PART I: ENGLAND YOUR ENGLAND
I
As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill
me.
They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them.
They are ‘only doing their duty’, as the saying goes. Most of them, I have
no doubt, are kind-hearted law-abiding men who would never dream of committing
murder in private life. On the other hand, if one of them succeeds in blowing me
to pieces with a well-placed bomb, he will never sleep any the worse for it. He
is serving his country, which has the power to absolve him from evil.
One cannot see the modern world as it is unless one recognizes the
overwhelming strength of patriotism, national loyalty. In certain circumstances
it can break down, at certain levels of civilization it does not exist, but as a
positive force there is nothing to set beside it. Christianity and
international Socialism are as weak as straw in comparison with it. Hitler and
Mussolini rose to power in their own countries very largely because they could
grasp this fact and their opponents could not.
Also, one must admit that the divisions between nation and nation are founded
on real differences of outlook. Till recently it was thought proper to pretend
that all human beings are very much alike, but in fact anyone able to use his
eyes knows that the average of human behaviour differs enormously from country
to country. Things that could happen in one country could not happen in another.
Hitler’s June purge, for instance, could not have happened in England. And, as
western peoples go, the English are very highly differentiated. There is a sort
of back-handed admission of this in the dislike which nearly all foreigners feel
for our national way of life. Few Europeans can endure living in England, and
even Americans often feel more at home in Europe.
When you come back to England from any foreign country, you have immediately
the sensation of breathing a different air. Even in the first few minutes dozens
of small things conspire to give you this feeling. The beer is bitterer, the
coins are heavier, the grass is greener, the advertisements are more blatant.
The crowds in the big towns, with their mild knobby faces, their bad teeth and
gentle manners, are different from a European crowd. Then the vastness of
England swallows you up, and you lose for a while your feeling that the whole
nation has a single identifiable character. Are there really such things as
nations? Are we not forty-six million individuals, all different? And the
diversity of it, the chaos! The clatter of clogs in the Lancashire mill towns,
the to-and-fro of the lorries on the Great North Road, the queues outside the
Labour Exchanges, the rattle of pin-tables in the Soho pubs, the old maids
hiking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn morning - all these
are not only fragments, but characteristic fragments, of the English
scene. How can one make a pattern out of this muddle?
But talk to foreigners, read foreign books or newspapers, and you are brought
back to the same thought. Yes, there is something distinctive and
recognizable in English civilization. It is a culture as individual as that of
Spain. It is somehow bound up with solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky
towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar-boxes. It has a flavour of
its own. Moreover it is continuous, it stretches into the future and the past,
there is something in it that persists, as in a living creature. What can the
England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you
in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the
mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person.
And above all, it is your civilization, it is you. However much
you hate it or laugh at it, you will never be happy away from it for any length
of time. The suet puddings and the red pillar-boxes have entered into your soul.
Good or evil, it is yours, you belong to it, and this side the grave you will
never get away from the marks that it has given you.
Meanwhile England, together with the rest of the world, is changing. And like
everything else it can change only in certain directions, which up to a point
can be foreseen. That is not to say that the future is fixed, merely that
certain alternatives are possible and others not. A seed may grow or not grow,
but at any rate a turnip seed never grows into a parsnip. It is therefore of the
deepest importance to try and determine what England is, before guessing
what part England can play in the huge events that are happening.
II
National characteristics are not easy to pin down, and when pinned down they
often turn out to be trivialities or seem to have no connexion with one another.
Spaniards are cruel to animals, Italians can do nothing without making a
deafening noise, the Chinese are addicted to gambling. Obviously such things don’t
matter in themselves. Nevertheless, nothing is causeless, and even the fact that
Englishmen have bad teeth can tell something about the realities of English
life.
Here are a couple of generalizations about England that would be accepted by
almost all observers. One is that the English are not gifted artistically. They
are not as musical as the Germans or Italians, painting and sculpture have never
flourished in England as they have in France. Another is that, as Europeans go,
the English are not intellectual. They have a horror of abstract thought, they
feel no need for any philosophy or systematic ‘world-view’. Nor is this
because they are ‘practical’, as they are so fond of claiming for
themselves. One has only to look at their methods of town planning and water
supply, their obstinate clinging to everything that is out of date and a
nuisance, a spelling system that defies analysis, and a system of weights and
measures that is intelligible only to the compilers of arithmetic books, to see
how little they care about mere efficiency. But they have a certain power of
acting without taking thought. Their world-famed hypocrisy - their
double-faced attitude towards the Empire, for instance - is bound up with
this. Also, in moments of supreme crisis the whole nation can suddenly draw
together and act upon a species of instinct, really a code of conduct which is
understood by almost everyone, though never formulated. The phrase that Hitler
coined for the Germans, ‘a sleep-walking people’, would have been better
applied to the English. Not that there is anything to be proud of in being
called a sleep-walker.
But here it is worth noting a minor English trait which is extremely well
marked though not often commented on, and that is a love of flowers. This is one
of the first things that one notices when one reaches England from abroad,
especially if one is coming from southern Europe. Does it not contradict the
English indifference to the arts? Not really, because it is found in people who
have no aesthetic feelings whatever. What it does link up with, however, is
another English characteristic which is so much a part of us that we barely
notice it, and that is the addiction to hobbies and spare-time occupations, the privateness
of English life. We are a nation of flower-lovers, but also a nation of
stamp-collectors, pigeon-fanciers, amateur carpenters, coupon-snippers,
darts-players, crossword-puzzle fans. All the culture that is most truly native
centres round things which even when they are communal are not official - the
pub, the football match, the back garden, the fireside and the ‘nice cup of
tea’. The liberty of the individual is still believed in, almost as in the
nineteenth century. But this has nothing to do with economic liberty, the right
to exploit others for profit. It is the liberty to have a home of your own, to
do what you like in your spare time, to choose your own amusements instead of
having them chosen for you from above. The most hateful of all names in an
English ear is Nosey Parker. It is obvious, of course, that even this purely
private liberty is a lost cause. Like all other modern people, the English are
in process of being numbered, labelled, conscripted, ‘co-ordinated’. But the
pull of their impulses is in the other direction, and the kind of regimentation
that can be imposed on them will be modified in consequence. No party rallies,
no Youth Movements, no coloured shirts, no Jew-baiting or ‘spontaneous’
demonstrations. No Gestapo either, in all probability.
But in all societies the common people must live to some extent against
the existing order. The genuinely popular culture of England is something that
goes on beneath the surface, unofficially and more or less frowned on by the
authorities. One thing one notices if one looks directly at the common people,
especially in the big towns, is that they are not puritanical. They are
inveterate gamblers, drink as much beer as their wages will permit, are devoted
to bawdy jokes, and use probably the foulest language in the world. They have to
satisfy these tastes in the face of astonishing, hypocritical laws (licensing
laws, lottery acts, etc. etc.) which are designed to interfere with everybody
but in practice allow everything to happen. Also, the common people are without
definite religious belief, and have been so for centuries. The Anglican Church
never had a real hold on them, it was simply a preserve of the landed gentry,
and the Nonconformist sects only influenced minorities. And yet they have
retained a deep tinge of Christian feeling, while almost forgetting the name of
Christ. The power-worship which is the new religion of Europe, and which has
infected the English intelligentsia, has never touched the common people. They
have never caught up with power politics. The ‘realism’ which is preached in
Japanese and Italian newspapers would horrify them. One can learn a good deal
about the spirit of England from the comic coloured postcards that you see in
the windows of cheap stationers’ shops. These things are a sort of diary upon
which the English people have unconsciously recorded themselves. Their
old-fashioned outlook, their graded snobberies, their mixture of bawdiness and
hypocrisy, their extreme gentleness, their deeply moral attitude to life, are
all mirrored there.
The gentleness of the English civilization is perhaps its most marked
characteristic. You notice it the instant you set foot on English soil. It is a
land where the bus conductors are good-tempered and the policemen carry no
revolvers. In no country inhabited by white men is it easier to shove people off
the pavement. And with this goes something that is always written off by
European observers as ‘decadence’ or hypocrisy, the English hatred of war
and militarism. It is rooted deep in history, and it is strong in the
lower-middle class as well as the working class. Successive wars have shaken it
but not destroyed it. Well within living memory it was common for ‘the
redcoats’ to be booed at in the streets and for the landlords of respectable
public houses to refuse to allow soldiers on the premises. In peace time, even
when there are two million unemployed, it is difficult to fill the ranks of the
tiny standing army, which is officered by the country gentry and a specialized
stratum of the middle class, and manned by farm labourers and slum proletarians.
The mass of the people are without military knowledge or tradition, and their
attitude towards war is invariably defensive. No politician could rise to power
by promising them conquests or military ‘glory’, no Hymn of Hate has ever
made any appeal to them. In the last war the songs which the soldiers made up
and sang of their own accord were not vengeful but humorous and mock-defeatist [Note
1] The only enemy they ever named was the sergeant-major.
In England all the boasting and flag-wagging, the ‘Rule Britannia’ stuff,
is done by small minorities. The patriotism of the common people is not vocal or
even conscious. They do not retain among their historical memories the name of a
single military victory. English literature, like other literatures, is full of
battle-poems, but it is worth noticing that the ones that have won for
themselves a kind of popularity are always a tale of disasters and retreats.
There is no popular poem about Trafalgar or Waterloo, for instance. Sir John
Moore’s army at Corunna, fighting a desperate rearguard action before escaping
overseas (just like Dunkirk!) has more appeal than a brilliant victory. The most
stirring battle-poem in English is about a brigade of cavalry which charged in
the wrong direction. And of the last war, the four names which have really
engraved themselves on the popular memory are Mons, Ypres, Gallipoli and
Passchendaele, every time a disaster. The names of the great battles that
finally broke the German armies are simply unknown to the general public.
The reason why the English anti-militarism disgusts foreign observers is that
it ignores the existence of the British Empire. It looks like sheer hypocrisy.
After all, the English have absorbed a quarter of the earth and held on to it by
means of a huge navy. How dare they then turn round and say that war is wicked?
It is quite true that the English are hypocritical about their Empire. In the
working class this hypocrisy takes the form of not knowing that the Empire
exists. But their dislike of standing armies is a perfectly sound instinct. A
navy employs comparatively few people, and it is an external weapon which cannot
affect home politics directly. Military dictatorships exist everywhere, but
there is no such thing as a naval dictatorship. What English people of nearly
all classes loathe from the bottom of their hearts is the swaggering officer
type, the jingle of spurs and the crash of boots. Decades before Hitler was ever
heard of, the word ‘Prussian’ had much the same significance in England as
‘Nazi’ has today. So deep does this feeling go that for a hundred years past
the officers of the British army, in peace time, have always worn civilian
clothes when off duty.
One rapid but fairly sure guide to the social atmosphere of a country is the
parade-step of its army. A military parade is really a kind of ritual dance,
something like a ballet, expressing a certain philosophy of life. The
goose-step, for instance, is one of the most horrible sights in the world, far
more terrifying than a dive-bomber. It is simply an affirmation of naked power;
contained in it, quite consciously and intentionally, is the vision of a boot
crashing down on a face. Its ugliness is part of its essence, for what it is
saying is ‘Yes, I am ugly, and you daren’t laugh at me’, like the
bully who makes faces at his victim. Why is the goose-step not used in England?
There are, heaven knows, plenty of army officers who would be only too glad to
introduce some such thing. It is not used because the people in the street would
laugh. Beyond a certain point, military display is only possible in countries
where the common people dare not laugh at the army. The Italians adopted the
goose-step at about the time when Italy passed definitely under German control,
and, as one would expect, they do it less well than the Germans. The Vichy
government, if it survives, is bound to introduce a stiffer parade-ground
discipline into what is left of the French army. In the British army the drill
is rigid and complicated, full of memories of the eighteenth century, but
without definite swagger; the march is merely a formalized walk. It belongs to a
society which is ruled by the sword, no doubt, but a sword which must never be
taken out of the scabbard.
And yet the gentleness of English civilization is mixed up with barbarities
and anachronisms. Our criminal law is as out-of-date as the muskets in the
Tower. Over against the Nazi Storm Trooper you have got to set that typically
English figure, the hanging judge, some gouty old bully with his mind rooted in
the nineteenth century, handing out savage sentences. In England people are
still hanged by the neck and flogged with the cat o’ nine tails. Both of these
punishments are obscene as well as cruel, but there has never been any genuinely
popular outcry against them. People accept them (and Dartmoor, and Borstal)
almost as they accept the weather. They are part of ‘the law’, which is
assumed to be unalterable.
Here one comes upon an all-important English trait: the respect for
constitutionalism and legality, the belief in ‘the law’ as something above
the State and above the individual, something which is cruel and stupid, of
course, but at any rate incorruptible.
