REVOLUTION OR DISASTER
Well, that is the set-up as I see it. It seems to me that we are back to the "revolutionary situation" which existed but was not utilized after Dunkirk. From that time until quite recently one's thoughts necessarily moved in some such progression as this:
We can't win the war with our present social and economic structure.
The structure won't change unless there is a rapid growth in popular consciousness.
The only thing that promotes this growth is military disasters.
One more disaster and we shall lose the war.
In the circumstances all one could do was to "support" the war, which involved supporting Churchill, and hope that in some way it would all come right on the night -- i.e. that the mere necessities of war, the inevitable drift towards a centralized economy and a more equal standard of living, would force the regime gradually to the Left and allow the worst reactionaries to be levered out. No one in his senses supposed that the British ruling classes would legislate themselves out of existence, but they might be manoeuvred into a position where their continuance in power was quite obviously in the Nazi interest. In that case the mass of the nation would swing against them and it would be possible to get rid of them with little or no violence. Before writing this off as a hopelessly "reformist" strategy it is worth remembering that England is literally within gunshot of the continent. Revolutionary defeatism, or anything approaching it, is nonsense in our geographical situation. If there were even a week's serious disorganization in the armed forces the Nazis would be here, after which one might as well stop talking about revolution.
To some small extent things have happened as I foresaw. One can after all discern the outlines of a revolutionary world war. Britain has been forced into alliance with Russia and China and into restoring Abyssinia and making fairly generous treaties with the Middle Eastern countries, and because of, among other things, the need to raise a huge air force a serious breach has been made in the class system. The defeats in the Far East have gone a long way towards killing the old conception of imperialism. But there was a sort of gap in the ladder which we never got over and which it was perhaps impossible to get over while no revolutionary party and no able leftwing leadership existed. This may or may not have been altered by the emergence of Cripps. I think it is certain that a new political party will have to arise if anything is to be changed, and the obvious bankruptcy of the old parties may hasten this. Maybe Cripps will lose his lustre quite quickly if he does not get out of the Government. But at present, in his peculiar isolated position, he is the likeliest man for any new movement to crystallize round. If he fails, God save us from the other probable alternatives to Churchill.
I suppose as usual I have written too much. There is not much change in our everyday lives here. The nation went on to brown bread a few weeks back. The basic petrol ration stops next month, which in theory means the end of private motoring. The new luxury taxes are terrific. Cigarettes now cost a shilling for ten and the cheapest beer tenpence a pint (fourpence in 1936). Everyone seems to be working longer and longer hours. Now and again at intervals of weeks one gets one's head above water for a moment and notices with surprise that the earth is still going round the sun. One day I noticed crocuses in the parks, another day pear blossom, another day hawthorn. One seems to catch vague glimpses of these things through a mist of war news.
Yours ever
George Orwell
Partisan Review, July-August 1942
33. Review
The Sword and the Sickle by Mulk Raj Anand
In this war we have one weapon which our enemies cannot use against us, and that is the English language. Several other languages are spoken by larger numbers of people, but there is no other that has any claim to be a world-wide lingua franca. The Japanese administrators in the Philippines, the Chinese delegates in India, the Indian nationalists in Berlin, are all obliged to do their business in English. Therefore, although Mr Anand's novel would still be interesting on its own merits if it had been written by an Englishman, it is impossible to read it without remembering every few pages that it is also a cultural curiosity. The growth, especially during the last few years, of an English-language Indian literature is a strange phenomenon, and it will have its effect on the postwar world, if not on the outcome of the war itself.
