
perfectionism and the notion of human infallibility. Even so it is broadly true that prose
literature has reached its highest levels in periods of democracy and free speculation.
What is new in totalitarianism is that its doctrines are not only unchallengeable but also
unstable. They have to be accepted on pain of damnation, but on the other hand, they are
always liable to be altered on a moment's notice. Consider, for example, the various
attitudes, completely incompatible with one another, which an English Communist or
"fellow-traveler" has had to adopt toward the war between Britain and Germany. For
years before September, 1939, he was expected to be in a continuous stew about "the
horrors of Nazism" and to twist everything he wrote into a denunciation of Hitler: after
September, 1939, for twenty months, he had to believe that Germany was more sinned
against than sinning, and the word "Nazi," at least as far as print went, had to drop right
out of his vocabulary. Immediately after hearing the 8 o'clock news bulletin on the
morning of June 22, 1941, he had to start believing once again that Nazism was the most
hideous evil the world had ever seen. Now, it is easy for the politician to make such
changes: for a writer the case is somewhat different. If he is to switch his allegiance at
exactly the right moment, he must either tell lies about his subjective feelings, or else
suppress them altogether. In either case he has destroyed his dynamo. Not only will ideas
refuse to come to him, but the very words he uses will seem to stiffen under his touch.
Political writing in our time consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted
together like the pieces of a child's Meccano set. It is the unavoidable result of self-
censorship. To write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one
thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox. It might be otherwise in an "age of
faith," when the prevailing orthodoxy has long been established and is not taken too
seriously. In that case it would be possible, or might be possible, for large areas of one's
mind to remain unaffected by what one officially believed. Even so, it is worth noticing
that prose literature almost disappeared during the only age of faith that Europe has ever
enjoyed. Throughout the whole of the Middle Ages there was almost no imaginative
prose literature and very little in the way of historical writing; and the intellectual leaders
of society expressed their most serious thoughts in a dead language which barley altered
during a thousand years.
Totalitarianism, however, does not so much promise an age of faith as an age of
schizophrenia. A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly
artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to
power by force or fraud. Such a society, no matter how long it persists, can never afford
to become either tolerant or intellectually stable. It can never permit either the truthful
recording of facts or the emotional sincerity that literary creation demands. But to be
corrupted by totalitarianism one does not have to live in a totalitarian country. The mere
prevalence of certain ideas can spread a kind of poison that makes one subject after
another impossible for literary purposes. Wherever there is an enforced orthodoxy — or
even two orthodoxies, as often happens — good writing stops. This was well illustrated by
the Spanish civil war. To many English intellectuals the war was a deeply moving
experience, but not an experience about which they could write sincerely. There were
only two things that you were allowed to say, and both of them were palpable lies: as a
result, the war produced acres of print but almost nothing worth reading.
It is not certain whether the effects of totalitarianism upon verse need be so deadly as its
effects on prose. There is a whole series of converging reasons why it is somewhat easier
for a poet than a prose writer to feel at home in an authoritarian society. To begin with,
bureaucrats and other "practical" men usually despise the poet too deeply to be much
interested in what he is saying. Secondly, what the poet is saying — that is, what his poem
"means" if translated into prose — is relatively unimportant, even to himself. The thought
contained in a poem is always simple, and is no more the primary purpose of the poem
than the anecdote is the primary purpose of the picture. A poem is an arrangement of
sounds and associations, as a painting is an arrangement of brushmarks. For short
snatches, indeed, as in the refrain of a song, poetry can even dispense with meaning
altogether. It is therefore fairly easy for a poet to keep away from dangerous subjects and
avoid uttering heresies; and even when he does utter them, they may escape notice. But
above all, good verse, unlike good prose, is not necessarily and individual product.
Certain kinds of poems, such as ballads, or, on the other hand, very artificial verse forms,
can be composed co-operatively by groups of people. Whether the ancient English and
Scottish ballads were originally produced by individuals, or by the people at large, is
disputed; but at any rate they are non-individual in the sense that they constantly change
in passing from mouth to mouth. Even in print no two versions of a ballad are ever quite
the same. Many primitive peoples compose verse communally. Someone begins to
improvise, probably accompanying himself on a musical instalment, somebody else chips
in with a line or a rhyme when the first singer breaks down, and so the process continues
until there exists a whole song or ballad which has no identifiable author.