It is not that anyone imagines the law to be just. Everyone knows that there
is one law for the rich and another for the poor. But no one accepts the
implications of this, everyone takes it for granted that the law, such as it is,
will be respected, and feels a sense of outrage when it is not. Remarks like ‘They
can’t run me in; I haven’t done anything wrong’, or ’They can’t do
that; it’s against the law’, are part of the atmosphere of England. The
professed enemies of society have this feeling as strongly as anyone else. One
sees it in prison-books like Wilfred Macartney’s Walls Have Mouths or
Jim Phelan’s Jail Journey, in the solemn idiocies that take place at
the trials of conscientious objectors, in letters to the papers from eminent
Marxist professors, pointing out that this or that is a ‘miscarriage of
British justice’. Everyone believes in his heart that the law can be, ought to
be, and, on the whole, will be impartially administered. The totalitarian idea
that there is no such thing as law, there is only power, has never taken root.
Even the intelligentsia have only accepted it in theory.
An illusion can become a half-truth, a mask can alter the expression of a
face. The familiar arguments to the effect that democracy is ‘just the same as’
or ‘just as bad as’ totalitarianism never take account of this fact. All
such arguments boil down to saying that half a loaf is the same as no bread. In
England such concepts as justice, liberty and objective truth are still believed
in. They may be illusions, but they are very powerful illusions. The belief in
them influences conduct, national life is different because of them. In proof of
which, look about you. Where are the rubber truncheons, where is the castor oil?
The sword is still in the scabbard, and while it stays there corruption cannot
go beyond a certain point. The English electoral system, for instance, is an all
but open fraud. In a dozen obvious ways it is gerrymandered in the interest of
the moneyed class. But until some deep change has occurred in the public mind,
it cannot become completely corrupt. You do not arrive at the polling
booth to find men with revolvers telling you which way to vote, nor are the
votes miscounted, nor is there any direct bribery. Even hypocrisy is a powerful
safeguard. The hanging judge, that evil old man in scarlet robe and horse-hair
wig, whom nothing short of dynamite will ever teach what century he is living
in, but who will at any rate interpret the law according to the books and will
in no circumstances take a money bribe, is one of the symbolic figures of
England. He is a symbol of the strange mixture of reality and illusion,
democracy and privilege, humbug and decency, the subtle network of compromises,
by which the nation keeps itself in its familiar shape.
III
I have spoken all the while of ‘the nation’, ‘England’, ‘Britain’,
as though forty-five million souls could somehow be treated as a unit. But is
not England notoriously two nations, the rich and the poor? Dare one pretend
that there is anything in common between people with £100,000 a year and people
with £1 a week? And even Welsh and Scottish readers are likely to have been
offended because I have used the word ‘England’ oftener than ‘Britain’,
as though the whole population dwelt in London and the Home Counties and neither
north nor west possessed a culture of its own.
One gets a better view of this question if one considers the minor point
first. It is quite true that the so-called races of Britain feel themselves to
be very different from one another. A Scotsman, for instance, does not thank you
if you call him an Englishman. You can see the hesitation we feel on this point
by the fact that we call our islands by no less than six different names,
England, Britain, Great Britain, the British Isles, the United Kingdom and, in
very exalted moments, Albion. Even the differences between north and south
England loom large in our own eyes. But somehow these differences fade away the
moment that any two Britons are confronted by a European. It is very rare to
meet a foreigner, other than an American, who can distinguish between English
and Scots or even English and Irish. To a Frenchman, the Breton and the
Auvergnat seem very different beings, and the accent of Marseilles is a stock
joke in Paris. Yet we speak of ‘France’ and ‘the French’, recognizing
France as an entity, a single civilization, which in fact it is. So also with
ourselves. Looked at from the outsider even the cockney and the Yorkshireman
have a strong family resemblance.
And even the distinction between rich and poor dwindles somewhat when one
regards the nation from the outside. There is no question about the inequality
of wealth in England. It is grosser than in any European country, and you have
only to look down the nearest street to see it. Economically, England is
certainly two nations, if not three or four. But at the same time the vast
majority of the people feel themselves to be a single nation and are
conscious of resembling one another more than they resemble foreigners.
Patriotism is usually stronger than class-hatred, and always stronger than any
kind of internationalism. Except for a brief moment in 1920 (the ‘Hands off
Russia’ movement) the British working class have never thought or acted
internationally. For two and a half years they watched their comrades in Spain
slowly strangled, and never aided them by even a single strike. [Note
2] But when their own country (the country of Lord Nuffield and Mr Montagu
Norman) was in danger, their attitude was very different. At the moment when it
seemed likely that England might be invaded, Anthony Eden appealed over the
radio for Local Defence Volunteers. He got a quarter of a million men in the
first twenty-four hours, and another million in the subsequent month. One has
only to compare these figures with, for instance, the number of conscientious
objectors to see how vast is the strength of traditional loyalties compared with
new ones.
In England patriotism takes different forms in different classes, but it runs
like a connecting thread through nearly all of them. Only the Europeanized
intelligentsia are really immune to it. As a positive emotion it is stronger in
the middle class than in the upper class - the cheap public schools, for
instance, are more given to patriotic demonstrations than the expensive ones -
but the number of definitely treacherous rich men, the Laval-Quisling type, is
probably very small. In the working class patriotism is profound, but it is
unconscious. The working man’s heart does not leap when he sees a Union Jack.
But the famous ‘insularity’ and ‘xenophobia’ of the English is far
stronger in the working class than in the bourgeoisie. In all countries the poor
are more national than the rich, but the English working class are outstanding
in their abhorrence of foreign habits. Even when they are obliged to live abroad
for years they refuse either to accustom themselves to foreign food or to learn
foreign languages. Nearly every Englishman of working-class origin considers it
effeminate to pronounce a foreign word correctly. During the war of 1914-18 the
English working class were in contact with foreigners to an extent that is
rarely possible. The sole result was that they brought back a hatred of all
Europeans, except the Germans, whose courage they admired. In four years on
French soil they did not even acquire a liking for wine. The insularity of the
English, their refusal to take foreigners seriously, is a folly that has to be
paid for very heavily from time to time. But it plays its part in the English
mystique, and the intellectuals who have tried to break it down have generally
done more harm than good. At bottom it is the same quality in the English
character that repels the tourist and keeps out the invader.
Here one comes back to two English characteristics that I pointed out,
seemingly at random, at the beginning of the last chapter. One is the lack of
artistic ability. This is perhaps another way of saying that the English are
outside the European culture. For there is one art in which they have shown
plenty of talent, namely literature. But this is also the only art that cannot
cross frontiers. Literature, especially poetry, and lyric poetry most of all, is
a kind of family joke, with little or no value outside its own language-group.
Except for Shakespeare, the best English poets are barely known in Europe, even
as names. The only poets who are widely read are Byron, who is admired for the
wrong reasons, and Oscar Wilde, who is pitied as a victim of English hypocrisy.
And linked up with this, though not very obviously, is the lack of philosophical
faculty, the absence in nearly all Englishmen of any need for an ordered system
of thought or even for the use of logic.
Up to a point, the sense of national unity is a substitute for a ‘world-view’.
Just because patriotism is all but universal and not even the rich are
uninfluenced by it, there can be moments when the whole nation suddenly swings
together and does the same thing, like a herd of cattle facing a wolf. There was
such a moment, unmistakably, at the time of the disaster in France. After eight
months of vaguely wondering what the war was about, the people suddenly knew
what they had got to do: first, to get the army away from Dunkirk, and secondly
to prevent invasion. It was like the awakening of a giant. Quick! Danger! The
Philistines be upon thee, Samson! And then the swift unanimous action - and,
then, alas, the prompt relapse into sleep. In a divided nation that would have
been exactly the moment for a big peace movement to arise. But does this mean
that the instinct of the English will always tell them to do the right thing?
Not at all, merely that it will tell them to do the same thing. In the 1931
General Election, for instance, we all did the wrong thing in perfect unison. We
were as single-minded as the Gadarene swine. But I honestly doubt whether we can
say that we were shoved down the slope against our will.
It follows that British democracy is less of a fraud than it sometimes
appears. A foreign observer sees only the huge inequality of wealth, the unfair
electoral system, the governing-class control over the press, the radio and
education, and concludes that democracy is simply a polite name for
dictatorship. But this ignores the considerable agreement that does
unfortunately exist between the leaders and the led. However much one may hate
to admit it, it is almost certain that between 1931 and 1940 the National
Government represented the will of the mass of the people. It tolerated slums,
unemployment and a cowardly foreign policy. Yes, but so did public opinion. It
was a stagnant period, and its natural leaders were mediocrities.
In spite of the campaigns of a few thousand left-wingers, it is fairly
certain that the bulk of the English people were behind Chamberlain’s foreign
policy. More, it is fairly certain that the same struggle was going on in
Chamberlain’s mind as in the minds of ordinary people. His opponents professed
to see in him a dark and wily schemer, plotting to sell England to Hitler, but
it is far likelier that he was merely a stupid old man doing his best according
to his very dim lights. It is difficult otherwise to explain the contradictions
of his policy, his failure to grasp any of the courses that were open to him.
Like the mass of the people, he did not want to pay the price either of peace or
of war. And public opinion was behind him all the while, in policies that were
completely incompatible with one another. It was behind him when he went to
Munich, when he tried to come to an understanding with Russia, when he gave the
guarantee to Poland, when he honoured it, and when he prosecuted the war
half-heartedly. Only when the results of his policy became apparent did it turn
against him; which is to say that it turned against its own lethargy of the past
seven years. Thereupon the people picked a leader nearer to their mood,
Churchill, who was at any rate able to grasp that wars are not won without
fighting. Later, perhaps, they will pick another leader who can grasp that only
Socialist nations can fight effectively.
Do I mean by all this that England is a genuine democracy? No, not even a
reader of the Daily Telegraph could quite swallow that.
England is the most class-ridden country under the sun. It is a land of
snobbery and privilege, ruled largely by the old and silly. But in any
calculation about it one has got to take into account its emotional unity, the
tendency of nearly all its inhabitants to feel alike and act together in moments
of supreme crisis. It is the only great country in Europe that is not obliged to
drive hundreds of thousands of its nationals into exile or the concentration
camp. At this moment, after a year of war, newspapers and pamphlets abusing the
Government, praising the enemy and clamouring for surrender are being sold on
the streets, almost without interference. And this is less from a respect for
freedom of speech than from a simple perception that these things don’t
matter. It is safe to let a paper like Peace News be sold, because it is
certain that ninety-five per cent of the population will never want to read it.
The nation is bound together by an invisible chain. At any normal time the
ruling class will rob, mismanage, sabotage, lead us into the muck; but let
popular opinion really make itself heard, let them get a tug from below that
they cannot avoid feeling, and it is difficult for them not to respond. The
left-wing writers who denounce the whole of the ruling class as ‘pro-Fascist’
are grossly over-simplifying. Even among the inner clique of politicians who
brought us to our present pass, it is doubtful whether there were any conscious
traitors. The corruption that happens in England is seldom of that kind. Nearly
always it is more in the nature of self-deception, of the right hand not knowing
what the left hand doeth. And being unconscious, it is limited. One sees this at
its most obvious in the English press. Is the English press honest or dishonest?
At normal times it is deeply dishonest. All the papers that matter live off
their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over
news. Yet I do not suppose there is one paper in England that can be
straightforwardly bribed with hard cash. In the France of the Third Republic all
but a very few of the newspapers could notoriously be bought over the counter
like so many pounds of cheese. Public life in England has never been openly
scandalous. It has not reached the pitch of disintegration at which humbug can
be dropped.
England is not the jewelled isle of Shakespeare’s much-quoted message, nor
is it the inferno depicted by Dr Goebbels. More than either it resembles a
family, a rather stuffy Victorian family, with not many black sheep in it but
with all its cupboards bursting with skeletons. It has rich relations who have
to be kow-towed to and poor relations who are horribly sat upon, and there is a
deep conspiracy of silence about the source of the family income. It is a family
in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands
of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts. Still, it is a family. It has its
private language and its common memories, and at the approach of an enemy it
closes its ranks. A family with the wrong members in control - that, perhaps,
is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.
IV
Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton,
but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there. One of the
dominant facts in English life during the past three quarters of a century has
been the decay of ability in the ruling class.
In the years between 1920 and 1940 it was happening with the speed of a
chemical reaction. Yet at the moment of writing it is still possible to speak of
a ruling class. Like the knife which has had two new blades and three new
handles, the upper fringe of English society is still almost what it was in the
mid nineteenth century. After 1832 the old land-owning aristocracy steadily lost
power, but instead of disappearing or becoming a fossil they simply intermarried
with the merchants, manufacturers and financiers who had replaced them, and soon
turned them into accurate copies of themselves. The wealthy shipowner or
cotton-miller set up for himself an alibi as a country gentleman, while his sons
learned the right mannerisms at public schools which had been designed for just
that purpose. England was ruled by an aristocracy constantly recruited from
parvenus. And considering what energy the self-made men possessed, and
considering that they were buying their way into a class which at any rate had a
tradition of public service, one might have expected that able rulers could be
produced in some such way.
And yet somehow the ruling class decayed, lost its ability, its daring,
finally even its ruthlessness, until a time came when stuffed shirts like Eden
or Halifax could stand out as men of exceptional talent. As for Baldwin, one
could not even dignify him with the name of stuffed shirt. He was simply a hole
in the air. The mishandling of England’s domestic problems during the
nineteen-twenties had been bad enough, but British foreign policy between 1931
and 1939 is one of the wonders of the world. Why? What had happened? What was it
that at every decisive moment made every British statesman do the wrong thing
with so unerring an instinct?
