Page 52 of Fifty Orwell Essays

case, are ex-Communists, and no one arrives at Trotskyism except via one

  of the left-wing movements. No Communist, unless tethered to his party by

  years of habit, is secure against a sudden lapse into Trotskyism. The

  opposite process does not seem to happen equally often, though there is

  no clear reason why it should not.

  In the classification I have attempted above, it will seem that I have

  often exaggerated, oversimplified, made unwarranted assumptions and have

  left out of account the existence of ordinarily decent motives. This was

  inevitable, because in this essay I am trying to isolate and identify

  tendencies which exist in all our minds and pervert our thinking, without

  necessarily occurring in a pure state or operating continuously. It is

  important at this point to correct the over-simplified picture which I

  have been obliged to make. To begin with, one has no right to assume that

  EVERYONE, or even every intellectual, is infected by nationalism.

  Secondly, nationalism can be intermittent and limited. An intelligent man

  may half-succumb to a belief which he knows to be absurd, and he may keep

  it out of his mind for long periods, only reverting to it in moments of

  anger or sentimentality, or when he is certain that no important issues

  are involved. Thirdly, a nationalistic creed may be adopted in good faith

  from non-nationalistic motives. Fourthly, several kinds of nationalism,

  even kinds that cancel out, can co-exist in the same person.

  All the way through I have said, 'the nationalist does this' or 'the

  nationalist does that', using for purposes of illustration the extreme,

  barely sane type of nationalist who has no neutral areas in his mind and

  no interest in anything except the struggle for power. Actually such

  people are fairly common, but they are not worth the powder and shot. In

  real life Lord Elton, D. N. Pritt, Lady Houston, Ezra Pound, Lord

  Vanisttart, Father Coughlin and all the rest of their dreary tribe have

  to be fought against, but their intellectual deficiencies hardly need

  pointing out. Monomania is not interesting, and the fact that no

  nationalist of the more bigoted kind can write a book which still seems

  worth reading after a lapse of years has a certain deodorising effect.

  But when one has admitted that nationalism has not triumphed everywhere,

  that there are still peoples whose judgements are not at the mercy of

  their desires, the fact does remain that the pressing problems--India,

  Poland, Palestine, the Spanish civil war, the Moscow trials, the American

  Negroes, the Russo-German Pact or what have you--cannot be, or at least

  never are, discussed upon a reasonable level. The Eltons and Pritts and

  Coughlins, each of them simply an enormous mouth bellowing the same lie

  over and over again, are obviously extreme cases, but we deceive

  ourselves if we do not realise that we can all resemble them in unguarded

  moments. Let a certain note be struck, let this or that corn be trodden

  on--and it may be corn whose very existence has been unsuspected

  hitherto--and the most fair-minded and sweet-tempered person may

  suddenly be transformed into a vicious partisan, anxious only to 'score'

  over his adversary and indifferent as to how many lies he tells or how

  many logical errors he commits in doing so. When Lloyd George, who was an

  opponent of the Boer War, announced in the House of Commons that the

  British communiques, if one added them together, claimed the killing of

  more Boers than the whole Boer nation contained, it is recorded that

  Arthur Balfour rose to his feet and shouted 'Cad!' Very few people are

  proof against lapses of this type. The Negro snubbed by a white woman,

  the Englishman who hears England ignorantly criticised by an American,

  the Catholic apologist reminded of the Spanish Armada, will all react in

  much the same way. One prod to the nerve of nationalism, and the

  intellectual decencies can vanish, the past can be altered, and the

  plainest facts can be denied.

  If one harbours anywhere in one's mind a nationalistic loyalty or hatred,

  certain facts, although in a sense known to be true, are inadmissible.

  Here are just a few examples. I list below five types of nationalist, and

  against each I append a fact which it is impossible for that type of

  nationalist to accept, even in his secret thoughts:

  BRITISH TORY: Britain will come out of this war with reduced power and

  prestige.

  COMMUNIST: If she had not been aided by Britain and America, Russia would

  have been defeated by Germany.

  IRISH NATIONALIST: Eire can only remain independent because of British

  protection.

  TROTSKYIST: The Stalin r?gime is accepted by the Russian masses.

  PACIFIST: Those who 'abjure' violence can only do so because others are

  committing violence on their behalf.

  All of these facts are grossly obvious if one's emotions do not happen to

  be involved: but to the kind of person named in each case they are also

  INTOLERABLE, and so they have to be denied, and false theories

  constructed upon their denial. I come back to the astonishing failure of

  military prediction in the present war. It is, I think, true to say that

  the intelligentsia have been more wrong about the progress of the war

  than the common people, and that they were more swayed by partisan

  feelings. The average intellectual of the Left believed, for instance,

  that the war was lost in 1940, that the Germans were bound to overrun

  Egypt in 1942, that the Japanese would never be driven out of the lands

  they had conquered, and that the Anglo-American bombing offensive was

  making no impression on Germany. He could believe these things because

  his hatred for the British ruling class forbade him to admit that British

  plans could succeed. There is no limit to the follies that can be

  swallowed if one is under the influence of feelings of this kind. I have

  heard it confidently stated, for instance, that the American troops had

  been brought to Europe not to fight the Germans but to crush an English

  revolution. One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things

  like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool. When Hitler invaded