In prose, this kind of intimate collaboration is quite impossible. Serious prose, in any
case, has to be composed in solitude, whereas the excitement of being part of a group is
actually an aid to certain kinds of versification. Verse — and perhaps good verse of its
own kind, though it would not be the highest kind — might survive under even the most
inquisitorial regime. Even in a society where liberty and individuality had been
extinguished, there would still be a need either for patriotic songs and heroic ballads
celebrating victories, or for elaborate exercises in flattery; and these are the kinds of
poems that can be written to order, or composed communally, without necessarily lacking
artistic value. Prose is a different matter, since the prose writer cannot narrow the range
of his thoughts without killing his inventiveness. But the history of totalitarian societies,
or of groups of people who have adopted the totalitarian outlook, suggests that loss of
liberty is inimical to all forms of literature. German literature almost disappeared during
the Hitler regime, and the case was not much better in Italy. Russian literature, so far as
one can judge by translations, has deteriorated markedly since the early days of the
revolution, though some of the verse appears to be better than the prose. Few if any
Russian novels that it is possible to take seriously have been translated for about fifteen
years. In western Europe and America large sections of the literary intelligentsia have
either passed through the Communist Party or have been warmly sympathetic to it, but
this whole leftward movement has produced extraordinarily few books worth reading.
Orthodox Catholicism, again, seems to have a crushing effect upon certain literary forms,
especially the novel. During a period of three hundred years, how many people have been
at once good novelists and good Catholics? The fact is that certain themes cannot be
celebrated in words, and tyranny is one of them. No one ever wrote a good book in praise
of the Inquisition. Poetry might survive in a totalitarian age, and certain arts or half-arts,
such as architecture, might even find tyranny beneficial, but the prose writer would have
no choice between silence or death. Prose literature as we know it is the product of
rationalism, of the Protestant centuries, of the autonomous individual. And the
destruction of intellectual liberty cripples the journalist, the sociological writer, the
historian, the novelist, the critic, and the poet, in that order. In the future it is possible that
a new kind of literature, not involving individual feeling or truthful observation, may
arise, but no such thing is at present imaginable. It seems much likelier that if the liberal
culture that we have lived in since the Renaissance comes to an end, the literary art will
perish with it.
Of course, print will continue to be used, and it is interesting to speculate what kinds of
reading matter would survive in a rigidly totalitarian society. Newspapers will
presumably continue until television technique reaches a higher level, but apart from
newspapers it is doubtful even now whether the great mass of people in the industrialized
countries feel the need for any kind of literature. They are unwilling, at any rate, to spend
anywhere near as much on reading matter as they spend on several other recreations.
Probably novels and stories will be completely superseded by film and radio productions.
Or perhaps some kind of low grade sensational fiction will survive, produced by a sort of
conveyor-belt process that reduces human initiative to the minimum.
It would probably not be beyond human ingenuity to write books by machinery. But a
sort of mechanizing process can already be seen at work in the film and radio, in
publicity and propaganda, and in the lower reaches of journalism. The Disney films, for
instance, are produced by what is essentially a factory process, the work being done
partly mechanically and partly by teams of artists who have to subordinate their
individual style. Radio features are commonly written by tired hacks to whom the subject
and the manner of treatment are dictated beforehand: even so, what they write is merely a
kind of raw material to be chopped into shape by producers and censors. So also with the
innumerable books and pamphlets commissioned by government departments. Even more
machine-like is the production of short stories, serials, and poems for the very cheap
magazines. Papers such as the Writer abound with advertisements of literary schools, all
of them offering you ready-made plots at a few shillings a time. Some, together with the
plot, supply the opening and closing sentences of each chapter. Others furnish you with a
sort of algebraical formula by the use of which you can construct plots for yourself.
Others have packs of cards marked with characters and situations, which have only to be
shuffled and dealt in order to produce ingenious stories automatically. It is probably in
some such way that the literature of a totalitarian society would be produced, if literature
were still felt to be necessary. Imagination — even consciousness, so far as possible —
would be eliminated from the process of writing. Books would be planned in their broad
lines by bureaucrats, and would pass through so many hands that when finished they
would be no more an individual product than a Ford car at the end of the assembly line. It
goes without saying that anything so produced would be rubbish; but anything that was
not rubbish would endanger the structure of the state. As for the surviving literature of the
past, it would have to be suppressed or at least elaborately rewritten.
Meanwhile, totalitarianism has not fully triumphed anywhere. Our own society is still,
broadly speaking, liberal. To exercise your right of free speech you have to fight against
economic pressure and against strong sections of public opinion, but not, as yet, against a
secret police force. You can say or print almost anything so long as you are willing to do
it in a hole-and-corner way. But what is sinister, as I said at the beginning of this essay, is
that the conscious enemies of liberty are those to whom liberty ought to mean most. The
big public do not care about the matter one way or the other. They are not in favour of
persecuting the heretic, and they will not exert themselves to defend him. They are at
once too sane and too stupid to acquire the totalitarian outlook. The direct, conscious
attack on intellectual decency comes from the intellectuals themselves.
