Fifty Orwell Essays

began a complicated story about having arrived from Colombo on a ship

  and wanting money to get back. His manner and appearance were difficult

  to "place", and I said to him:

  "You speak very good English. What nationality are you?"

  He answered eagerly in his chi-chi accent: "I am a JOO, sir!"

  And I remember turning to my companion and saying, only partly in joke,

  "He admits it openly." All the Jews I had known till then were people

  who were ashamed of being Jews, or at any rate preferred not to talk

  about their ancestry, and if forced to do so tended to use the word

  "Hebrew".

  The working-class attitude was no better. The Jew who grew up in

  Whitechapel took it for granted that he would be assaulted, or at least

  hooted at, if he ventured into one of the Christian slums nearby, and

  the "Jew joke" of the music halls and the comic papers was almost

  consistently ill-natured. [Note at end of paragraph] There was also

  literary Jew-baiting, which in the hands of Belloc, Chesterton and their

  followers reached an almost continental level of scurrility. Non-Catholic

  writers were sometimes guilty of the same thing in a milder form. There

  has been a perceptible antisemitic strain in English literature from

  Chaucer onwards, and without even getting up from this table to consult a

  book I can think of passages which IF WRITTEN NOW would be stigmatised as

  antisemitism, in the works of Shakespeare, Smollett, Thackeray, Bernard

  Shaw, H. G. Wells, T. S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley and various others. Offhand,

  the only English writers I can think of who, before the days of Hitler,

  made a definite effort to stick up for Jews are Dickens and Charles Reade.

  And however little the average intellectual may have agreed with the

  opinions of Belloc and Chesterton, he did not acutely disapprove of

  them. Chesterton's endless tirades against Jews, which he thrust into

  stories and essays upon the flimsiest pretexts, never got him into

  trouble--indeed Chesterton was one of the most generally respected

  figures in English literary life. Anyone who wrote in that strain NOW

  would bring down a storm of abuse upon himself, or more probably would

  find it impossible to get his writings published.

  [Note: It is interesting to compare the "Jew joke" with that other

  stand-by of the music halls, the "Scotch joke", which superficially it

  resembles. Occasionally a story is told (e.g. the Jew and the Scotsman who

  went into a pub together and both died of thirst) which puts both races on

  an equality, but in general the Jew is credited MERELY with cunning and

  avarice while the Scotsman is credited with physical hardihood as well.

  This is seen, for example, in the story of the Jew and the Scotsman who

  go together to a meeting which has been advertised as free. Unexpectedly

  there is a collection, and to avoid this the Jew faints and the Scotsman

  carries him out. Here the Scotsman performs the athletic feat of

  carrying the other. It would seem vaguely wrong if it were the other way

  about. (Author's footnote.)]

  If, as I suggest, prejudice against Jews has always been pretty

  widespread in England, there is no reason to think that Hitler has

  genuinely diminished it. He has merely caused a sharp division between

  the politically conscious person who realises that this is not a time to

  throw stones at the Jews, and the unconscious person whose native

  antisemitism is increased by the nervous strain of the war. One can

  assume, therefore, that many people who would perish rather than admit

  to antisemitic feelings are secretly prone to them. I have already

  indicated that I believe antisemitism to be essentially a neurosis,

  but of course it has its rationalisations, which are sincerely

  believed in and are partly true. The rationalisation put forward by the

  common man is that the Jew is an exploiter. The partial justification

  for this is that the Jew, in England, is generally a small

  businessman--that is to say a person whose depredations are more obvious

  and intelligible than those of, say, a bank or an insurance company.

  Higher up the intellectual scale, antisemitism is rationalised by saying

  that the Jew is a person who spreads disaffection and weakens national

  morale. Again there is some superficial justification for this. During

  the past twenty-five years the activities of what are called

  "intellectuals" have been largely mischievous. I do not think it an

  exaggeration to say that if the "intellectuals" had done their work a

  little more thoroughly, Britain would have surrendered in 1940. But the

  disaffected intelligentsia inevitably included a large number of Jews.

  With some plausibility it can be said that the Jews are the enemies of

  our native culture and our national morale. Carefully examined, the

  claim is seen to be nonsense, but there are always a few prominent

  individuals who can be cited in support of it. During the past few years

  there has been what amounts to a counter-attack against the rather

  shallow Leftism which was fashionable in the previous decade and which

  was exemplified by such organisations as the Left Book Club. This

  counter-attack (see for instance such books as Arnold Lutin's THE GOOD

  GORILLA or Evelyn Waugh's PUT OUT MORE FLAGS) has an antisemitic strain,

  and it would probably be more marked if the subject were not so

  obviously dangerous. It so happens that for some decades past Britain

  has had no nationalist intelligentsia worth bothering about. But British

  nationalism, i.e. nationalism of an intellectual kind, may revive, and

  probably will revive if Britain comes out of the present war greatly

  weakened. The young intellectuals of 1950 may be as naively patriotic as

  those of 1914. In that case the kind of antisemitism which flourished

  among the anti-Dreyfusards in France, and which Chesterton and Belloc

  tried to import into this country, might get a foothold.