The underlying fact was that the whole position of the moneyed class had long
ceased to be justifiable. There they sat, at the centre of a vast empire and a
world-wide financial network, drawing interest and profits and spending them -
on what? It was fair to say that life within the British Empire was in many ways
better than life outside it. Still, the Empire was underdeveloped, India slept
in the Middle Ages, the Dominions lay empty, with foreigners jealously barred
out, and even England was full of slums and unemployment. Only half a million
people, the people in the country houses, definitely benefited from the existing
system. Moreover, the tendency of small businesses to merge together into large
ones robbed more and more of the moneyed class of their function and turned them
into mere owners, their work being done for them by salaried managers and
technicians. For long past there had been in England an entirely functionless
class, living on money that was invested they hardly knew where, the ’idle
rich’, the people whose photographs you can look at in the Tatler and
the Bystander, always supposing that you want to. The existence of these
people was by any standard unjustifiable. They were simply parasites, less
useful to society than his fleas are to a dog.
By 1920 there were many people who were aware of all this. By 1930 millions
were aware of it. But the British ruling class obviously could not admit to
themselves that their usefulness was at an end. Had they done that they would
have had to abdicate. For it was not possible for them to turn themselves into
mere bandits, like the American millionaires, consciously clinging to unjust
privileges and beating down opposition by bribery and tear-gas bombs. After all,
they belonged to a class with a certain tradition, they had been to public
schools where the duty of dying for your country, if necessary, is laid down as
the first and greatest of the Commandments. They had to feel themselves
true patriots, even while they plundered their countrymen. Clearly there was
only one escape for them - into stupidity. They could keep society in its
existing shape only by being unable to grasp that any improvement was
possible. Difficult though this was, they achieved it, largely by fixing their
eyes on the past and refusing to notice the changes that were going on round
them.
There is much in England that this explains. It explains the decay of country
life, due to the keeping-up of a sham feudalism which drives the more spirited
workers off the land. It explains the immobility of the public schools, which
have barely altered since the eighties of the last century. It explains the
military incompetence which has again and again startled the world. Since the
fifties every war in which England has engaged has started off with a series of
disasters, after which the situation has been saved by people comparatively low
in the social scale. The higher commanders, drawn from the aristocracy, could
never prepare for modern war, because in order to do so they would have had to
admit to themselves that the world was changing. They have always clung to
obsolete methods and weapons, because they inevitably saw each war as a
repetition of the last. Before the Boer War they prepared for the Zulu War,
before the 1914 for the Boer War, and before the present war for 1914. Even at
this moment hundreds of thousands of men in England are being trained with the
bayonet, a weapon entirely useless except for opening tins. It is worth noticing
that the navy and, latterly, the air force, have always been more efficient than
the regular army. But the navy is only partially, and the air force hardly at
all, within the ruling-class orbit.
It must be admitted that so long as things were peaceful the methods of the
British ruling class served them well enough. Their own people manifestly
tolerated them. However unjustly England might be organized, it was at any rate
not torn by class warfare or haunted by secret police. The Empire was peaceful
as no area of comparable size has ever been. Throughout its vast extent, nearly
a quarter of the earth, there were fewer armed men than would be found necessary
by a minor Balkan state. As people to live under, and looking at them merely
from a liberal, negative standpoint, the British ruling class had their
points. They were preferable to the truly modern men, the Nazis and Fascists.
But it had long been obvious that they would be helpless against any serious
attack from the outside.
They could not struggle against Nazism or Fascism, because they could not
understand them. Neither could they have struggled against Communism, if
Communism had been a serious force in western Europe. To understand Fascism they
would have had to study the theory of Socialism, which would have forced them to
realize that the economic system by which they lived was unjust, inefficient and
out-of-date. But it was exactly this fact that they had trained themselves never
to face. They dealt with Fascism as the cavalry generals of 1914 dealt with the
machine-guns - by ignoring it. After years of aggression and massacres, they
had grasped only one fact, that Hitler and Mussolini were hostile to Communism.
Therefore, it was argued, they must be friendly to the British
dividend-drawer. Hence the truly frightening spectacle of Conservative M.P.s
wildly cheering the news that British ships, bringing food to the Spanish
Republican government, had been bombed by Italian aeroplanes. Even when they had
begun to grasp that Fascism was dangerous, its essentially revolutionary nature,
the huge military effort it was capable of making, the sort of tactics it would
use, were quite beyond their comprehension. At the time of the Spanish Civil
War, anyone with as much political knowledge as can be acquired from a sixpenny
pamphlet on Socialism knew that, if Franco won, the result would be
strategically disastrous for England; and yet generals and admirals who had
given their lives to the study of war were unable to grasp this fact. This vein
of political ignorance runs right through English official life, through Cabinet
ministers, ambassadors, consuls, judges, magistrates, policemen. The policeman
who arrests the ‘red’ does not understand the theories the ‘red’ is
preaching; if he did his own position as bodyguard of the moneyed class might
seem less pleasant to him. There is reason to think that even military espionage
is hopelessly hampered by ignorance of the new economic doctrines and the
ramifications of the underground parties.
The British ruling class were not altogether wrong in thinking that Fascism
was on their side. It is a fact that any rich man, unless he is a Jew, has less
to fear from Fascism than from either Communism or democratic Socialism. One
ought never to forget this, for nearly the whole of German and Italian
propaganda is designed to cover it up. The natural instinct of men like Simon,
Hoare, Chamberlain etc. was to come to an agreement with Hitler. But - and
here the peculiar feature of English life that I have spoken of, the deep sense
of national solidarity, comes in - they could only do so by breaking up the
Empire and selling their own people into semi-slavery. A truly corrupt class
would have done this without hesitation, as in France. But things had not gone
that distance in England. Politicians who would make cringing speeches about ‘the
duty of loyalty to our conquerors’ are hardly to be found in English public
life. Tossed to and fro between their incomes and their principles, it was
impossible that men like Chamberlain should do anything but make the worst of
both worlds.
One thing that has always shown that the English ruling class are morally
fairly sound, is that in time of war they are ready enough to get themselves
killed. Several dukes, earls and what nots were killed in the recent campaign in
Flanders. That could not happen if these people were the cynical scoundrels that
they are sometimes declared to be. It is important not to misunderstand their
motives, or one cannot predict their actions. What is to be expected of them is
not treachery, or physical cowardice, but stupidity, unconscious sabotage, an
infallible instinct for doing the wrong thing. They are not wicked, or not
altogether wicked; they are merely unteachable. Only when their money and power
are gone will the younger among them begin to grasp what century they are living
in.
V
The stagnation of the Empire in the between-war years affected everyone in
England, but it had an especially direct effect upon two important sub-sections
of the middle class. One was the military and imperialist middle class,
generally nicknamed the Blimps, and the other the left-wing intelligentsia.
These two seemingly hostile types, symbolic opposites - the half-pay colonel
with his bull neck and diminutive brain, like a dinosaur, the highbrow with his
domed forehead and stalk-like neck - are mentally linked together and
constantly interact upon one another; in any case they are born to a
considerable extent into the same families.
Thirty years ago the Blimp class was already losing its vitality. The
middle-class families celebrated by Kipling, the prolific lowbrow families whose
sons officered the army and navy and swarmed over all the waste places of the
earth from the Yukon to the Irrawaddy, were dwindling before 1914. The thing
that had killed them was the telegraph. In a narrowing world, more and more
governed from Whitehall, there was every year less room for individual
initiative. Men like Clive, Nelson, Nicholson, Gordon would find no place for
themselves in the modern British Empire. By 1920 nearly every inch of the
colonial empire was in the grip of Whitehall. Well-meaning, over-civilized men,
in dark suits and black felt hats, with neatly rolled umbrellas crooked over the
left forearm, were imposing their constipated view of life on Malaya and
Nigeria, Mombasa and Mandalay. The one-time empire builders were reduced to the
status of clerks, buried deeper and deeper under mounds of paper and red tape.
In the early twenties one could see, all over the Empire, the older officials,
who had known more spacious days, writhing impotently under the changes that
were happening. From that time onwards it has been next door to impossible to
induce young men of spirit to take any part in imperial administration. And what
was true of the official world was true also of the commercial. The great
monopoly companies swallowed up hosts of petty traders. Instead of going out to
trade adventurously in the Indies one went to an office stool in Bombay or
Singapore. And life in Bombay or Singapore was actually duller and safer than
life in London. Imperialist sentiment remained strong in the middle class,
chiefly owing to family tradition, but the job of administering the Empire had
ceased to appeal. Few able men went east of Suez if there was any way of
avoiding it.
But the general weakening of imperialism, and to some extent of the whole
British morale, that took place during the nineteen-thirties, was partly the
work of the left-wing intelligentsia, itself a kind of growth that had sprouted
from the stagnation of the Empire.
It should be noted that there is now no intelligentsia that is not in some
sense ‘left’. Perhaps the last right-wing intellectual was T. E. Lawrence.
Since about 1930 everyone describable as an ‘intellectual’ has lived in a
state of chronic discontent with the existing order. Necessarily so, because
society as it was constituted had no room for him. In an Empire that was simply
stagnant, neither being developed nor falling to pieces, and in an England ruled
by people whose chief asset was their stupidity, to be ‘clever’ was to be
suspect. If you had the kind of brain that could understand the poems of T. S.
Eliot or the theories of Karl Marx, the higher-ups would see to it that you were
kept out of any important job. The intellectuals could find a function for
themselves only in the literary reviews and the left-wing political parties.
The mentality of the English left-wing intelligentsia can be studied in half
a dozen weekly and monthly papers. The immediately striking thing about all
these papers is their generally negative, querulous attitude, their complete
lack at all times of any constructive suggestion. There is little in them except
the irresponsible carping of people who have never been and never expect to be
in a position of power. Another marked characteristic is the emotional
shallowness of people who live in a world of ideas and have little contact with
physical reality. Many intellectuals of the Left were flabbily pacifist up to
1935, shrieked for war against Germany in the years 1935-9, and then promptly
cooled off when the war started. It is broadly though not precisely true that
the people who were most ‘anti-Fascist’ during the Spanish Civil War are
most defeatist now. And underlying this is the really important fact about so
many of the English intelligentsia - their severance from the common culture
of the country.
In intention, at any rate, the English intelligentsia are Europeanized. They
take their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow. In the general
patriotism of the country they form a sort of island of dissident thought.
England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of
their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is
something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to
snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings. It is
a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English
intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during ‘God save
the King’ than of stealing from a poor box. All through the critical years
many left-wingers were chipping away at English morale, trying to spread an
outlook that was sometimes squashily pacifist, sometimes violently pro-Russian,
but always anti-British. It is questionable how much effect this had, but it
certainly had some. If the English people suffered for several years a real
weakening of morale, so that the Fascist nations judged that they were ‘decadent’
and that it was safe to plunge into war, the intellectual sabotage from the Left
was partly responsible. Both the New Statesman and the News Chronicle
cried out against the Munich settlement, but even they had done something to
make it possible. Ten years of systematic Blimp-baiting affected even the Blimps
themselves and made it harder than it had been before to get intelligent young
men to enter the armed forces. Given the stagnation of the Empire, the military
middle class must have decayed in any case, but the spread of a shallow Leftism
hastened the process.
It is clear that the special position of the English intellectuals during the
past ten years, as purely negative creatures, mere anti-Blimps, was a
by-product of ruling-class stupidity. Society could not use them, and they had
not got it in them to see that devotion to one’s country implies ‘for
better, for worse’. Both Blimps and highbrows took for granted, as though it
were a law of nature, the divorce between patriotism and intelligence. If you
were a patriot you read Blackwood’s Magazine and publicly thanked God
that you were ‘not brainy’. If you were an intellectual you sniggered at the
Union Jack and regarded physical courage as barbarous. It is obvious that this
preposterous convention cannot continue. The Bloomsbury highbrow, with his
mechanical snigger, is as out-of-date as the cavalry colonel. A modern nation
cannot afford either of them. Patriotism and intelligence will have to come
together again. It is the fact that we are fighting a war, and a very peculiar
kind of war, that may make this possible.
VI
One of the most important developments in England during the past twenty
years has been the upward and downward extension of the middle class. It has
happened on such a scale as to make the old classification of society into
capitalists, proletarians and petit bourgeois (small property-owners) almost
obsolete.
England is a country in which property and financial power are concentrated
in very few hands. Few people in modern England own anything at all,
except clothes, furniture and possibly a house. The peasantry have long since
disappeared, the independent shopkeeper is being destroyed, the small
businessman is diminishing in numbers. But at the same time modern industry is
so complicated that it cannot get along without great numbers of managers,
salesmen, engineers, chemists and technicians of all kinds, drawing fairly large
salaries. And these in turn call into being a professional class of doctors,
lawyers, teachers, artists, etc. etc. The tendency of advanced capitalism has
therefore been to enlarge the middle class and not to wipe it out as it once
seemed likely to do.
But much more important than this is the spread of middle-class ideas and
habits among the working class. The British working class are now better off in
almost all ways than they were thirty years ago. This is partly due to the
efforts of the trade unions, but partly to the mere advance of physical science.