This novel is a sequel to The Village and Across the Black Waters. The Sikh sepoy who has fought in France and spent years as a prisoner in Germany comes home to find himself -- partly because he is suspected of disaffection and partly because that is the normal fate of all soldiers in all wars -- cheated out of the reward that he had imagined that he was fighting for. The rest of the story deals mostly with the peasant movement and the beginnings of the Indian Communist Party. Now, any book about India written by an Indian must at this date almost unavoidably be the story of a grievance, and I notice that Mr Anand has already got himself into trouble by what is wrongly described as his bitterness. In reality, the book's comparative lack of bitterness is a roundabout demonstration of the English "bad conscience" towards India. In a novel on the same subject by an English intellectual, what would you expect to find? An endless masochistic denunciation of his own race, and a series of traditional caricatures of Anglo-Indian society, with its unbearable club life, its chota pegs, etc. etc. In the scene as the Indian sees it, however, the English hardly enter. They are merely a permanent evil, something taken almost for granted, like the climate, and though the ultimate objective is to get rid of British rule, it is almost forgotten among the weaknesses and internecine struggles of the revolutionaries themselves. European characters barely appear in the story -- a reminder that in India only about one person in a thousand is technically white -- and of the few that do it cannot be said that they are treated worse than the other characters. They are not treated sympathetically either, for on the whole the characterization is harsh and derisive (to give just one example, Mr Gandhi's head is described as resembling "a raw purple turnip"), and the whole book is full of the Indian melancholy and of the horribly ugly, degrading scenes which offend one's eyes all the time in the starved countries of the East. Although it ends on a comparatively hopeful note this novel does not break the rule that books about India are depressing. Probably they must be so, quite apart from the question-mark they raise in the English conscience, because while the world remains in anything like its present shape the central problem of India, its poverty, is not soluble. How much of the special atmosphere of English-language Indian literature is due to its subject-matter is uncertain, but in reading Mr Anand's work, or that of Ahmed Ali and several others, it is difficult not to feel that by this time another dialect, comparable perhaps to Irish-English, has grown up. One quotation will do to illustrate this:
Conscious of his responsibility for the misadventures into which he had led them, Lalu bent down and strained to lever the dead bodies with trembling hands. A sharp odour of decomposing flesh shot up to his nostrils from Chandra's body, while his hands were smeared with blood from Nandu's neck. He sat up imagining the smell to be a whiff of the foul virulence of bacterial decay, ensuing from the vegetation of the forest through which they had come. But, as he bent down again, there was no disguising the stink of the corpse. And, in a flash, he realized that though Nandu's blood was hot now, it would soon be cold and the body would stink if it was carried all the way to Allahabad.
There is a vaguely un-English flavour about this ("shot up to his nostrils", for instance, is not quite an English idiom), and yet it is obviously the work of a man who is not only at ease with the English language but thinks in it and would probably write in it by preference. This raises the question of the future, if any, of English-language Indian literature. At present English is to a great extent the official and business language of India: five million Indians are literate in it and millions more speak a debased version of it; there is a huge English-language Indian press, and the only English magazine devoted wholly to poetry is e
dited by Indians. On average, too, Indians write and even pronounce English far better than any European race. Will this state of affairs continue? It is inconceivable that the present relationship between the two countries will last much longer, and when it vanishes the economic inducements for learning English will also tend to disappear. Presumably, therefore, the fate of the English language in Asia is either to fade out or to survive as a pidgin language useful for business and technical purposes. It might survive, in dialect form, as the mother tongue of the small Eurasian community, but it is difficult to believe that it has a literary future. Mr Anand and Ahmed Ali are much better writers than the average run of English novelists, but they are not likely to have many successors. Why, then, is it that their books have at this moment an importance that goes beyond their literary merit? Partly because they are interpreting Asia to the west, but more, I think, because they act as a westernizing influence among their own countrymen. And at present there are reasons why the second function is more important than the first.
Anyone who has to deal in propaganda knows that a sudden change came over the Indian scene as soon as Japan entered the war. Many, perhaps most, Indian intellectuals are emotionally pro-Japanese. From their point of view Britain is the enemy, China means nothing to them, Russia is an object of lip-service only. But is it the case that the Indian anti-British intelligentsia actually wishes to see China permanently enslaved, the Soviet Union destroyed, Europe a Nazi concentration camp? No, that is not fair either: it is merely that the nationalism of defeated peoples is necessarily revengeful and shortsighted. If you discuss this question with an Indian you get an answer something like this: "Half of me is a Socialist but the other half is a Nationalist. I know what Fascism means, I know very well that I ought to be on your side, but I hate your people so much that if we can get rid of them I hardly care what happens afterwards. I tell you that there are moments when all I want is to see China, Japan and India get together and destroy western civilization, not only in Asia, but in Europe." This outlook is widespread among the coloured peoples. Its emotional roots are obvious enough, the various disguises in which it is wrapped are easily seen though, but it is there, and it contains a great danger, to us and to the world. The only answer to the self-pity and race-hatred common among Indians is to point out that others besides Indians are oppressed. The only answer to nationalism is international Socialism, and the contact of Indians -- to a lesser extent, of all Asiatics -- with Socialist literature and Socialist thought generally, is through the English language. As a general rule, Indians are reliably anti-Fascist in proportion as they are westernized. That is why at the beginning of this review I described the English language as a weapon of war. It is a funnel for ideas deadly to the Fascist view of life. Mr Anand does not like us very much, and some of his colleagues hate us very bitterly; but so long as they voice their hatred in English they are in a species of alliance with us, and an ultimate decent settlement with the Indians whom we have wronged but also helped to awaken remains possible.