  I have no hard-and-fast theory about the origins of antisemitism. The

  two current explanations, that it is due to economic causes, or on the

  other hand, that it is a legacy from the Middle Ages, seem to me

  unsatisfactory, though I admit that if one combines them they can be

  made to cover the facts. All I would say with confidence is that

  antisemitism is part of the larger problem of nationalism, which has not

  yet been seriously examined, and that the Jew is evidently a scapegoat,

  though for what he is a scapegoat we do not yet know. In this essay I

  have relied almost entirely on my own limited experience, and perhaps

  every one of my conclusions would be negatived by other observers. The

  fact is that there are almost no data on this subject. But for what they

  are worth I will summarise my opinions. Boiled down, they amount to

  this:

  There is more antisemitism in England than we care to admit, and the war

  has accentuated it, but it is not certain that it is on the increase if

  one thinks in terms of decades rather than years.

  It does not at present lead to open persecution, but it has the effect

  of making people callous to the sufferings of Jews in other countries.

  It is at bottom quite
irrational and will not yield to argument.

  The persecutions in Germany have caused much concealment of antisemitic

  feeling and thus obscured the whole picture.

  The subject needs serious investigation.

  Only the last point is worth expanding. To study any subject

  scientifically one needs a detached attitude, which is obviously harder

  when one's own interests or emotions are involved. Plenty of people who

  are quite capable of being objective about sea urchins, say, or the

  square root of 2, become schizophrenic if they have to think about the

  sources of their own income. What vitiates nearly all that is written

  about antisemitism is the assumption in the writer's mind that HE

  HIMSELF is immune to it. "Since I know that antisemitism is irrational,"

  he argues, "it follows that I do not share it." He thus fails to start

  his investigation in the one place where he could get hold of some

  reliable evidence--that is, in his own mind.

  It seems to me a safe assumption that the disease loosely called

  nationalism is now almost universal. Antisemitism is only one

  manifestation of nationalism, and not everyone will have the disease in

  that particular form. A Jew, for example, would not be antisemitic: but

  then many Zionist Jews seem to me to be merely antisemites turned

  upside-down, just as many Indians and Negroes display the normal colour

  prejudices in an inverted form. The point is that something, some

  psychological vitamin, is lacking in modern civilisation, and as a

  result we are all more or less subject to this lunacy of believing that

  whole races or nations are mysteriously good or mysteriously evil. I

  defy any modern intellectual to look closely and honestly into his own

  mind without coming upon nationalistic loyalties and hatreds of one kind

  or another. It is the fact that he can feel the emotional tug of such

  things, and yet see them dispassionately for what they are, that gives

  him his status as an intellectual. It will be seen, therefore, that the

  starting point for any investigation of antisemitism should not be "Why

  does this obviously irrational belief appeal to other people?" but "Why

  does antisemitism appeal TO ME? What is there about it that I feel to be

  true?" If one asks this question one at least discovers one's own

  rationalisations, and it may be possible to find out what lies beneath

  them. Antisemitism should be investigated--and I will not say by

  antisemites, but at any rate by people who know that they are not immune

  to that kind of emotion. When Hitler has disappeared a real enquiry into

  this subject will be possible, and it would probably be best to start

  not by debunking antisemitism, but by marshalling all the justifications

  for it that can be found, in one's own mind or anybody else's. In that

  way one might get some clues that would lead to its psychological roots.

  But that antisemitism will be definitively CURED, without curing the

  larger disease of nationalism, I do not believe.

  FREEDOM OF THE PARK (1945)

  A few weeks ago, five people who were selling papers outside Hyde Park

  were arrested by the police for obstruction. When taken before the

  magistrates, they were all found guilty, four of them being bound over

  for six months and the other sentenced to forty shillings fine or a

  month's imprisonments. He preferred to serve his term.

  The papers these people were selling were PEACE NEWS, FORWARD and

  FREEDOM, besides other kindred literature. PEACE NEWS is the organ of the

  Peace Pledge Union, FREEDOM (till recently called WAR COMMENTARY) is that

  of the Anarchists; as for FORWARD, its politics defy definition, but at

  any rate it is violently Left. The magistrate, in passing sentence,

  stated that he was not influenced by the nature of the literature that

  was being sold; he was concerned merely with the fact of obstruction, and

  that this offence had technically been committed.

  This raises several important points. To begin with, how does the law

  stand on the subject? As far as I can discover, selling newspapers in the

  street is technically an obstruction, at any rate if you fail to move

  when the police tell you to. So it would be legally possible for any

  policeman who felt like it to arrest any newsboy for selling the EVENING

  NEWS. Obviously this doesn't happen, so that the enforcement of the law

  depends on the discretion of the police.

  And what makes the police decide to arrest one man rather than another?

  However it may be with the magistrate, I find it hard to believe that in

  this case the police were not influenced by political considerations. It

  is a bit too much of a coincidence that they should have picked on people

  selling just those papers.