It is not always realized that within rather narrow limits the standard of life
of a country can rise without a corresponding rise in real wages. Up to a point,
civilization can lift itself up by its boot-tags. However unjustly society is
organized, certain technical advances are bound to benefit the whole community,
because certain kinds of goods are necessarily held in common. A millionaire
cannot, for example, light the streets for himself while darkening them for
other people. Nearly all citizens of civilized countries now enjoy the use of
good roads, germ-free water, police protection, free libraries and probably free
education of a kind. Public education in England has been meanly starved of
money, but it has nevertheless improved, largely owing to the devoted efforts of
the teachers, and the habit of reading has become enormously more widespread. To
an increasing extent the rich and the poor read the same books, and they also
see the same films and listen to the same radio programmes. And the differences
in their way of life have been diminished by the mass-production of cheap
clothes and improvements in housing. So far as outward appearance goes, the
clothes of rich and poor, especially in the case of women, differ far less than
they did thirty or even fifteen years ago. As to housing, England still has
slums which are a blot on civilization, but much building has been done during
the past ten years, largely by the local authorities. The modern council house,
with its bathroom and electric light, is smaller than the stockbroker’s villa,
but it is recognizably the same kind of house, which the farm labourer’s
cottage is not. A person who has grown up in a council housing estate is likely
to be - indeed, visibly is - more middle class in outlook than a
person who has grown up in a slum.
The effect of all this is a general softening of manners. It is enhanced by
the fact that modern industrial methods tend always to demand less muscular
effort and therefore to leave people with more energy when their day’s work is
done. Many workers in the light industries are less truly manual labourers than
is a doctor or a grocer. In tastes, habits, manners and outlook the working
class and the middle class are drawing together. The unjust distinctions remain,
but the real differences diminish. The old-style ‘proletarian’ -
collarless, unshaven and with muscles warped by heavy labour - still exists,
but he is constantly decreasing in numbers; he only predominates in the
heavy-industry areas of the north of England.
After 1918 there began to appear something that had never existed in England
before: people of indeterminate social class. In 1910 every human being in these
islands could be ‘placed’ in an instant by his clothes, manners and accent.
That is no longer the case. Above all, it is not the case in the new townships
that have developed as a result of cheap motor cars and the southward shift of
industry. The place to look for the germs of the future England is in
light-industry areas and along the arterial roads. In Slough, Dagenham, Barnet,
Letchworth, Hayes - everywhere, indeed, on the outskirts of great towns -
the old pattern is gradually changing into something new. In those vast new
wildernesses of glass and brick the sharp distinctions of the older kind of
town, with its slums and mansions, or of the country, with its manor-houses and
squalid cottages, no longer exist. There are wide gradations of income, but it
is the same kind of life that is being lived at different levels, in
labour-saving flats or council houses, along the concrete roads and in the naked
democracy of the swimming-pools. It is a rather restless, cultureless life,
centring round tinned food, Picture Post, the radio and the internal
combustion engine. It is a civilization in which children grow up with an
intimate knowledge of magnetoes and in complete ignorance of the Bible. To that
civilization belong the people who are most at home in and most definitely of
the modern world, the technicians and the higher-paid skilled workers, the
airmen and their mechanics, the radio experts, film producers, popular
journalists and industrial chemists. They are the indeterminate stratum at which
the older class distinctions are beginning to break down.
This war, unless we are defeated, will wipe out most of the existing class
privileges. There are every day fewer people who wish them to continue. Nor need
we fear that as the pattern changes life in England will lose its peculiar
flavour. The new red cities of Greater London are crude enough, but these things
are only the rash that accompanies a change. In whatever shape England emerges
from the war it will be deeply tinged with the characteristics that I have
spoken of earlier. The intellectuals who hope to see it Russianized or
Germanized will be disappointed. The gentleness, the hypocrisy, the
thoughtlessness, the reverence for law and the hatred of uniforms will remain,
along with the suet puddings and the misty skies. It needs some very great
disaster, such as prolonged subjugation by a foreign enemy, to destroy a
national culture. The Stock Exchange will be pulled down, the horse plough will
give way to the tractor, the country houses will be turned into children’s
holiday camps, the Eton and Harrow match will be forgotten, but England will
still be England, an everlasting animal stretching into the future and the past,
and, like all living things, having the power to change out of recognition and
yet remain the same.
PART II: SHOPKEEPERS AT WAR
I
I began this book to the tune of German bombs, and I begin this second
chapter in the added racket of the barrage. The yellow gun-flashes are lighting
the sky, the splinters are rattling on the housetops, and London Bridge is
falling down, falling down, falling down. Anyone able to read a map knows that
we are in deadly danger. I do not mean that we are beaten or need be beaten.
Almost certainly the outcome depends on our own will. But at this moment we are
in the soup, full fathom five, and we have been brought there by follies which
we are still committing and which will drown us altogether if we do not mend our
ways quickly.
What this war has demonstrated is that private capitalism - that is, an
economic system in which land, factories, mines and transport are owned
privately and operated solely for profit - does not work. It cannot
deliver the goods. This fact had been known to millions of people for years
past, but nothing ever came of it, because there was no real urge from below to
alter the system, and those at the top had trained themselves to be impenetrably
stupid on just this point. Argument and propaganda got one nowhere. The lords of
property simply sat on their bottoms and proclaimed that all was for the best.
Hitler’s conquest of Europe, however, was a physical debunking of
capitalism. War, for all its evil, is at any rate an unanswerable test of
strength, like a try-your-grip machine. Great strength returns the penny, and
there is no way of faking the result.
When the nautical screw was first invented, there was a controversy that
lasted for years as to whether screw-steamers or paddle-steamers were better.
The paddle-steamers, like all obsolete things, had their champions, who
supported them by ingenious arguments. Finally, however, a distinguished admiral
tied a screw-steamer and a paddle-steamer of equal horsepower stern to stern and
set their engines running. That settled the question once and for all. And it
was something similar that happened on the fields of Norway and of Flanders.
Once and for all it was proved that a planned economy is stronger than a
planless one. But it is necessary here to give some kind of definition to those
much-abused words, Socialism and Fascism.
Socialism is usually defined as ‘common ownership of the means of
production.’ Crudely: the State, representing the whole nation, owns
everything, and everyone is a State employee. This does not mean that
people are stripped of private possessions such as clothes and furniture, but it
does mean that all productive goods, such as land, mines, ships and
machinery, are the property of the State. The State is the sole large-scale
producer. It is not certain that Socialism is in all ways superior to
capitalism, but it is certain that, unlike capitalism, it can solve the problems
of production and consumption. At normal times a capitalist economy can never
consume all that it produces, so that there is always a wasted surplus (wheat
burned in furnaces, herrings dumped back into the sea etc. etc.) and always
unemployment. In time of war, on the other hand, it has difficulty in producing
all that it needs, because nothing is produced unless someone sees his way to
making a profit out of it.
In a Socialist economy these problems do not exist. The State simply
calculates what goods will be needed and does its best to produce them.
Production is only limited by the amount of labour and raw materials. Money, for
internal purposes, ceases to be a mysterious all-powerful thing and becomes a
sort of coupon or ration-ticket, issued in sufficient quantities to buy up such
consumption goods as may be available at the moment.
However, it has become clear in the last few years that ‘common ownership
of the means of production’ is not in itself a sufficient definition of
Socialism. One must also add the following: approximate equality of incomes (it
need be no more than approximate), political democracy, and abolition of all
hereditary privilege, especially in education. These are simply the necessary
safeguards against the reappearance of a class-system. Centralized ownership has
very little meaning unless the mass of the people are living roughly upon an
equal level, and have some kind of control over the government. ‘The State’
may come to mean no more than a self-elected political party, and oligarchy and
privilege can return, based on power rather than on money.
But what then is Fascism?
Fascism, at any rate the German version, is a form of capitalism that borrows
from Socialism just such features as will make it efficient for war purposes.
Internally, Germany has a good deal in common with a Socialist state. Ownership
has never been abolished, there are still capitalists and workers, and - this
is the important point, and the real reason why rich men all over the world tend
to sympathize with Fascism - generally speaking the same people are
capitalists and the same people workers as before the Nazi revolution. But at
the same time the State, which is simply the Nazi Party, is in control of
everything. It controls investment, raw materials, rates of interest, working
hours, wages. The factory owner still owns his factory, but he is for practical
purposes reduced to the status of a manager. Everyone is in effect a State
employee, though the salaries vary very greatly. The mere efficiency of
such a system, the elimination of waste and obstruction, is obvious. In seven
years it has built up the most powerful war machine the world has ever seen.
But the idea underlying Fascism is irreconcilably different from that which
underlies Socialism. Socialism aims, ultimately, at a world-state of free and
equal human beings. It takes the equality of human rights for granted. Nazism
assumes just the opposite. The driving force behind the Nazi movement is the
belief in human inequality, the superiority of Germans to all other
races, the right of Germany to rule the world. Outside the German Reich it does
not recognize any obligations. Eminent Nazi professors have ‘proved’ over
and over again that only nordic man is fully human, have even mooted the idea
that non-nordic peoples (such as ourselves) can interbreed with gorillas!
Therefore, while a species of war-Socialism exists within the German state, its
attitude towards conquered nations is frankly that of an exploiter. The function
of the Czechs, Poles, French, etc. is simply to produce such goods as Germany
may need, and get in return just as little as will keep them from open
rebellion. If we are conquered, our job will probably be to manufacture weapons
for Hitler’s forthcoming wars with Russia and America. The Nazis aim, in
effect, at setting up a kind of caste system, with four main castes
corresponding rather closely to those of the Hindu religion. At the top comes
the Nazi party, second come the mass of the German people, third come the
conquered European populations. Fourth and last are to come the coloured
peoples, the ‘semi-apes’ as Hitler calls them, who are to be reduced quite
openly to slavery.
However horrible this system may seem to us, it works. It works
because it is a planned system geared to a definite purpose, world-conquest, and
not allowing any private interest, either of capitalist or worker, to stand in
its way. British capitalism does not work, because it is a competitive system in
which private profit is and must be the main objective. It is a system in which
all the forces are pulling in opposite directions and the interests of the
individual are as often as not totally opposed to those of the State.
All through the critical years British capitalism, with its immense
industrial plant and its unrivalled supply of skilled labour, was unequal to the
strain of preparing for war. To prepare for war on the modern scale you have got
to divert the greater part of your national income to armaments, which means
cutting down on consumption goods. A bombing plane, for instance, is equivalent
in price to fifty small motor cars, or eight thousand pairs of silk stockings,
or a million loaves of bread. Clearly you can’t have many bombing
planes without lowering the national standard of life. It is guns or butter, as
Marshal Goering remarked. But in Chamberlain’s England the transition could
not be made. The rich would not face the necessary taxation, and while the rich
are still visibly rich it is not possible to tax the poor very heavily either.
Moreover, so long as profit was the main object the manufacturer had no
incentive to change over from consumption goods to armaments. A businessman’s
first duty is to his shareholders. Perhaps England needs tanks, but perhaps it
pays better to manufacture motor cars. To prevent war material from reaching the
enemy is common sense, but to sell in the highest market is a business duty.
Right at the end of August 1939 the British dealers were tumbling over one
another in their eagerness to sell Germany tin, rubber, copper and shellac -
and this in the clear, certain knowledge that war was going to break out in a
week or two. It was about as sensible as selling somebody a razor to cut your
throat with. But it was ‘good business’.
And now look at the results. After 1934 it was known that Germany was
rearming. After 1936 everyone with eyes in his head knew that war was coming.
After Munich it was merely a question of how soon the war would begin. In
September 1939 war broke out. Eight months later it was discovered that,
so far as equipment went, the British army was barely beyond the standard of
1918. We saw our soldiers fighting their way desperately to the coast, with one
aeroplane against three, with rifles against tanks, with bayonets against
tommy-guns. There were not even enough revolvers to supply all the officers.
After a year of war the regular army was still short of 300,000 tin hats. There
had even, previously, been a shortage of uniforms - this in one of the
greatest woollen-goods producing countries in the world!
What had happened was that the whole moneyed class, unwilling to face a
change in their way of life, had shut their eyes to the nature of Fascism and
modern war. And false optimism was fed to the general public by the gutter
press, which lives on its advertisements and is therefore interested in keeping
trade conditions normal. Year after year the Beaverbrook press assured us in
huge headlines that THERE WILL BE NO WAR, and as late as the beginning of 1939
Lord Rothermere was describing Hitler as ‘a great gentleman’. And while
England in the moment of disaster proved to be short of every war material
except ships, it is not recorded that there was any shortage of motor cars, fur
coats, gramophones, lipstick, chocolates or silk stockings. And dare anyone
pretend that the same tug-of-war between private profit and public necessity is
not still continuing? England fights for her life, but business must fight for
profits. You can hardly open a newspaper without seeing the two contradictory
processes happening side by side. On the very same page you will find the
Government urging you to save and the seller of some useless luxury urging you
to spend. Lend to Defend, but Guinness is Good for You. Buy a Spitfire, but also
buy Haig and Haig, Pond’s Face Cream and Black Magic Chocolates.