It is possible that the Russophile intelligentsia, if they had not succumbed to that
particular myth, would have succumbed to another of much the same kind. But at any
rate the Russian myth is there, and the corruption it causes stinks. When one sees highly
educated men looking on indifferently at oppression and persecution, one wonders which
to despise more, their cynicism or their shortsightedness. Many scientists, for example,
are the uncritical admirers of the U. S. S. R. They appear to think that the destruction of
liberty is of no importance so long as their own line of work is for the moment
unaffected. The U. S. S. R. is a large, rapidly developing country which has an acute need
of scientific workers and, consequently, treats them generously. Provided that they steer
clear of dangerous subjects such as psychology, scientists are privileged persons. Writers,
on the other hand, are viciously persecuted. It is true that literary prostitutes like Ilya
Ehrenburg or Alexei Tolstoy are paid huge sums of money, but the only thing which is of
any value to the writer as such — his freedom of expression — is taken away from him.
Some, at least, of the English scientists who speak so enthusiastically of the opportunities
to be enjoyed by scientists in Russia are capable of understanding this. But their
reflection appears to be: "Writers are persecuted in Russia. So what? I am not a writer. "
They do not see that any attack on intellectual liberty, and on the concept of objective
truth, threatens in the long run every department of thought.
For the moment the totalitarian state tolerates the scientist because it needs him. Even in
Nazi Germany, scientists, other than Jews, were relatively well treated and the German
scientific community, as a whole, offered no resistance to Hitler. At this stage of history,
even the most autocratic ruler is forced to take account of physical reality, partly because
of the lingering-on of liberal habits of thought, partly because of the need to prepare for
war. So long as physical reality cannot altogether be ignored, so long as two and two
have to make four when you are, for example, drawing the blueprint of an aeroplane, the
scientist has his function, and can even be allowed a measure of liberty. His awakening
will come later, when the totalitarian state is firmly established. Meanwhile, if he wants
to safeguard the integrity of science, it is his job to develop some kind of solidarity with
his literary colleagues and not disregard it as a matter of indifference when writers are
silenced or driven to suicide, and newspapers systematically falsified.
But however it may be with the physical sciences, or with music, painting and
architecture, it is — as I have tried to show — certain that literature is doomed if liberty of
thought perishes. Not only is it doomed in any country which retains a totalitarian
structure; but any writer who adopts the totalitarian outlook, who finds excuses for
persecution and the falsification of reality, thereby destroys himself as a writer. There is
no way out of this. No tirades against "individualism" and the "ivory tower," no pious
platitudes to the effect that "true individuality is only attained through identification with
the community," can get over the fact that a bought mind is a spoiled mind. Unless
spontaneity enters at some point or another, literary creation is impossible, and language
itself becomes something totally different from what it is now, we may learn to separate
literary creation from intellectual honesty. At present we know only that the imagination,
like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity. Any writer or journalist who denies
that fact — and nearly all the current praise of the Soviet Union contains or implies such a
denial — is, in effect, demanding his own destruction.
As I Please
Tribune, 4 February 1944
When Sir Walter Raleigh was imprisoned in the Tower of London, he occupied himself
with writing a history of the world. He had finished the first volume and was at work on
the second when there was a scuffle between some workmen beneath the window of his
cell, and one of the men was killed. In spite of diligent enquiries, and in spite of the fact
that he had actually seen the thing happen, Sir Walter was never able to discover what the
quarrel was about; whereupon, so it is said — and if the story is not true it certainly ought
to be — he burned what he had written and abandoned his project.
This story has come into my head I do not know how many times during the past ten
years, but always with the reflection that Raleigh was probably wrong. Allowing for all
the difficulties of research at that date, and the special difficulty of conducting research in
prison, he could probably have produced a world history which had some resemblance to
the real course of events. Up to a fairly recent date, the major events recorded in the
history books probably happened. It is probably true that the battle of Hastings was
fought in 1066, that Columbus discovered America, that Henry VIII had six wives, and
so on. A certain degree of truthfulness was possible so long as it was admitted that a
fact may be true even if you don't like it. Even as late as the last war it was possible for
the Encyclopedia Britannica, for instance, to compile its articles on the various
campaigns partly from German sources. Some of the facts — the casualty figures, for
instance — were regarded as neutral and in substance accepted by everybody. No such
thing would be possible now. A Nazi and a non-Nazi version of the present war would
have no resemblance to one another, and which of them finally gets into the history books
will be decided not by evidential methods but on the battlefield.