  If they had also arrested someone selling TRUTH, or the TABLET, or the

  SPECTATOR, or even the CHURCH TIMES, their impartiality would be easier

  to believe in.

  The British police are not like the continental GENDARMERIE or Gestapo,

  but I do not think [sic] one maligns them in saying that, in the past,

  they have been unfriendly to Left-wing activities. They have generally

  shown a tendency to side with those whom they regarded as the defenders

  of private property. Till quite recently "red" and "illegal" were almost

  synonymous, and it was always the seller of, say the DAILY WORKER, never

  the seller of say, the DAILY TELEGRAPH, who was moved on and generally

  harassed. Apparently it can be the same, at any rate at moments, under a

  Labour Government.

  A thing I would like to know--it is a thing we hear very little

  about--is what changes are made in the administrative personnel when

  there has been a change of government.. Does a police officer who has a

  vague notion that "Socialism" means something against the law carry on

  just the same when the government itself is Socialist?

  When a Labour government takes over, I wonder what happens to Scotland

  Yard Special Branch? To Military Intelligence? We are not told, but such

  symptoms as there are do not suggest that any very extensive shuffling is

  going on.

  However, the main point of this episode is that the sellers of newspapers

  and pamphlets should be interfered with at all. Which particular minority

  is singled out--whether Pacifists, Communists, Anarchists, Jehovah's

  Witness of the Legion of Christian Reformers who recently declared Hitler

  to be Jesus Christ--is a secondary matter. It is of symptomatic

  importance that these people should have been arrested at that particular

  spot. You are not allowed to sell literature inside Hyde Park, but for

  many years past it has been usual for the paper-sellers to station

  themselves outside the gates and distribute literature connected with the

  open air meetings a hundred yards away. Every kind of publication has

  been sold there without interference.

  The degree of freedom of the press existing in this country is often

  over-rated. Technically there is great freedom, but the fact that most of

  the press is owned by a few people operates in much the same way as State

  censorship. On the other hand, freedom of speech is real. On a platform,

>   or in certain recognised open air spaces like Hyde Park, you can say

  almost anything, and, what is perhaps more significant, no one is

  frightened to utter his true opinions in pubs, on the tops of busses, and

  so forth.

  The point is that the relative freedom which we enjoy depends of public

  opinion. The law is no protection. Governments make laws, but whether

  they are carried out, and how the police behave, depends on the general

  temper in the country. If large numbers of people are interested in

  freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law

  forbids it; if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will

  be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them. The decline in the

  desire for individual liberty has not been so sharp as I would have

  predicted six years ago, when the war was starting, but still there has

  been a decline. The notion that certain opinions cannot safely be allowed

  a hearing is growing. It is given currency by intellectuals who confuse

  the issue by not distinguishing between democratic opposition and open

  rebellion, and it is reflected in our growing indifference to tyranny and

  injustice abroad. And even those who declare themselves to be in favour

  of freedom of opinion generally drop their claim when it is their own

  adversaries who are being prosecutued.

  I am not suggesting that the arrest of five people for selling harmless

  newspapers is a major calamity. When you see what is happening in the

  world today, it hardly seems worth squealing about such a tiny incident.

  All the same, it is not a good symptom that such things should happen when

  the war is well over, and I should feel happier if this and the long

  series of similar episodes that have preceded it, were capable of raising

  a genuine popular clamour, and not merely a mild flutter in sections of

  the minority press.

  FUTURE OF A RUINED GERMANY (1945)

  As the advance into Germany continues and more and more of the

  devastation wrought by the Allied bombing planes is laid bare, there are

  three comments that almost every observer finds himself making. The first

  is: 'The people at home have no conception of this.' The second is, 'It's

  a miracle that they've gone on fighting.' And the third is, 'Just think

  of the work of building this all up again!'

  It is quite true that the scale of the Allied blitzing of Germany is even

  now not realised in this country, and its share in the breaking-down of

  German resistance is probably much underrated. It is difficult to give

  actuality to reports of air warfare and the man in the street can be

  forgiven if he imagines that what we have done to Germany over the past

  four years is merely the same kind of thing they did to us in 1940.

  But this error, which must be even commoner in the United States, has in

  it a potential danger, and the many protests against indiscriminate

  bombing which have been uttered by pacifists and humanitarians have

  merely confused the issue.

  Bombing is not especially inhumane. War itself is inhumane and the

  bombing plane, which is used to paralyse industry and transport, is a

  relatively civilised weapon. 'Normal' or 'legitimate' warfare is just as

  destructive of inanimate objects and enormously so of human lives.

  Moreover, a bomb kills a casual cross-section of the population, whereas

  the men killed in battle are exactly the ones that the community can

  least afford to lose. The people of Britain have never felt easy about

  the bombing of civilians and no doubt they will be ready enough to pity

  the Germans as soon as they have definitely defeated them; but what they

  still have not grasped---thanks to their own comparative immunity---is

  the frightful destructiveness of modern war and the long period of

  impoverishment that now lies ahead of the world as a whole.