But one thing gives hope - the visible swing in public opinion. If we can
survive this war, the defeat in Flanders will turn out to have been one of the
great turning-points in English history. In that spectacular disaster the
working class, the middle class and even a section of the business community
could see the utter rottenness of private capitalism. Before that the case
against capitalism had never been proved. Russia, the only definitely
Socialist country, was backward and far away. All criticism broke itself against
the rat-trap faces of bankers and the brassy laughter of stockbrokers.
Socialism? Ha! ha! ha! Where’s the money to come from? Ha! ha! ha! The lords
of property were firm in their seats, and they knew it. But after the French
collapse there came something that could not be laughed away, something that
neither cheque-books nor policemen were any use against - the bombing. Zweee
- BOOM! What’s that? Oh, only a bomb on the Stock Exchange. Zweee - BOOM!
Another acre of somebody’s valuable slum-property gone west. Hitler will at
any rate go down in history as the man who made the City of London laugh on the
wrong side of its face. For the first time in their lives the comfortable were
uncomfortable, the professional optimists had to admit that there was something
wrong. It was a great step forward. From that time onwards the ghastly job of
trying to convince artificially stupefied people that a planned economy might be
better than a free-for-all in which the worst man wins - that job will never
be quite so ghastly again.
II
The difference between Socialism and capitalism is not primarily a difference
of technique. One cannot simply change from one system to the other as one might
install a new piece of machinery in a factory, and then carry on as before, with
the same people in positions of control. Obviously there is also needed a
complete shift of power. New blood, new men, new ideas - in the true sense of
the word, a revolution.
I have spoken earlier of the soundness and homogeneity of England, the
patriotism that runs like a connecting thread through almost all classes. After
Dunkirk anyone who had eyes in his head could see this. But it is absurd to
pretend that the promise of that moment has been fulfilled. Almost certainly the
mass of the people are now ready for the vast changes that are necessary; but
those changes have not even begun to happen.
England is a family with the wrong members in control. Almost entirely we are
governed by the rich, and by people who step into positions of command by right
of birth. Few if any of these people are consciously treacherous, some of them
are not even fools, but as a class they are quite incapable of leading us to
victory. They could not do it, even if their material interests did not
constantly trip them up. As I pointed out earlier, they have been artificially
stupefied. Quite apart from anything else, the rule of money sees to it that we
shall be governed largely by the old - that is, by people utterly unable to
grasp what age they are living in or what enemy they are fighting. Nothing was
more desolating at the beginning of this war than the way in which the whole of
the older generation conspired to pretend that it was the war of 1914-18 over
again. All the old duds were back on the job, twenty years older, with the skull
plainer in their faces. Ian Hay was cheering up the troops, Belloc was writing
articles on strategy, Maurois doing broadcasts, Bairnsfather drawing cartoons.
It was like a tea-party of ghosts. And that state of affairs has barely altered.
The shock of disaster brought a few able men like Bevin to the front, but in
general we are still commanded by people who managed to live through the years
1931-9 without even discovering that Hitler was dangerous. A generation of the
unteachable is hanging upon us like a necklace of corpses.
As soon as one considers any problem of this war - and it does not matter
whether it is the widest aspect of strategy or the tiniest detail of home
organization - one sees that the necessary moves cannot be made while the
social structure of England remains what it is. Inevitably, because of their
position and upbringing, the ruling class are fighting for their own privileges,
which cannot possibly be reconciled with the public interest. It is a mistake to
imagine that war aims, strategy, propaganda and industrial organization exist in
watertight compartments. All are interconnected. Every strategic plan, every
tactical method, even every weapon will bear the stamp of the social system that
produced it. The British ruling class are fighting against Hitler, whom they
have always regarded and whom some of them still regard as their protector
against Bolshevism. That does not mean that they will deliberately sell out; but
it does mean that at every decisive moment they are likely to falter, pull their
punches, do the wrong thing.
Until the Churchill Government called some sort of halt to the process, they
have done the wrong thing with an unerring instinct ever since 1931. They helped
Franco to overthrow the Spanish Government, although anyone not an imbecile
could have told them that a Fascist Spain would be hostile to England. They fed
Italy with war materials all through the winter of 1939-40, although it was
obvious to the whole world that the Italians were going to attack us in the
spring. For the sake of a few hundred thousand dividend-drawers they are turning
India from an ally into an enemy. Moreover, so long as the moneyed classes
remain in control, we cannot develop any but a defensive strategy. Every
victory means a change in the status quo. How can we drive the Italians
out of Abyssinia without rousing echoes among the coloured peoples of our own
Empire? How can we even smash Hitler without the risk of bringing the German
Socialists and Communists into power? The left-wingers who wail that ‘this is
a capitalist war’ and that ‘British Imperialism’ is fighting for loot have
got their heads screwed on backwards. The last thing the British moneyed class
wish for is to acquire fresh territory. It would simply be an embarrassment.
Their war aim (both unattainable and unmentionable) is simply to hang on to what
they have got.
Internally, England is still the rich man’s Paradise. All talk of ‘equality
of sacrifice’ is nonsense. At the same time as factory-workers are asked to
put up with longer hours, advertisements for ‘Butler. One in family, eight in
staff ‘ are appearing in the press. The bombed-out populations of the East End
go hungry and homeless while wealthier victims simply step into their cars and
flee to comfortable country houses. The Home Guard swells to a million men in a
few weeks, and is deliberately organized from above in such a way that only
people with private incomes can hold positions of command. Even the rationing
system is so arranged that it hits the poor all the time, while people with over
£2,000 a year are practically unaffected by it. Everywhere privilege is
squandering good will. In such circumstances even propaganda becomes almost
impossible. As attempts to stir up patriotic feeling, the red posters issued by
the Chamberlain Government at the beginning of the war broke all depth-records.
Yet they could not have been much other than they were, for how could
Chamberlain and his followers take the risk of rousing strong popular feeling against
Fascism? Anyone who was genuinely hostile to Fascism must also be opposed
to Chamberlain himself and to all the others who had helped Hitler into power.
So also with external propaganda. In all Lord Halifax’s speeches there is not
one concrete proposal for which a single inhabitant of Europe would risk the top
joint of his little finger. For what war aim can Halifax, or anyone like him,
conceivably have, except to put the clock back to 1933?
It is only by revolution that the native genius of the English people can be
set free. Revolution does not mean red flags and street fighting, it means a
fundamental shift of power. Whether it happens with or without bloodshed is
largely an accident of time and place. Nor does it mean the dictatorship of a
single class. The people in England who grasp what changes are needed and are
capable of carrying them through are not confined to any one class, though it is
true that very few people with over £2,000 a year are among them. What is
wanted is a conscious open revolt by ordinary people against inefficiency, class
privilege and the rule of the old. It is not primarily a question of change of
government. British governments do, broadly speaking, represent the will of the
people, and if we alter our structure from below we shall get the government we
need. Ambassadors, generals, officials and colonial administrators who are
senile or pro-Fascist are more dangerous than Cabinet ministers whose follies
have to be committed in public. Right through our national life we have got to
fight against privilege, against the notion that a half-witted public-schoolboy
is better for command than an intelligent mechanic. Although there are gifted
and honest individuals among them, we have got to break the grip of the
moneyed class as a whole. England has got to assume its real shape. The England
that is only just beneath the surface, in the factories and the newspaper
offices, in the aeroplanes and the submarines, has got to take charge of its own
destiny.
In the short run, equality of sacrifice, ‘war-Communism’, is even more
important than radical economic changes. It is very necessary that industry
should be nationalized, but it is more urgently necessary that such
monstrosities as butlers and ‘private incomes’ should disappear forthwith.
Almost certainly the main reason why the Spanish Republic could keep up the
fight for two and a half years against impossible odds was that there were no
gross contrasts of wealth. The people suffered horribly, but they all suffered
alike. When the private soldier had not a cigarette, the general had not one
either. Given equality of sacrifice, the morale of a country like England would
probably be unbreakable. But at present we have nothing to appeal to except
traditional patriotism, which is deeper here than elsewhere, but is not
necessarily bottomless. At some point or another you have got to deal with the
man who says ‘I should be no worse off under Hitler.’ But what answer can
you give him - that is, what answer that you can expect him to listen to -
while common soldiers risk their lives for two and sixpence a day, and fat women
ride about in Rolls-Royce cars, nursing pekineses?
It is quite likely that this war will last three years. It will mean cruel
overwork, cold dull winters, uninteresting food, lack of amusements, prolonged
bombing. It cannot but lower the general standard of living, because theessential act of war is to manufacture armaments instead of consumable goods.
The working class will have to suffer terrible things. And they will
suffer them, almost indefinitely, provided that they know what they are fighting
for. They are not cowards, and they are not even internationally minded. They
can stand all that the Spanish workers stood, and more. But they will want some
kind of proof that a better life is ahead for themselves and their children. The
one sure earnest of that is that when they are taxed and overworked they shall
see that the rich are being hit even harder. And if the rich squeal audibly, so
much the better.
We can bring these things about, if we really want to. It is not true that
public opinion has no power in England. It never makes itself heard without
achieving something; it has been responsible for most of the changes for the
better during the past six months. But we have moved with glacier-like slowness,
and we have learned only from disasters. It took the fall of Paris to get rid of
Chamberlain and the unnecessary suffering of scores of thousands of people in
the East End to get rid or partially rid of Sir John Anderson. It is not worth
losing a battle in order to bury a corpse. For we are fighting against swift
evil intelligences, and time presses, and
history to the defeated
May say Alas! but cannot alter or pardon.
III
During the last six months there has been much talk of ‘the Fifth Column’.
From time to time obscure lunatics have been jailed for making speeches in
favour of Hitler, and large numbers of German refugees have been interned, a
thing which has almost certainly done us great harm in Europe. It is of course
obvious that the idea of a large, organized army of Fifth Columnists suddenly
appearing on the streets with weapons in their hands, as in Holland and Belgium,
is ridiculous. Nevertheless a Fifth Column danger does exist. One can only
consider it if one also considers in what way England might be defeated.
It does not seem probable that air bombing can settle a major war. England
might well be invaded and conquered, but the invasion would be a dangerous
gamble, and if it happened and failed it would probably leave us more united and
less Blimp-ridden than before. Moreover, if England were overrun by foreign
troops the English people would know that they had been beaten and would
continue the struggle. It is doubtful whether they could be held down
permanently, or whether Hitler wishes to keep an army of a million men stationed
in these islands. A government of -, - and - (you can fill in the names)
would suit him better. The English can probably not be bullied into surrender,
but they might quite easily be bored, cajoled or cheated into it, provided that,
as at Munich, they did not know that they were surrendering. It could happen
most easily when the war seemed to be going well rather than badly. The
threatening tone of so much of the German and Italian propaganda is a
psychological mistake. It only gets home on intellectuals. With the general
public the proper approach would be ‘Let’s call it a draw’. It is when a
peace-offer along those lines is made that the pro-Fascists will raise
their voices.
But who are the pro-Fascists? The idea of a Hitler victory appeals to the
very rich, to the Communists, to Mosley’s followers, to the pacifists, and to
certain sections among the Catholics. Also, if things went badly enough on the
Home Front, the whole of the poorer section of the working class might swing
round to a position that was defeatist though not actively pro-Hitler.
In this motley list one can see the daring of German propaganda, its
willingness to offer everything to everybody. But the various pro-Fascist forces
are not consciously acting together, and they operate in different ways.
The Communists must certainly be regarded as pro-Hitler, and are bound to
remain so unless Russian policy changes, but they have not very much influence.
Mosley’s Blackshirts, though now lying very low, are a more serious danger,
because of the footing they probably possess in the armed forces. Still, even in
its palmiest days Mosley’s following can hardly have numbered 50,000. Pacifism
is a psychological curiosity rather than a political movement. Some of the
extremer pacifists, starting out with a complete renunciation of violence, have
ended by warmly championing Hitler and even toying with antisemitism. This is
interesting, but it is not important. ‘Pure’ pacifism, which is a by-product
of naval power, can only appeal to people in very sheltered positions. Moreover,
being negative and irresponsible, it does not inspire much devotion. Of the
membership of the Peace Pledge Union, less than fifteen per cent even pay their
annual subscriptions. None of these bodies of people, pacifists, Communists or
Blackshirts, could bring a large-scale stop-the-war movement into being by their
own efforts. But they might help to make things very much easier for a
treacherous government negotiating surrender. Like the French Communists, they
might become the half-conscious agents of millionaires.
The real danger is from above. One ought not to pay any attention to Hitler’s
recent line of talk about being the friend of the poor man, the enemy of
plutocracy, etc. etc. Hitler’s real self is in Mein Kampf, and in his
actions. He has never persecuted the rich, except when they were Jews or when
they tried actively to oppose him. He stands for a centralized economy which
robs the capitalist of most of his power but leaves the structure of society
much as before. The State controls industry, but there are still rich and poor,
masters and men. Therefore, as against genuine Socialism, the moneyed class have
always been on his side. This was crystal clear at the time of the Spanish Civil
War, and clear again at the time when France surrendered. Hitler’s puppet
government are not working men, but a gang of bankers, gaga generals and corrupt
right-wing politicians.