During the Spanish civil war I found myself feeling very strongly that a true history of
this war never would or could be written. Accurate figures, objective accounts of what
was happening, simply did not exist. And if I felt that even in 1937, when the Spanish
Government was still in being, and the lies which the various Republican factions were
telling about each other and about the enemy were relatively small ones, how does the
case stand now? Even if Franco is overthrown, what kind of records will the future
historian have to go upon? And if Franco or anyone at all resembling him remains in
power, the history of the war will consist quite largely of "facts" which millions of people
now living know to be lies. One of these "facts," for instance, is that there was a
considerable Russian army in Spain. There exists the most abundant evidence that there
was no such army. Yet if Franco remains in power, and if Fascism in general survives,
that Russian army will go into the history books and future school children will believe in
it. So for practical purposes the lie will have become truth.
This kind of thing is happening all the time. Out of the milions of instances which must
be available, I will choose one which happens to be verifiable. During part of 1941 and
1942, when the Luftwaffe was busy in Russia, the German radio regaled its home
audiences with stories of devestating air raids on London. Now, we are aware that those
raids did not happen. But what use would our knowledge be if the Germans conquered
Britain? For the purposes of a future historian, did those raids happen, or didn't they? The
answer is: If Hitler survives, they happened, and if he falls they didn't happen. So with
innumerable other events of the past ten or twenty years. Is the Protocols of the Elders of
Zion a genuine document? Did Trotsky plot with the Nazis? How many German
aeroplanes were shot down in the Battle of Britain? Does Europe welcome the New
Order? In no case do you get one answer which is universally accepted because it is true:
in each case you get a number of totally incompatible answers, one of which is finally
adopted as the result of a physical struggle. History is written by the winners.
In the last analysis our only claim to victory is that if we win the war we shall tell fewer
lies about it than our adversaries. The really frightening thing about totalitarianism is not
that it commits "atrocities" but that it attacks the concept of objective truth; it claims to
control the past as well as the future. In spite of all the lying and self-righteousness that
war encourages, I do not honestly think it can be said that that habit of mind is growing in
Britain. Taking one thing with another, I should say that the press is slightly freer than it
was before the war. I know out of my own experience that you can print things now
which you couldn't print ten years ago. War resisters have probably been less maltreated
in this war than in the last one, and the expression of unpopular opinion in public is
certainly safer. There is some hope, therefore, that the liberal habit of mind, which thi nk s
of truth as something outside yourself, something to be discovered, and not as something
you can make up as you go along, will survive. But I still don't envy the future historian's
job. Is it not a strange commentary on our time that even the casualties in the present war
cannot be estimated within several millions?
No New Ideas?
Looking through Chesterton's Introduction to Hard Times in the Everyman Edition
(incidentally, Chesterton's Introductions to Dickens are about the best thing he ever
wrote) , I note the typically sweeping statement: "There are no new ideas. " Chesterton is
here claiming that the ideas which animated the French Revolution were not new ones
but simply a revival of doctrines which had flourished earlier and then had been
abandoned. But the claim that "there is nothing new under the sun" is one of the stock
arguments of intelligent reactionaries. Catholic apologists, in particular, use it almost
automatically. Everything that you can say or think has been said or thought before.
Every political theory from Liberalism to Trotskyism can be shown to be a development
of some heresy in the early Church. Every system of philosophy springs ultimately from
the Greeks. Every scientific theory (if we are to believe the popular Catholic press) was
anticipated by Roger Bacon and others in the thirteenth century. Some Hindu thinkers go
even further and claim that not merely the scientific theories, but the products of applied
science as well, aeroplanes, radio and the whole bag of tricks, were known to the ancient
Hindus, who afterward dropped them as being unworthy of their attention.
It is not very difficult to see that this idea is rooted in the fear of progress. If there is
nothing new under the sun, if the past in some shape or another always returns, then the
future when it comes will be something familiar. At any rate what will never come —
since it has never come before — is that hated, dreaded thing, a world of free and equal
human beings. Particularly comforting to reactionary thinkers is the idea of a cyclical
universe, in which the same chain of events happens over and over again. In such a
universe every seeming advance towards democracy simply means that the coming age of
tyranny and privilege is a little bit nearer. This belief, obviously superstitious though it is,
is widely held nowadays, and is common among Fascists and near-Fascists.