  Russia, the officials of the MOI issued 'as background' a warning that

  Russia might be expected to collapse in six weeks. On the other hand the

  Communists regarded every phase of the war as a Russian victory, even

  when the Russians were driven back almost to the Caspian Sea and had lost

  several million prisoners. There is no need to multiply instances. The

  point is that as soon as fear, hatred, jealousy and power worship are

  involved, the sense of reality becomes unhinged. And, as I have pointed

  out already, the sense of right and wrong becomes unhinged also. There is

  no crime, absolutely none, that cannot be condoned when 'our' side

  commits it. Even if one does not deny that the crime has happened, even

  if one knows that it is exactly the same crime as one has condemned in

  some other case, even if one admits in an intellectual sense that it is

  unjustified--still one cannot FEEL that it is wrong. Loyalty is

  involved, and so pity ceases to funct
ion.

  The reason for the rise and spread of nationalism is far too big a

  question to be raised here. It is enough to say that, in the forms in

  which it appears among English intellectuals, it is a distorted

  reflection of the frightful battles actually happening in the external

  world, and that its worst follies have been made possible by the

  breakdown of patriotism and religious belief. If one follows up this

  train of thought, one is in danger of being led into a species of

  Conservatism, or into political quietism. It can be plausibly argued, for

  instance--it is even possibly true--that patriotism is an inoculation

  against nationalism, that monarchy is a guard against dictatorship, and

  that organised religion is a guard against superstition. Or again, it can

  be argued that NO unbiased outlook is possible, that ALL creeds and

  causes involve the same lies, follies, and barbarities; and this is often

  advanced as a reason for keeping out of politics altogether. I do not

  accept this argument, if only because in the modern world no one

  describable as an intellectual CAN keep out of politics in the sense of

  not caring about them. I think one must engage in politics--using the

  word in a wide sense--and that one must have preferences: that is, one

  must recognise that some causes are objectively better than others, even

  if they are advanced by equally bad means. As for the nationalistic loves

  and hatreds that I have spoken of, they are part of the make-up of most

  of us, whether we like it or not. Whether it is possible to get rid of

  them I do not know, but I do believe that it is possible to struggle

  against them, and that this is essentially a MORAL effort. It is a

  question first of all of discovering what one really is, what one's own

  feelings really are, and then of making allowance for the inevitable

  bias. If you hate and fear Russia, if you are jealous of the wealth and

  power of America, if you despise Jews, if you have a sentiment of

  inferiority towards the British ruling class, you cannot get rid of those

  feelings simply by taking thought. But you can at least recognise that

  you have them, and prevent them from contaminating your mental processes.

  The emotional urges which are inescapable, and are perhaps even necessary

  to political action, should be able to exist side by side with an

  acceptance of reality. But this, I repeat, needs a MORAL effort, and

  contemporary English literature, so far as it is alive at all to the

  major issues of our time, shows how few of us are prepared to make it.

  REVENGE IS SOUR (1945)

  Whenever I read phrases like 'war guilt trials', 'punishment of war

  criminals' and so forth, there comes back into my mind the memory of

  something I saw in a prisoner-of-war camp in South Germany, earlier this

  year.

  Another correspondent and myself were being show round the camp by a

  little Viennese Jew who had been enlisted in the branch of the American

  army which deals with the interrogation of prisoners. He was an alert,

  fair-haired, rather good-looking youth of about twenty-five, and

  politically so much more knowledgeable than the average American officer

  that it was a pleasure to be with him. The camp was on an airfield, and,

  after we had been round the cages, our guide led us to a hangar where

  various prisoners who were in a different category from the others were

  being 'screened'.

  Up at one end of the hangar about a dozen men were lying in a row on the

  concrete floor. These, it was explained, were S.S. officers who had been

  segregated from the other prisoners. Among them was a man in dingy

  civilian clothes who was lying with his arm across his face and

  apparently asleep. He had strange and horribly deformed feet. The two of

  them were quite symmetrical, but they were clubbed out into an

  extraordinary globular shape which made them more like a horse's hoof

  than anything human. As we approached the group, the little Jew seemed to

  be working himself up into a state of excitement.

  'That's the real swine!' he said, and suddenly he lashed out with his

  heavy army boot and caught the prostrate man a fearful kick right on the

  bulge of one of his deformed feet.

  'Get up, you swine!' he shouted as the man started out of sleep, and then

  repeated something of the kind in German. The prisoner scrambled to his

  feet and stood clumsily to attention. With the same air of working

  himself up into a fury--indeed he was almost dancing up and down as he

  spoke--the Jew told us the prisoner's history. He was a 'real' Nazi: his

  party number indicated that he had been a member since the very early

  days, and he had held a post corresponding to a General in the political

  branch of the S.S. It could be taken as quite certain that he had had

  charge of concentration camps and had presided over tortures and

  hangings. In short, he represented everything that we had been fighting

  against during the past five years.