That kind of spectacular, conscious treachery is less likely to
succeed in England, indeed is far less likely even to be tried. Nevertheless, to
many payers of supertax this war is simply an insane family squabble which ought
to be stopped at all costs. One need not doubt that a ‘peace’ movement is on
foot somewhere in high places; probably a shadow Cabinet has already been
formed. These people will get their chance not in the moment of defeat but in
some stagnant period when boredom is reinforced by discontent. They will not
talk about surrender, only about peace; and doubtless they will persuade
themselves, and perhaps other people, that they are acting for the best. An army
of unemployed led by millionaires quoting the Sermon on the Mount - that is
our danger. But it cannot arise when we have once introduced a reasonable degree
of social justice. The lady in the Rolls-Royce car is more damaging to morale
than a fleet of Goering’s bombing planes.
PART THREE: THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION
I
The English revolution started several years ago, and it began to gather
momentum when the troops came back from Dunkirk. Like all else in England, it
happens in a sleepy, unwilling way, but it is happening. The war has speeded it
up, but it has also increased, and desperately, the necessity for speed.
Progress and reaction are ceasing to have anything to do with party labels.
If one wishes to name a particular moment, one can say that the old distinction
between Right and Left broke down when Picture Post was first published.
What are the politics of Picture Post? Or of Cavalcade, or
Priestley’s broadcasts, or the leading articles in the Evening Standard?
None of the old classifications will fit them. They merely point to the
existence of multitudes of unlabelled people who have grasped within the last
year or two that something is wrong. But since a classless, ownerless society is
generally spoken of as ‘Socialism’, we can give that name to the society
towards which we are now moving. The war and the revolution are inseparable. We
cannot establish anything that a western nation would regard as Socialism
without defeating Hitler; on the hand we cannot defeat Hitler while we remain
economically and socially in the nineteenth century. The past is fighting the
future and we have two years, a year, possibly only a few months, to see to it
that the future wins.
We cannot look to this or to any similar government to put through the
necessary changes of its own accord. The initiative will have to come from
below. That means that there will have to arise something that has never existed
in England, a Socialist movement that actually has the mass of the people behind
it. But one must start by recognizing why it is that English Socialism has
failed.
In England there is only one Socialist party that has ever seriously
mattered, the Labour Party. It has never been able to achieve any major change,
because except in purely domestic matters it has never possessed a genuinely
independent policy. It was and is primarily a party of the trade unions, devoted
to raising wages and improving working conditions. This meant that all through
the critical years it was directly interested in the prosperity of British
capitalism. In particular it was interested in the maintenance of the British
Empire, for the wealth of England was drawn largely from Asia and Africa. The
standard of living of the trade-union workers, whom the Labour Party
represented, depended indirectly on the sweating of Indian coolies. At the same
time the Labour Party was a Socialist party, using Socialist phraseology,
thinking in terms of an old-fashioned anti-imperialism and more or less pledged
to make restitution to the coloured races. It had to stand for the ‘independence’
of India, just as it had to stand for disarmament and ‘progress’ generally.
Nevertheless everyone was aware that this was nonsense. In the age of the tank
and the bombing plane, backward agricultural countries like India and the
African colonies can no more be independent than can a cat or a dog. Had any
Labour government come into office with a clear majority and then proceeded to
grant India anything that could truly be called independence, India would simply
have been absorbed by Japan, or divided between Japan and Russia.
To a Labour government in power, three imperial policies would have been
open. One was to continue administering the Empire exactly as before, which
meant dropping all pretensions to Socialism. Another was to set the subject
peoples ‘free’, which meant in practice handing them over to Japan, Italy
and other predatory powers, and incidentally causing a catastrophic drop in the
British standard of living. The third was to develop a positive imperial
policy, and aim at transforming the Empire into a federation of Socialist
states, like a looser and freer version of the Union of Soviet Republics. But
the Labour Party’s history and background made this impossible. It was a party
of the trade unions, hopelessly parochial in outlook, with little interest in
imperial affairs and no contacts among the men who actually held the Empire
together. It would have had to hand the administration of India and Africa and
the whole job of imperial defence to men drawn from a different class and
traditionally hostile to Socialism. Overshadowing everything was the doubt
whether a Labour government which meant business could make itself obeyed. For
all the size of its following, the Labour Party had no footing in the navy,
fleet or none in the army or air force, none whatever in the Colonial Services,
and not even a sure footing in the Home Civil Service. In England its position
was strong but not unchallengeable, and outside England all the points were in
the hands of its enemies. Once in power, the same dilemma would always have
faced it: carry out your promises, and risk revolt, or continue with the same
policy as the Conservatives, and stop talking about Socialism. The Labour
leaders never found a solution, and from 1935 onwards it was very doubtful
whether they had any wish to take office. They had degenerated into a Permanent
Opposition.
Outside the Labour Party there existed several extremist parties, of whom the
Communists were the strongest. The Communists had considerable influence in the
Labour Party in the years 1920-26 and 1935-9. Their chief importance, and that
of the whole left wing of the Labour movement, was the part they played in
alienating the middle classes from Socialism.
The history of the past seven years has made it perfectly clear that
Communism has no chance in western Europe. The appeal of Fascism is enormously
greater. In one country after another the Communists have been rooted out by
their more up-to-date enemies, the Nazis. In the English-speaking countries they
never had a serious footing. The creed they were spreading could appeal only to
a rather rare type of person, found chiefly in the middle-class intelligentsia,
the type who has ceased to love his own country but still feels the need of
patriotism, and therefore develops patriotic sentiments towards Russia. By 1940,
after working for twenty years and spending a great deal a money, the British
Communists had barely 20,000 members, actually a smaller number than they had
started out with in 1920. The other Marxist parties were of even less
importance. They had not the Russian money and prestige behind them, and even
more than the Communists they were tied to the nineteenth-century doctrine of
the class war. They continued year after year to preach this out-of-date gospel,
and never drew any inference from the fact that it got them no followers.
Nor did any strong native Fascist movement grow up. Material conditions were
not bad enough, and no leader who could be taken seriously was forthcoming. One
would have had to look a long time to find a man more barren of ideas than Sir
Oswald Mosley. He was as hollow as a jug. Even the elementary fact that Fascism
must not offend national sentiment had escaped him. His entire movement was
imitated slavishly from abroad, the uniform and the party programme from Italy
and the salute from Germany, with the Jew-baiting tacked on as an afterthought,
Mosley having actually started his movement with Jews among his most prominent
followers. A man of the stamp of Bottomley or Lloyd George could perhaps have
brought a real British Fascist movement into existence. But such leaders only
appear when the psychological need for them exists.
After twenty years of stagnation and unemployment, the entire English
Socialist movement was unable to produce a version of Socialism which the mass
of the people could even find desirable. The Labour Party stood for a timid
reformism, the Marxists were looking at the modern world through
nineteenth-century spectacles. Both ignored agriculture and imperial problems,
and both antagonized the middle classes. The suffocating stupidity of left-wing
propaganda had frightened away whole classes of necessary people, factory
managers, airmen, naval officers, farmers, white-collar workers, shopkeepers,
policemen. All of these people had been taught to think of Socialism as
something which menaced their livelihood, or as something seditious, alien, ‘anti-British’
as they would have called it. Only the intellectuals, the least useful section
of the middle class, gravitated towards the movement.
A Socialist Party which genuinely wished to achieve anything would have
started by facing several facts which to this day are considered unmentionable
in left-wing circles. It would have recognized that England is more united than
most countries, that the British workers have a great deal to lose besides their
chains, and that the differences in outlook and habits between class and class
are rapidly diminishing. In general, it would have recognized that the
old-fashioned ‘proletarian revolution’ is an impossibility. But all through
the between-war years no Socialist programme that was both revolutionary and
workable ever appeared; basically, no doubt, because no one genuinely wanted any
major change to happen. The Labour leaders wanted to go on and on, drawing their
salaries and periodically swapping jobs with the Conservatives. The Communists
wanted to go on and on, suffering a comfortable martyrdom, meeting with endless
defeats and afterwards putting the blame on other people. The left-wing
intelligentsia wanted to go on and on, sniggering at the Blimps, sapping away at
middle-class morale, but still keeping their favoured position as hangers-on of
the dividend-drawers. Labour Party politics had become a variant of
Conservatism, ‘revolutionary’ politics had become a game of make-believe.
Now however, the circumstances have changed, the drowsy years have ended.
Being a Socialist no longer means kicking theoretically against a system which
in practice you are fairly well satisfied with. This time our predicament is
real. It is ‘the Philistines be upon thee, Samson’. We have got to make our
words take physical shape, or perish. We know very well that with its present
social structure England cannot survive, and we have got to make other people
see that fact and act upon it. We cannot win the war without introducing
Socialism, nor establish Socialism without winning the war. At such a time it is
possible, as it was not in the peaceful years, to be both revolutionary and
realistic. A Socialist movement which can swing the mass of the people behind
it, drive the pro-Fascists out of positions of control, wipe out the grosser
injustices and let the working class see that they have something to fight for,
win over the middle classes instead of antagonizing them, produce a workable
imperial policy instead of a mixture of humbug and Utopianism, bring patriotism
and intelligence into partnership - for the first time, a movement of such a
kind becomes possible.
II
The fact that we are at war has turned Socialism from a text-book word into a
realizable policy.
The inefficiency of private capitalism has been proved all over Europe. Its
injustice has been proved in the East End of London. Patriotism, against which
the Socialists fought so long, has become a tremendous lever in their hands.
People who at any other time would cling like glue to their miserable scraps of
privilege, will surrender them fast enough when their country is in danger. War
is the greatest of all agents of change. It speeds up all processes, wipes out
minor distinctions, brings realities to the surface. Above all, war brings it
home to the individual that he is not altogether an individual. It is
only because they are aware of this that men will die on the field of battle. At
this moment it is not so much a question of surrendering life as of surrendering
leisure, comfort, economic liberty, social prestige. There are very few people
England who really want to see their country conquered by Germany. If it can be
made clear that defeating Hitler means wiping out class privilege, the great
mass of middling people, the £6 a week to £2,000 a year class, will probably
be on our side. These people are quite indispensable, because they include most
of the technical experts. Obviously the snobbishness and political ignorance of
people like airmen and naval officers will be a very great difficulty. But
without those airmen, destroyer commanders, etc. etc. we could not survive for a
week. The only approach to them is through their patriotism. An intelligent
Socialist movement will use their patriotism, instead of merely insulting
it, as hitherto.
But do I mean that there will no opposition? Of course not. It would be
childish to expect anything of the kind.
There will be a bitter political struggle, and there will be unconscious and
half-conscious sabotage everywhere. At some point or other it may be necessary
to use violence. It is easy to imagine a pro-Fascist rebellion breaking out in,
for instance, India. We shall have to fight against bribery, ignorance and
snobbery. The bankers and the larger businessmen, the landowners and
dividend-drawers, the officials with their prehensile bottoms, will obstruct for
all they are worth. Even the middle class will writhe when their accustomed way
of life is menaced. But just because the English sense of national unity has
never disintegrated because patriotism is finally stronger than class-hatred,
the chances are that the will of the majority will prevail. It is no use
imagining that one can make fundamental changes without causing a split in the
nation; but the treacherous minority will be far smaller in time of war than it
would be at any other time.
The swing of opinion is visibly happening, but it cannot be counted on to
happen fast enough of its own accord. This war is a race between the
consolidation of Hitler’s empire and the growth of democratic consciousness.
Everywhere in England you can see a ding-dong battle ranging to and fro - in
Parliament and in the Government, in the factories and the armed forces, in the
pubs and the air-raid shelters, in the newspapers and on the radio. Every day
there are tiny defeats, tiny victories. Morrison for Home Secretary - a few
yards forward, Priestley shoved off the air - a few yards back. It is a
struggle between the groping and the unteachable, between the young and the old,
between the living and the dead. But it is very necessary that the discontent
which undoubtedly exists should take a purposeful and not merely obstructive
form. It is time for the people to define their war aims. What is wanted
is a simple, concrete programme of action, which can be given all possible
publicity, and round which public opinion can group itself.
I suggest that the following six-point programme is the kind of thing we
need. The first three points deal with England’s internal policy, the other
three with the Empire and the world:
1. Nationalization of land, mines, railways, banks and major industries.
2. Limitation of incomes, on such a scale that the highest tax-free income in
Britain does not exceed the lowest by more than ten to one.
3. Reform of the educational system along democratic lines.
4. Immediate Dominion status for India, with power to secede when the war is
over.
5. Formation of an Imperial General Council, in which the coloured peoples
are to be represented.
6. Declaration of formal alliance with China, Abyssinia and all other victims
of the Fascist powers.
The general tendency of this programme is unmistakable. It aims quite frankly
at turning this war into a revolutionary war and England into a Socialist
democracy. I have deliberately included in it nothing that the simplest person
could not understand and see the reason for. In the form in which I have put it,
it could be printed on the front page of the Daily Mirror. But for the
purposes of this book a certain amount of amplification is needed.
l. Nationalization. One can ‘nationalize’ industry by the stroke
of a pen, but the actual process is slow and complicated. What is needed is that
the ownership of all major industry shall be formally vested in the State,
representing the common people. Once that is done it becomes possible to
eliminate the class of mere owners who live not by virtue of anything
they produce but by the possession of title-deeds and share certificates.