In fact, there are new ideas. The idea that an advanced civilization need not rest on
slavery is a relatively new idea, for instance; it is a good deal younger than the Christian
religion. But even if Chesterton's dictum were true, it would only be true in the sense that
a statue is contained in every block of stone. Ideas may not change, but emphasis shifts
constantly. It could be claimed, for example, that the most important part of Marx's
theory is contained in the saying: "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. "
But before Marx developed it, what force had that saying had? Who had paid any
attention to it? Who had inferred from it — what it certainly implies — that laws, religions
and moral codes are all a superstructure built over existing property relations? It was
Christ, according to the Gospel, who uttered the text, but it was Marx who brought it to
life. And ever since he did so the motives of politicians, priests, judges, moralists and
millionaires have been under the deepest suspicion — which, of course, is why they hate
him so much.
As I Please - Robot Bombs
Tribune, 30 June 1944
I notice that apart from the widespread complaint that the German pilotless planes "seem
so unnatural" (a bomb dropped by a live airman is quite natural, apparently), some
journalists are denouncing them as barbarous, inhumane and "an indiscriminate attack on
civilians. "
After what we have been doing to the Germans over the past two years, this seems a bit
thick, but it is the normal human response to every new weapon.
Poison gas, the
machine-gun, the submarine, gunpowder, and even the crossbow were similarly denounced in their day. Every weapon seems unfair until you have adopted it yourself.
But I would not deny that the pilotless plane, flying bomb, or whatever its correct name
may be, is an exceptionally unpleasant thing, because, unlike most other projectiles, it
gives you time to think. What is your first reaction when you hear that droning, zooming
noise? Inevitably it is a hope that the noise won 't stop. You want to hear the bomb pass
safely overhead and die away into the distance before the engine cuts out. In other words,
you are hoping it will fall on somebody else. So also when you dodge a shell or an
ordinary bomb — but in that case you have only about five seconds to take cover and no
time to speculate on the bottomless selfishness of the human being.
As I Please - Civilian Bombing
Tribune, 14 July 1944
I have received a number of letters, some of them quite violent ones, attacking me for my
remarks on Miss Vera Brittain's anti-bombing pamphlet. There are two points that seem
to need further comment.
First of all there is the charge, which is becoming quite a common one, that "we started
it," i. e. that Britain was the first country to practise systematic bombing of civilians. How
anyone can make this claim, with the history of the past dozen years in mind, is almost
beyond me. The first act in the present war — some hours, if I remember rightly, before
any declaration of war passed — was the German bombing of Warsaw. The Germans
bombed and shelled the city so intensively that, according to the Poles, at one time 700
fires were raging simultaneously. They made a film of the destruction of Warsaw, which
they entitled "Baptism of Fire" and sent all round the world with the object of terrorising
neutrals.
Several years earlier than this the Condor Legion, sent to Spain by Hitler, had bombed
one Spanish city after another. The "silent raids" on Barcelona in 1938 killed several
thousand people in a couple of days. Earlier than this the Italians had bombed entirely
defenseless Abyssinians and boasted of their explodes as something screamingly funny.
Bruno Mussolini wrote newspaper articles in which he described bombed Abyssinians
"bursting open like a rose," which he said was "most amusing. " And the Japanese ever
since 1931, and intensively since 1937, have been bombing crowded Chinese cities where
there are not even any ARP arrangements, let alone any AA guns or fighter aircraft.
I am not arguing that two blacks make a white, nor that Britain's record is a particularly
good one. In a number of "little wars" from about 1920 onwards the RAF has dropped its
bombs on Afghans, Indians and Arabs who had little or no power of hitting back. But it is
simply untruthful to say that large-scale bombing of crowded town areas, with the object
of causing panic, is a British invention. It was the Fascist states who started this practice,
and so long as the air war went in their favour they avowed their aims quite clearly.
The other thing that needs dealing with is the parrot cry "killing women and children. " I
pointed out before, but evidently it needs repeating, that it is probably somewhat better to
kill a cross-section of the population than to kill only the young men. If the figures
published by the Germans are true, and we have really killed 1,200,000 civilians in our
raids, that loss of life has probably harmed the German race somewhat less than a
corresponding loss on the Russian front or in Africa and Italy.
Any nation at war will do its best to protect its children, and the number of children killed
in raids probably does not correspond to their percentage of the general population.
Women cannot be protected to the same extent, but the outcry against killing women, if
you accept killing at all, is sheer sentimentality. Why is it worse to kill a woman than a
man? The argument usually advanced is that in killing women you are killing the
breeders, whereas men can be more easily spared. But this is a fallacy based on the notion
that human beings can be bred like animals. The idea behind it is that since one man is
capable of fertilizing a very large number of women, just as a prize ram fertilizes
thousands of ewes, the loss of male lives is comparatively unimportant. Human beings,
however, are not cattle. When the slaughter caused by war leaves a surplus of women, the
enormous majority of those women bear no children. Male lives are very nearly as
important, biologically, as female ones.