  Meanwhile, I was studying his appearance. Quite apart from the scrubby,

  unfed, unshaven look that a newly captured man generally has, he was a

  disgusting specimen. But he did not look brutal or in any way

  frightening: merely neurotic and, in a low way, intellectual. His pale,

  shifty eyes were deformed by powerful spectacles. He could have been an

  unfrocked clergyman, an actor ruined by drink, or a spiritualist medium.

  I have seen very similar people in London common lodging houses, and also

  in the Reading Room of the British Museum. Quite obviously he was

  mentally unbalanced--indeed, only doubtfully sane, though at this moment

  sufficiently in his right mind to be frightened of getting another kick.

  And yet everything that the Jew was telling me of his history could have

  been true, and probably was true! So the Nazi torturer of one's

  imagination, the monstrous figure against whom one had struggled for so

  many years, dwindled to this pitiful wretch, whose obvious need was not

  for punishment, but for some kind of psychological treatment.

  Later, there were further humiliations. Another S.S. officer, a large

  brawny man, was ordered to strip to the waist and show the blood group

  number tattooed on his under-arm; another was forced to explain to us how

  he had lied about being a member of the S.S. and attempted to pass

  himself off as an ordinary soldier of the Wehrmacht. I wondered whether

  the Jew was getting any real kick out of this new-found power that he was

  exercising. I concluded that he wasn't really enjoying it, and that he

  was merely--like a man in a brothel, or a boy smoking his first cigar,

  or a tourist traipsing round a picture gallery--TELLING himself that he

  was enjoying it, and behaving as he had planned to behave in the days he

  was helpless.

  It is absurd to blame any German or Austrian Jew for getting his own back

  on the Nazis. Heaven knows what scores this particular man may have had

  to wipe out; very likely his whole family had been murdered; and after

  all, even a wanton kick to a prisoner is a very tiny thing compared with

  the outrages committed by the Hitler r?gime. But what this scene, and
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  much else that I saw in Germany, brought home to me was that the whole

  idea of revenge and punishment is a childish daydream. Properly speaking,

  there is no such thing as revenge. Revenge is an act which you want to

  commit when you are powerless and because you are powerless: as soon as

  the sense of impotence is removed, the desire evaporates also.

  Who would not have jumped for joy, in 1940, at the thought of seeing S.S.

  officers kicked and humiliated? But when the thing becomes possible, it

  is merely pathetic and disgusting. It is said that when Mussolini's

  corpse was exhibited in public, an old woman drew a revolver and fired

  five shots into it, exclaiming, 'Those are for my five sons!' It is the

  kind of story that the newspapers make up, but it might be true. I wonder

  how much satisfaction she got out of those five shots, which, doubtless,

  she had dreamed years earlier of firing. The condition of her being able

  to get close enough to Mussolini to shoot at him was that he should be a

  corpse.

  In so far as the big public in this country is responsible for the

  monstrous peace settlement now being forced on Germany, it is because of

  a failure to see in advance that punishing an enemy brings no

  satisfaction. We acquiesce in crimes like the expulsion of all Germans

  from East Prussia--crimes which in some cases we could not prevent but

  might at least have protested against--because the Germans had angered

  and frightened us, and therefore we were certain that when they were down

  we should feel no pity for them. We persist in these policies, or let

  others persist in them on our behalf, because of a vague feeling that,

  having set out to punish Germany, we ought to go ahead and do it.

  Actually there is little acute hatred of Germany left in this country,

  and even less, I should expect to find, in the army of occupation. Only

  the minority of sadists, who must have their 'atrocities' from one source

  or another, take a keen interest in the hunting-down of war criminals and

  quislings. If you asked the average man what crime Goering, Ribbentrop,

  and the rest are to be charged with at their trial, he cannot tell you.

  Somehow the punishment of these monsters ceases to seem attractive when it

  becomes possible: indeed, once under lock and key, they almost cease to

  be monsters.

  Unfortunately, there is often a need of some concrete incident before one

  can discover the real state of one's feelings. Here is another memory

  from Germany. A few hours after Stuttgart was captured by the French

  army, a Belgian journalist and myself entered the town, which was still

  in some disorder. The Belgian had been broadcasting throughout the war

  for the European Service of the BBC, and, like nearly all Frenchmen or

  Belgians, he had a very much tougher attitude towards 'the Boche' than an

  Englishman or an American would have. All the main bridges into town had

  been blown up, and we had to enter by a small footbridge which the

  Germans had evidently mad efforts to defend. A dead German soldier was

  lying supine at the foot of the steps. His face was a waxy yellow. On his

  breast someone had laid a bunch of the lilac which was blooming

  everywhere.

  The Belgian averted his face as we went past. When we were well over the

  bridge he confided to me that this was the first time he had seen a dead

  man. I suppose he was thirty five years old, and for four years he had

  been doing war propaganda over the radio. For several days after this,

  his attitude was quite different from what it had been earlier. He looked

  with disgust at the bomb-wrecked town and the humiliation the Germans

  were undergoing, and even on one occasion intervened to prevent a

  particularly bad bit of looting. When he left, he gave the residue of the

  coffee we had brought with us to the Germans on whom we were billeted. A

  week earlier he would probably have been scandalized at the idea of