State-ownership implies, therefore, that nobody shall live without working. How
sudden a change in the conduct of industry it implies is less certain. In a
country like England we cannot rip down the whole structure and build again from
the bottom, least of all in time of war. Inevitably the majority of industrial
concerns will continue with much the same personnel as before, the one-time
owners or managing directors carrying on with their jobs as State employees.
There is reason to think that many of the smaller capitalists would actually
welcome some such arrangement. The resistance will come from the big
capitalists, the bankers, the landlords and the idle rich, roughly speaking the
class with over £2,000 a year - and even if one counts in all their
dependants there are not more than half a million of these people in England.
Nationalization of agricultural land implies cutting out the landlord and the
tithe drawer, but not necessarily interfering with the farmer. It is difficult
to imagine any reorganization of English agriculture that would not retain most
of the existing farms as units, at any rate at the beginning. The farmer, when
he is competent, will continue as a salaried manager. He is virtually that
already, with the added disadvantage of having to make a profit and being
permanently in debt to the bank. With certain kinds of petty trading, and even
the small-scale ownership of land, the State will probably not interfere at all.
It would be a great mistake to start by victimizing the smallholder class, for
instance. These people are necessary, on the whole they are competent, and the
amount of work they do depends on the feeling that they are ‘their own masters’.
But the State will certainly impose an upward limit to the ownership of land
(probably fifteen acres at the very most), and will never permit any ownership
of land in town areas.
From the moment that all productive goods have been declared the property of
the State, the common people will feel, as they cannot feel now, that the State is
themselves. They will be ready then to endure the sacrifices that are
ahead of us, war or no war. And even if the face of England hardly seems to
change, on the day that our main industries are formally nationalized the
dominance of a single class will have been broken. From then onwards the
emphasis will be shifted from ownership to management, from privilege to
competence. It is quite possible that State-ownership will in itself bring about
less social change than will be forced upon us by the common hardships of war.
But it is the necessary first step without any real reconstruction is
impossible.
2. Incomes. Limitation of incomes implies the fixing of a minimum
wage, which implies a managed internal currency based simply on the amount of
consumption goods available. And this again implies a stricter rationing scheme
than is now in operation. It is no use at this stage of the world’s history to
suggest that all human beings should have exactly equal incomes. It has
been shown over and over again that without some kind of money reward there is
no incentive to undertake certain jobs. On the other hand the money reward need
not be very large. In practice it is impossible that earnings should be limited
quite as rigidly as I have suggested. There will always be anomalies and
evasions. But there is no reason why ten to one should not be the maximum normal
variation. And within those limits some sense of equality is possible. A man
with £3 a week and a man with £1,500 a year can feel themselves fellow
creatures, which the Duke of Westminster and the sleepers on the Embankment
benches cannot.
3. Education. In wartime, educational reform must necessarily be
promise rather than performance. At the moment we are not in a position to raise
the school-leaving age or increase the teaching staffs of the elementary
schools. But there are certain immediate steps that we could take towards a
democratic educational system. We could start by abolishing the autonomy of the
public schools and the older universities and flooding them with State-aided
pupils chosen simply on grounds of ability. At present, public-school education
is partly a training in class prejudice and partly a sort of tax that the middle
classes pay to the upper class in return for the right to enter certain
professions. It is true that that state of affairs is altering. The middle
classes have begun to rebel against the expensiveness of education, and the war
will bankrupt the majority of the public schools if it continues for another
year or two. The evacuation is also producing certain minor changes. But there
is a danger that some of the older schools, which will be able to weather the
financial storm longest, will survive in some form or another as festering
centres of snobbery. As for the 10,000 ‘private’ schools that England
possesses, the vast majority of them deserve nothing except suppression. They
are simply commercial undertakings, and in many cases their educational level is
actually lower than that of the elementary schools. They merely exist because of
a widespread idea that there is something disgraceful in being educated by the
public authorities. The State could quell this idea by declaring itself
responsible for all education, even if at the start this were no more
than a gesture. We need gestures as well as actions. It is all too obvious that
our talk of ‘defending democracy’ is nonsense while it is a mere accident of
birth that decides whether a gifted child shall or shall not get the education
it deserves.
4. India. What we must offer India is not ‘freedom’, which, I have
said earlier, is impossible, but alliance, partnership - in a word, equality.
But we must also tell the Indians that they are free to secede, if they want to.
Without that there can be no equality of partnership, and our claim to be
defending the coloured peoples against Fascism will never be believed. But it is
a mistake to imagine that if the Indians were free to cut themselves adrift they
would immediately do so. When a British government offers them
unconditional independence, they will refuse it. For as soon as they have the
power to secede the chief reasons for doing so will have disappeared.
A complete severance of the two countries would be a disaster for India no
less than for England. Intelligent Indians know this. As things are at present,
India not only cannot defend itself, it is hardly even capable of feeding
itself. The whole administration of the country depends on a framework of
experts (engineers, forest officers, railwaymen, soldiers, doctors) who are
predominantly English and could not be replaced within five or ten years.
Moreover, English is the chief lingua franca and nearly the whole of the Indian
intelligentsia is deeply anglicized. Any transference to foreign rule - for if
the British marched out of India the Japanese and other powers would immediately
march in - would mean an immense dislocation. Neither the Japanese, the
Russians, the Germans nor the Italians would be capable of administering India
even at the low level of efficiency that is attained by the British. They do not
possess the necessary supplies of technical experts or the knowledge of
languages and local conditions, and they probably could not win the confidence
of indispensable go-betweens such as the Eurasians. If India were simply ‘liberated’,
i.e. deprived of British military protection, the first result would be a fresh
foreign conquest, and the second a series of enormous famines which would kill
millions of people within a few years.
What India needs is the power to work out its own constitution without
British interference, but in some kind of partnership that ensures its military
protection and technical advice. This is unthinkable until there is a Socialist
government in England. For at least eighty years England has artificially
prevented the development of India, partly from fear of trade competition if
India industries were too highly developed, partly because backward peoples are
more easily governed than civilized ones. It is a commonplace that the average
Indian suffers far more from his own countrymen than from the British. The petty
Indian capitalist exploits the town worker with the utmost ruthlessness, the
peasant lives from birth to death in the grip of the money-lender. But all this
is an indirect result of the British rule, which aims half-consciously at
keeping India as backward as possible. The classes most loyal to Britain are the
princes, the landowners and the business community - in general, the
reactionary classes who are doing fairly well out of the status quo. The
moment that England ceased to stand towards India in the relation of an
exploiter, the balance of forces would be altered. No need then for the British
to flatter the ridiculous Indian princes, with their gilded elephants and
cardboard armies, to prevent the growth of the Indian trade unions, to play off
Moslem against Hindu, to protect the worthless life of the money-lender, to
receive the salaams of toadying minor officials, to prefer the half-barbarous
Gurkha to the educated Bengali. Once check that stream of dividends that flows
from the bodies of Indian coolies to the banking accounts of old ladies in
Cheltenham, and the whole sahib-native nexus, with its haughty ignorance on one
side and envy and servility on the other, can come to an end. Englishmen and
Indians can work side by side for the development of India, and for the training
of Indians in all the arts which, so far, they have been systematically
prevented from learning. How many of the existing British personnel in India,
commercial or official, would fall in with such an arrangement - which would
mean ceasing once and for to be ‘sahibs’ - is a different question. But,
broadly speaking, more is to be hoped from the younger men and from those
officials (civil engineers, forestry and agriculture experts, doctors,
educationists) who have been scientifically educated. The higher officials, the
provincial governors, commissioners, judges, etc. are hopeless; but they are
also the most easily replaceable.
That, roughly, is what would be meant by Dominion status if it were offered
to India by a Socialist government. It is an offer of partnership on equal terms
until such time as the world has ceased to be ruled by bombing planes. But we
must add to it the unconditional right to secede. It is the only way of proving
that we mean what we say. And what applies to India applies, mutatis mutandis,
to Burma, Malaya and most of our African possessions.
5 and 6 explain themselves. They are the necessary preliminary to any claim
that we are fighting this war for the protection of peaceful peoples against
Fascist aggression.
Is it impossibly hopeful to think that such a policy as this could get a
following in England? A year ago, even six months ago, it would have been, but
not now. Moreover - and this is the peculiar opportunity of this moment - it
could be given the necessary publicity. There is now a considerable weekly
press, with a circulation of millions, which would be ready to popularize - if
not exactly the programme I have sketched above, at any rate some
policy along those lines. There are even three or four daily papers which would
be prepared to give it a sympathetic hearing. That is the distance we have
travelled in the last six months.
But is such a policy realizable? That depends entirely on ourselves.
Some of the points I have suggested are of the kind that could be carried out
immediately, others would take years or decades and even then would not be
perfectly achieved. No political programme is ever carried out in its entirety.
But what matters is that that or something like it should be our declared
policy. It is always the direction that counts. It is of course quite
hopeless to expect the present Government to pledge itself to any policy that
implies turning this war into a revolutionary war. It is at best a government of
compromise, with Churchill riding two horses like a circus acrobat.
Before such measures as limitation of incomes become even thinkable, there will
have to be complete shift of power away from the old ruling class. If during
this winter the war settles into another stagnant period, we ought in my opinion
to agitate for a General Election, a thing which the Tory Party machine will
make frantic efforts to prevent. But even without an election we can get the
government we want, provided that we want it urgently enough. A real shove from
below will accomplish it. As to who will be in that government when it comes, I
make no guess. I only know that the right men will be there when the people
really want them, for it is movements that make leaders and not leaders
movements.
Within a year, perhaps even within six months, if we are still unconquered,
we shall see the rise of something that has never existed before, a specifically
English Socialist movement. Hitherto there has been only the Labour Party,
which was the creation of the working class but did not aim at any fundamental
change, and Marxism, which was a German theory interpreted by Russians and
unsuccessfully transplanted to England. There was nothing that really touched
the heart of the English people. Throughout its entire history the English
Socialist movement has never produced a song with a catchy tune - nothing like
La Marseillaise or La Cucaracha, for instance. When a Socialist
movement native to England appears, the Marxists, like all others with a vested
interest in the past, will be its bitter enemies. Inevitably they will denounce
it as ’Fascism’. Already it is customary among the more soft-boiled
intellectuals of the Left to declare that if we fight against Nazis we shall ’go
Nazi’ ourselves. They might almost equally well say that if we fight Negroes
we shall turn black. To ‘go Nazi’ we should have to have the history of
Germany behind us. Nations do not escape from their past merely by making a
revolution. An English Socialist government will transform the nation from top
to bottom, but it will still bear all over it the unmistakable marks of our own
civilization, the peculiar civilization which I discussed earlier in this book.
It will not be doctrinaire, nor even logical. It will abolish the House of
Lords, but quite probably will not abolish the Monarchy. It will leave
anachronisms and loose ends everywhere, the judge in his ridiculous horsehair
wig and the lion and the unicorn on the soldier’s cap-buttons. It will not set
up any explicit class dictatorship. It will group itself round the old Labour
Party and its mass following will be in the trade unions, but it will draw into
it most of the middle class and many of the younger sons of the bourgeoisie.
Most of its directing brains will come from the new indeterminate class of
skilled workers, technical experts, airmen, scientists, architects and
journalists, the people who feel at home in the radio and ferro-concrete age.
But it will never lose touch with the tradition of compromise and the belief in
a law that is above the State. It will shoot traitors, but it will give them a
solemn trial beforehand and occasionally it will acquit them. It will crush any
open revolt promptly and cruelly, but it will interfere very little with the
spoken and written word. Political parties with different names will still
exist, revolutionary sects will still be publishing their newspapers and making
as little impression as ever. It will disestablish the Church, but will not
persecute religion. It will retain a vague reverence for the Christian moral
code, and from time to time will refer to England as ‘a Christian country’.
The Catholic Church will war against it, but the Nonconformist sects and the
bulk of the Anglican Church will be able to come to terms with it. It will show
a power of assimilating the past which will shock foreign observers and
sometimes make them doubt whether any revolution has happened.
But all the same it will have done the essential thing. It will have
nationalized industry, scaled down incomes, set up a classless educational
system. Its real nature will be apparent from the hatred which the surviving
rich men of the world will feel for it. It will aim not at disintegrating the
Empire but at turning it into a federation of Socialist states, freed not so
much from the British flag as from the money-lender, the dividend-drawer and the
wooden-headed British official. Its war strategy will be totally different from
that of any property-ruled state, because it will not be afraid of the
revolutionary after-effects when any existing régime is brought down. It will
not have the smallest scruple about attacking hostile neutrals or stirring up
native rebellion in enemy colonies. It will fight in such a way that even if it
is beaten its memory will be dangerous to the victor, as the memory of the
French Revolution was dangerous to Metternich’s Europe. The dictators will
fear it as they could not fear the existing British régime, even if its
military strength were ten times what it is.
But at this moment, when the drowsy life of England has barely altered, and
the offensive contrast of wealth and poverty still exists everywhere, even amid
the bombs, why do I dare to say that all these things ‘will’ happen?