In the last war the British Empire lost nearly a million men killed, of whome abou;three-
quarters came from these islands. Most of them will have been under thirty. If all those
young men had had only one child each whe should now have en extra 750,000 people
round about the age of twenty. France, which lost much more heavily, never recovered
from the slaughter of the last war, and it is doubtful whether Britain has fully recovered,
either. We can't yet calculate the casualties of the present war, but the last one killed
between ten and twenty million young men. Flad it been conducted, as the next one will
perhaps be, with flying bombs, rockets and other long-range weapons which kill old and
young, healthy and unhealthy, male and female impartially, it would probably have
damaged European civilization somewhat less than it did.
Contrary to what some of my correspondents seem to think, I have no enthusiasm for air
raids, either ours or the enemy's. Like a lot of other people in this country, I am growing
definitely tired of bombs. But I do object to the hypocrisy of accepting force as an
instrument while squealing against this or that individual weapon, or of denouncing war
while wanting to preserve the kind of soceity that makes war inevitable.
As I Please - My Country Right Or Wrong
Tribune, 24 December 1943
Attacking me in the Weekly Review for attacking Douglas Reed, Mr. A. K. Chesterton
remarks, "'My country — right or wrong' is a maxim which apparently has no place in Mr.
Orwell's philosophy. " He also states that "all of us believe that whatever her condition
Britain must win this war, or for that matter any other war in which she is engaged. "
The operative phrase is any other war. There are plenty of us who would defend our
own country, under no matter what government, if it seemed that we were in danger of
actual invasion and conquest. But "any war" is a different matter. How about the Boer
War, for instance? There is a neat little bit of historical irony here. Mr. A. K. Chesterton
is the nephew of G. K. Chesterton, who courageously opposed the Boer War, and once
remarked that "My country, right or wrong" was on the same moral level as "My mother,
drunk or sober. "
As I Please - Atrocity Pictures
Tribune, 8 September 1944
I have before me an exceptionally disgusting photograph, from the Star of August 29, of
two partially undressed women, with shaven heads and with swastikas painted on their
faces, being led through the streets of Paris amid grinning onlookers. The Star — not that I
am picking on the Star, for most of the press has behaved likewise — reproduces this
photograph with seeming approval.
I don't blame the French for doing this kind of thing. They have had four years of
suffering, and I can partially imagine how they feel towards the collaborators. But it is a
different matter when newspapers in this country try to persuade their readers that
shaving women's heads is a nice thing to do. As soon as I saw this Star photograph, I
thought, "Where have I seen something like this before? " Then I remembered. Just about
ten years ago, when the Nazi regime was beginning to get into its stride, very similar
pictures of humiliated Jews being led through the streets of German cities were exhibited
in the British press — but with this difference, that on that occasion we were not expected
to approve.
Recently another newspaper published photographs of the dangling corpses of Germans
hanged by the Russians in Kharkov, and carefully informed its readers that these
executions had been filmed and that the public would shortly be able to witness them at
the new theatres. (Were children admitted, I wonder? )
There is a saying of Nietzche which I have quoted before, but which is worth quoting
again:
He who fights too long against dragons becomes a dragon himself; and if you gaze too
long into the abyss, the abyss will gaze into you.
"Too long," in this context, should perhaps be taken as meaning "after the dragon is
beaten. "
As I Please -- Hell
14 April 1944
Attacking Mr. C. A. Smith and myself in the Malvern Torch for various remarks about
the Christian religion, Mr. Sidney Dark grows very angry because I have suggested that
the belief in personal immortality is decaying. "I would wager," he says, "that if a Gallup
poll were taken seventy-five percent (of the British population) would confess to a vague
belief in survival. " Writing elsewhere during the same week, Mr. Dark puts it at eighty-
five percent.
Now, I find it very rare to meet anyone, of whatever background, who admits to believing
in personal immortality. Still, I think it quite likely that if you asked everyone the
question and put pencil and paper in hands, a fairly large number (I am not so free with
my percentages as Mr. Dark) would admit the possibility that after death there might be
"something. " The point Mr. Dark has missed is that the belief, such as it is, hasn't the
actuality it had for our forefathers. Never, literally never in recent years, have I met
anyone who gave me the impression of believing in the next world as firmly as he
believed in the existence of, for instance, Australia. Belief in the next world does not
influence conduct as it would if it were genuine. With that endless existence beyond
death to look forward to, how trivial our lives here would seem! Most Christians profess
to believe in Hell. Yet have you ever met a Christian who seemed as afraid of Hell as he
was of cancer? Even very devout Christians will make jokes about Hell. They wouldn't
make jokes about leprosy, or RAF pilots with their faces burnt away: the subject is too
painful. Here there springs into my mind a little triolet by the late A. M. Currie:
It's a pity that Poppa has sold
his soul It makes him sizzle at breakfast so. The
money was useful, but still on the whole It's a
pity that Poppa has sold his soul When he might
have held on like the Baron de Coal And not
cleared out when the price was low. It's a pity
that Poppa has sold his soul It makes him sizzle
at breakfast so.
