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
>
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