Because the time has come when one can predict the future in terms of an ‘either
- or’. Either we turn this war into a revolutionary war (I do not say that
our policy will be exactly what I have indicated above - merely that it
will be along those general lines) or we lose it, and much more besides. Quite
soon it will be possible to say definitely that our feet are set upon one path
or the other. But at any rate it is certain that with our present social
structure we cannot win. Our real forces, physical, moral or intellectual,
cannot be mobilized.
III
Patriotism has nothing to do with Conservatism. It is actually the opposite
of Conservatism, since it is a devotion to something that is always changing and
yet is felt to be mystically the same. It is the bridge between the future and
the past. No real revolutionary has ever been an internationalist.
During the past twenty years the negative, fainéant outlook which has
been fashionable among English left-wingers, the sniggering of the intellectuals
at patriotism and physical courage, the persistent effort to chip away English
morale and spread a hedonistic, what-do-I-get-out-of-it attitude to life, has
done nothing but harm. It would have been harmful even if we had been living in
the squashy League of Nations universe that these people imagined. In an age of
fuehrers and bombing planes it was a disaster. However little we may like it,
toughness is the price of survival. A nation trained to think hedonistically
cannot survive amid peoples who work like slaves and breed like rabbits, and
whose chief national industry is war. English Socialists of nearly all colours
have wanted to make a stand against Fascism, but at the same time they have
aimed at making their own countrymen unwarlike. They have failed, because in
England traditional loyalties are stronger than new ones. But in spite of all
the ‘anti-Fascist’ heroics of the left-wing press, what chance should we
have stood when the real struggle with Fascism came, if the average Englishman
had been the kind of creature that the New Statesman, the Daily Worker
or even the News Chronicle wished to make him?
Up to 1935 virtually all English left-wingers were vaguely pacifist. After
1935 the more vocal of them flung themselves eagerly into the Popular Front
movement, which was simply an evasion of the whole problem posed by Fascism. It
set out to be ‘anti-Fascist’ in a purely negative way - ‘against’
Fascism without being ‘for’ any discoverable policy - and underneath it
lay the flabby idea that when the time came the Russians would do our fighting
for us. It is astonishing how this illusion fails to die. Every week sees its
spate of letters to the press, pointing out that if we had a government with no
Tories in it the Russians could hardly avoid coming round to our side. Or we are
to publish high-sounding war aims (vide books like Unser Kampf, A
Hundred Million Allies - If We Choose, etc.), whereupon the European
populations will infallibly rise on our behalf. It is the same idea all the time
- look abroad for your inspiration, get someone else to do your fighting for
you. Underneath it lies the frightful inferiority complex of the English
intellectual, the belief that the English are no longer a martial race, no
longer capable of enduring.
In truth there is no reason to think that anyone will do our fighting for us
yet awhile, except the Chinese, who have been doing it for three years already.
[Note 3] The Russians may be driven to fight on our side by
the fact of a direct attack, but they have made it clear enough that they will
not stand up to the German army if there is any way of avoiding it. In any case
they are not likely to be attracted by the spectacle of a left-wing government
in England. The present Russian régime must almost certainly be hostile to any
revolution in the West. The subject peoples of Europe will rebel when Hitler
begins to totter, but not earlier. Our potential allies are not the Europeans
but on the one hand the Americans, who will need a year to mobilize their
resources even if Big Business can be brought to heel, and on the other hand the
coloured peoples, who cannot be even sentimentally on our side till our own
revolution has started. For a long time, a year, two years, possibly three
years, England has got to be the shock-absorber of the world. We have got to
face bombing, hunger, overwork, influenza, boredom and treacherous peace offers.
Manifestly it is a time to stiffen morale, not to weaken it. Instead of taking
the mechanically anti-British attitude which is usual on the Left, it is better
to consider what the world would really be like if the English-speaking culture
perished. For it is childish to suppose that the other English-speaking
countries, even the U.S.A., will be unaffected if Britain is conquered.
Lord Halifax, and all his tribe, believe that when the war is over things
will be exactly as they were before. Back to the crazy pavement of Versailles,
back to ‘democracy’, i.e. capitalism, back to dole queues and the
Rolls-Royce cars, back to the grey top hats and the sponge-bag trousers, in
saecula saeculorum. It is of course obvious that nothing of the kind is
going to happen. A feeble imitation of it might just possibly happen in the case
of a negotiated peace, but only for a short while. Laissez-faire
capitalism is dead. [Note 4] The choice lies between the
kind of collective society that Hitler will set up and the kind that can arise
if he is defeated.
If Hitler wins this war he will consolidate his rule over Europe, Africa and
the Middle East, and if his armies have not been too greatly exhausted
beforehand, he will wrench vast territories from Soviet Russia. He will set up a
graded caste-society in which the German Herrenvolk (‘master race’ or
‘aristocratic race’) will rule over Slavs and other lesser peoples whose job
it will be to produce low-priced agricultural products. He will reduce the
coloured peoples once and for all to outright slavery. The real quarrel of the
Fascist powers with British imperialism is that they know that it is
disintegrating. Another twenty years along the present line of development, and
India will be a peasant republic linked with England only by voluntary alliance.
The ‘semi-apes’ of whom Hitler speaks with such loathing will be flying
aeroplanes and manufacturing machine-guns. The Fascist dream of a slave empire
will be at an end. On the other hand, if we are defeated we simply hand over our
own victims to new masters who come fresh to the job and have not developed any
scruples.
But more is involved than the fate of the coloured peoples. Two incompatible
visions of life are fighting one another. ‘Between democracy and
totalitarianism,’ says Mussolini, ‘there can be no compromise.’ The two
creeds cannot even, for any length of time, live side by side. So long as
democracy exists, even in its very imperfect English form, totalitarianism is in
deadly danger. The whole English-speaking world is haunted by the idea of human
equality, and though it would be simply a lie to say that either we or the
Americans have ever acted up to our professions, still, the idea is
there, and it is capable of one day becoming a reality. From the
English-speaking culture, if it does not perish, a society of free and equal
human beings will ultimately arise. But it is precisely the idea of human
equality - the ‘Jewish’ or ‘Judaeo-Christian’ idea of equality -
that Hitler came into the world to destroy. He has, heaven knows, said so often
enough. The thought of a world in which black men would be as good as white men
and Jews treated as human beings brings him the same horror and despair as the
thought of endless slavery brings to us.
It is important to keep in mind how irreconcilable these two viewpoints are.
Some time within the next year a pro-Hitler reaction within the left-wing
intelligentsia is likely enough. There are premonitory signs of it already.
Hitler’s positive achievement appeals to the emptiness of these people, and,
in the case of those with pacifist leanings, to their masochism. One knows in
advance more or less what they will say. They will start by refusing to admit
that British capitalism is evolving into something different, or that the defeat
of Hitler can mean any more than a victory for the British and American
millionaires. And from that they will proceed to argue that, after all,
democracy is ‘just the same as’ or ‘just as bad as’ totalitarianism.
There is not much freedom of speech in England; therefore there is no
more than exists in Germany. To be on the dole is a horrible experience;
therefore it is no worse to be in the torture-chambers of the Gestapo. In
general, two blacks make a white, half a loaf is the same as no bread.
But in reality, whatever may be true about democracy and totalitarianism, it
is not true that they are the same. It would not be true, even if British
democracy were incapable of evolving beyond its present stage. The whole
conception of the militarized continental state, with its secret police, its
censored literature and its conscript labour, is utterly different from that of
the loose maritime democracy, with its slums and unemployment, its strikes and
party politics. It is the difference between land power and sea power, between
cruelty and inefficiency, between lying and self-deception, between the S.S. man
and the rent-collector. And in choosing between them one chooses not so much on
the strength of what they now are as of what they are capable of becoming. But
in a sense it is irrelevant whether democracy, at its highest or at its lowest,
is ‘better’ than totalitarianism. To decide that one would have to have
access to absolute standards. The only question that matters is where one’s
real sympathies will lie when the pinch comes. The intellectuals who are so fond
of balancing democracy against totalitarianism and ‘proving’ that one is as
bad as the other are simply frivolous people who have never been shoved up
against realities. They show the same shallow misunderstanding of Fascism now,
when they are beginning to flirt with it, as a year or two ago, when they were
squealing against it. The question is not, ‘Can you make out a
debating-society "case" in favour of Hitler?’ The question is, ‘Do
you genuinely accept that case? Are you willing to submit to Hitler’s rule? Do
you want to see England conquered, or don’t you?’ It would be better to be
sure on that point before frivolously siding with the enemy. For there is no
such thing as neutrality in war; in practice one must help one side or the
other.
When the pinch comes, no one bred in the western tradition can accept the
Fascist vision of life. It is important to realize that now, and to grasp
what it entails. With all its sloth, hypocrisy and injustice, the
English-speaking civilization is the only large obstacle in Hitler’s path. It
is a living contradiction of all the ‘infallible’ dogmas of Fascism. That is
why all Fascist writers for years past have agreed that England’s power must
be destroyed. England must be ‘exterminated’, must be ‘annihilated’,
must ‘cease to exist’. Strategically it would be possible for this war to
end with Hitler in secure possession of Europe, and with the British Empire
intact and British sea-power barely affected. But ideologically it is not
possible; were Hitler to make an offer along those lines, it could only be
treacherously, with a view to conquering England indirectly or renewing the
attack at some more favourable moment. England cannot possibly be allowed to
remain as a sort of funnel through which deadly ideas from beyond the Atlantic
flow into the police states of Europe. And turning it round to our point of
view, we see the vastness of the issue before us, the all-importance of
preserving our democracy more or less as we have known it. But to preserve
is always to extend. The choice before us is not so much between victory
and defeat as between revolution and apathy. If the thing we are fighting for is
altogether destroyed, it will have been destroyed partly by our own act.
It could happen that England could introduce the beginnings of Socialism,
turn this war into a revolutionary war, and still be defeated. That is at any
rate thinkable. But, terrible as it would be for anyone who is now adult, it
would be far less deadly than the ‘compromise peace’ which a few rich men
and their hired liars are hoping for. The final ruin of England could only be
accomplished by an English government acting under orders from Berlin. But that
cannot happen if England has awakened beforehand. For in that case the defeat
would be unmistakable, the struggle would continue, the idea would
survive. The difference between going down fighting, and surrendering without a
fight, is by no means a question of ‘honour’ and schoolboy heroics. Hitler
said once that to accept defeat destroys the soul of a nation. This
sounds like a piece of claptrap, but it is strictly true. The defeat of 1870 did
not lessen the world-influence of France. The Third Republic had more influence,
intellectually, than the France of Napoleon III. But the sort of peace that
Pétain, Laval and Co. have accepted can only be purchased by deliberately
wiping out the national culture. The Vichy Government will enjoy a spurious
independence only on condition that it destroys the distinctive marks of French
culture: republicanism, secularism, respect for the intellect, absence of colour
prejudice. We cannot be utterly defeated if we have made our revolution
beforehand. We may see German troops marching down Whitehall, but another
process, ultimately deadly to the German power-dream, will have been started.
The Spanish people were defeated, but the things they learned during those two
and a half memorable years will one day come back upon the Spanish Fascists like
a boomerang.
A piece of Shakespearean bombast was much quoted at the beginning of the war.
Even Mr Chamberlain quoted it once, if my memory does not deceive me :
Come the four corners of the world in arms
And we shall shock them: naught shall make us rue
If England to herself do rest but true.
It is right enough, if you interpret it rightly. But England has got to be
true to herself. She is not being true to herself while the refugees who have
sought our shores are penned up in concentration camps, and company directors
work out subtle schemes to dodge their Excess Profits Tax. It is goodbye to the Tatler
and the Bystander, and farewell to the lady in the Rolls-Royce car. The
heirs of Nelson and of Cromwell are not in the House of Lords. They are in the
fields and the streets, in the factories and the armed forces, in the four-ale
bar and the suburban back garden; and at present they are still kept under by a
generation of ghosts. Compared with the task of bringing the real England to the
surface, even the winning of the war, necessary though it is, is secondary. By
revolution we become more ourselves, not less. There is no question of stopping
short, striking a compromise, salvaging ‘democracy’, standing still. Nothing
ever stands still. We must add to our heritage or lose it, we must grow greater
or grow less, we must go forward or backward. I believe in England, and I
believe that we shall go forward.
Note 1: For example:
‘I don’t want to join the bloody Army,
I don’t want to go unto the war;
I want no more to roam,
I’d rather stay at home,
Living on the earnings of a whore.’
But it was not in that spirit that they fought. [Author’s footnote.]
Note 2: :It is true that they aided them to a certain
extent with money. Still, the sums raised for the various aid-Spain funds would
not equal five per cent of the turnover of the football pools during the same
period. [Author’s footnote.]
Note 3: Written before the outbreak of the war in Greece.
[Author’s footnote.]
Note 4: It is interesting to notice that Mr Kennedy,
U.S.A. Ambassador in London, remarked on his return to New York in October 1940
that as a result of the war ‘democracy is finished’. By ‘democracy’, of
course, he meant private capitalism. [Author’s footnote.].