Currie, a Catholic, would presumably have said that he believed in Hell. If his next-door
neighbour had been burnt to death he would not have written a comic poem about it, yet
he can make jokes about somebody being fried for millions of years. I say that such belief
has no reality. It is a sham currency, like the money in Samuel Butler's Musical Banks.
As I Please - Conversation With A Pacifist
On the night in 1940 when the big ack-ack barrage was fired over London for the first
time, I was in Picadilly Circus when the guns opened up, and I fled into the Cafe Royal to
take cover. Among the crowd inside a good-looking, well-made youth of about twenty-
five was making somewhat of a nuisance of himself with a copy of Peace News, which
he was forcing upon the attention of everyone at the neighbouring tables. I got into
conversation with him, and the conversation went something like this:
The youth: "I tell you, it'll all be over by Christmas. There's obviously going to be a
compromise peace. I'm pinning my faith to Sir Samuel Hoare. It's degrading company to
be in, I admit, but still Hoare is on our side. So long as Hoare's in Madrid, there's always
hope of a sell-out. "
Orwell: "What about all those preparations that they're making against invasion — the pill
boxes that they're building everywhere, the Local Defense Volunteers and so forth? "
The youth: "Oh, that merely means they're getting ready to crush the working class when
the Germans get here. I suppose some of them might be fools enough to try to resist, but
Churchill and the Germans between them won't take long to settle them. Don't worry, it'll
soon be over. "
Orwell: "Do you really want to see your children grow up Nazis? "
The youth: "Nonsense! You don't suppose the Germans are going to encourage Fascism
in this country, do you? They don't want to breed up a race of warriors to fight against
them. Their object will be to turn us into slaves. That's why I’m a pacifist. They'll
encourage people like me. "
Orwell: "And shoot people like me? "
The youth: "That would be just too bad. "
Orwell: "But why are you so anxious to remain alive? "
The youth: "So that I can get on with my work, of course. "
It had come out in the conversation that the youth was a painter — whether good or bad I
do not know; but at any rate, sincerely interested in painting and quite ready to face
poverty in pursuit of it. As a painter, he would probably have been somewhat better off
under a German occupation than a writer or journalist would be. But still, what he said
contained a very dangerous fallacy, now very widespread in the countries where
totalitarianism has not actually established itself.
The fallacy is to believe that under a dictatorial government you can be free inside. Quite
a number of people console themselves with this thought, now that totalitarianism in one
form or another is visibly on the up-grade in every part of the world. Out in the street the
loudspeakers bellow, the flags flutter from the rooftops, the police with their tommy-guns
prowl to and fro, the face of the Leader, four feet wide, glares from every hoarding; but
up in the attics the secret enemies of the regime can record their thoughts in perfect
freedom — that is the idea, more or less. And many people are under the impression that
this is going on now in Germany and other dictatorial countries.
Why is this idea false? I pass over the fact that modem dictatorships don't, in fact, leave
the loopholes that the old-fashioned despotisms did; and also the probable weakening of
the desire for intellectual liberty owing to totalitarian methods of education. The greatest
mistake is to imagine that the human being is an autonomous individual. The secret
freedom which you can supposedly enjoy under a despotic government is nonsense,
because your thoughts are never entirely your own. Philosophers, writers, artists, even
scientists, not only need encouragement and an audience, they need constant stimulation
from other people. It is almost impossible to think without talking. If Defoe had really
lived on a desert island, he could not have written Robinson Crusoe, nor would he have
wanted to. Take away freedom of speech, and the creative faculties dry up. Had the
Germans really got to England my acquaintance of the Cafe Royal would soon have
found his painting deteriorating, even if the Gestapo had let him alone. And when the lid
is taken off Europe, I believe one of the things that will surprise us will be to find how
little worthwhile writing of any kind — even such things as diaries, for instance — has
been produced in secret under the dictators.
Partisan Review - Wishful Thinking
So far as I can see, all political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way.
People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most
grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome. For example, right up to
May of this year the more disaffected English intellectuals refused to believe that a
Second Front would be opened. They went on refusing while, bang in front of their faces,
the endless convoys of guns and landing-craft rumbled through London on their way to
the coast. One could point to countless other instances of people hugging quite manifest
delusions because the truth would be wounding to their pride. Hence the absence of
reliable political prediction. To name just one easily isolated example: who foresaw the
Russo-German pact of 1939? A few pessimistic Conservatives foretold an agreement
between Germany and Russia, but the wrong kind of agreement, and for the wrong
reasons. So far as I am aware, no intellectual of the Left, whether russophile or
russophobe, foresaw anything of the kind. For that matter, the Left as a whole failed to
foresee the rise of Fascism and failed to grasp that the Nazis were dangerous even when
they were on the verge of seizing power. To appreciate the danger of Fascism the Left
would have had to admit its own shortcomings, which was too painful; so the whole
phenomenon was ignored or misinterpreted, with disastrous results.
The most one can say is that people can be fairly good prophets when their wishes are
realizable. But a truly objective approach is almost impossible, because in one form or
another almost everyone is a nationalist . . . The most intelligent people seem capable of
holding schizophrenic beliefs, or disregarding plain facts, of evading serious questions
with debating-society repartees, or swallowing baseless rumours and of looking on
indifferently while history is falsified. All these mental vices spring ultimately from the
nationalistic habit of mind, which is itself, I suppose, the product of fear and of the
ghastly emptiness of machine civilization. . . .
I believe that it is possible to be more objective than most of us are, but that it involves a
moral effort. One cannot get away from one's own subjective feelings, but at least one
can know what they are and make allowance for them.
Partisan Review, Winter 1945
As I Please - The Coming Age Of Superpowers
Tribune
2 February 1945
A not-too-distant explosion shakes the house, the windows rattle in their sockets, and in
the next room the class of 1964 wakes up and lets out a yell or two. Each time this
happens I find myself thinking, "Is it possible that human beings can continue with this
lunacy very much longer? " You know the answer, of course. Indeed, the difficulty
nowadays is to find anyone who thinks that there will not be another war in the fairly
near future.
Germany, I suppose, will be defeated this year, and when Germany is out of the way
Japan will not be able to stand up to the combined powers of Britain and the U. S. A. Then
there will be a peace of exhaustion, with only minor and unofficial wars raging all over
the place, and perhaps this so-called peace may last for decades. But after that, by the
way the world is actually shaping, it may well be that war will become permanent.
Already, quite visibly and more or less with the acquiescence of all of us, the world is
splitting up into the two or three huge super-states forecast in James Burnham's
Managerial Revolution. One cannot draw their exact boundaries as yet, but one can see
more or less what areas they will comprise. And if the world does settle down into this
pattern, it is likely that these vast states will be permanently at war with one another,
though it will not necessarily be a very intensive or bloody kind of war. Their problems,
both economic and psychological, will be a lot simpler if the doodlebugs are more or less
continually whizzing to and fro.
If these two or three super-states do establish themselves, not only will each of them be
too big to be conquered, but they will be under no necessity to trade with one another,
and in a position to prevent all contact between their nationals. Already, for a dozen years
or so, large areas of the earth have been cut off from one another, although technically at
peace.
Some months ago, in this column, I pointed out that modern scientific inventions have
tended to prevent rather than increase international communication. This brought me
several angry letters from readers, but none of them were able to show that what I had
said was false. They merely retorted that if we had Socialism, the aeroplane, the radio etc.
would not be perverted to wrong uses. Very true, but then we haven't Socialism. As it is,
the aeroplane is primarily a thing for dropping bombs and the radio primarily a thing for
whipping up nationalism. Even before the war there was enormously less contact
between the peoples of the earth than there had been thirty years earlier, and education
was perverted, history re-written and freedom of thought suppressed to an extent
undreamed of in earlier ages. And there is no sign whatever of these tendencies being
reversed.
Maybe I am pessimistic. But at any rate those are the thoughts that cross my mind (and a
lot of other people's too, I believe) every time the explosion of a V bomb booms through
the mist.
Review:
The Road to Serfdom by F. A. Hayek The Mirror of the Past by K. Zilliacus
Taken together, these two books give grounds for dismay. The first of them is an
eloquent defence of laissez-faire capitalism, the other is an even more vehement
denunciation of it. They cover to some extent the same ground, they frequently quote the
same authorities, and they even start out with the same premise, since each of them
assumes that Western civilization depends on the sanctity of the individual. Yet each
writer is convinced that the other's policy leads directly to slavery, and the alarming thing
is that they may both be right. . . .