Horizon, July 1942
34. Pacifism and the War
A Controversy, by D. S. Savage, George Woodcock, Alex Comfort, George Orwell.
D. S. SAVAGE:7
7. D. S. Savage, poet, whose critical works include The Personal Principle and Hamlet and the Pirates.
A few brief comments on George Orwell's March-April London Letter.
It is fashionable nowadays to equate Fascism with Germany. We must fight Fascism, therefore we must fight Germany. Thus Mr Orwell: "the greater part of the very young intelligentsia. . . don't feel the horror of Fascism that we who are somewhat older feel," also: "there is no real answer to the charge that pacifism is objectively proFascist." Answer: Fascism is not a force confined to any one nation. We can just as soon get it here as anywhere else. The characteristic markings of Fascism are: curtailment of individual and minority liberties; abolition of private values and substitution of State life and public values (patriotism); external imposition of discipline (militarism); prevalence of mass-values and mass-mentality; falsification of intellectual activity under State pressure. These are all tendencies of present-day Britain. The pacifist opposes every one of these, and might therefore be called the only genuine opponent of Fascism.
Don't let us be misled by names. Fascism is quite capable of calling itself democracy or even Socialism. It's the reality under the name that matters. War demands totalitarian organization of society. Germany organized herself on that basis prior to embarking on war. Britain now finds herself compelled to take the same measures after involvement in war. Germans call it National Socialism. We call it democracy. The result is the same.
Let us assume that Mr Orwell means "objectively pro-German". (If so, his loose terminology is surely indicative of very loose thinking.) Who is "objective"? -- Mr Orwell, a partisan of one particular side in the struggle? According to this type of reasoning, a German or Japanese pacifist would be "objectively pro-British". This is puerile. Mr Orwell is assuming that the pacifist shares his chauvinistic predilections. On the contrary, we regard the war as a disaster to humanity. Who is to say that a British victory will be less disastrous than a German one? The last British victory was pretty meaningless.
Mr Orwell, in all his recent writings on the subject, shows a total inability to grasp the real nature of pacifism. Let me try, in a few words, to enlighten him.
Mr Orwell is himself a "politician", with a politician's outlook on things. He consequently sees pacifism primarily as a political phenomenon. That is just what it isn't. Primarily it is a moral phenomenon. Political movements are based on programme and organization. With pacifism, programme and organization are quite subsidiary. Pacifism springs from conscience -- i.e. from within the individual human being. "Peace News," says Orwell, "follows its old tradition of opposing war for different incompatible reasons." There are certainly innumerable reasons why war should be opposed, but the chief reason is the diabolical nature of modern warfare, with its diabolical repercussions upon human personality and values. I am not referring only to the act of warfare itself, but the whole complex of events which is war. The corruption and hollowness revealed in the prosecution of this war are too contemptible for words. Certainly I will accept my share of responsibility for them, but I won't fight in a war to extend that corruption and hollowness.
Perhaps I ought to try and give expression to what many of us pacifists feel about Germany in relation to ourselves, since Mr Orwell brings up this point. Needless to say, we have no love for Fascism, and our entire attitude is one of personal resistance to all forms of Fascism, as they impinge upon us in concrete form. (Whereas Orwell swallows the concrete encroachments and waves his arms at a distant bogey.) Not only will we not fight, nor lend a hand with the war, but the "intellectuals" among us would scorn to mentally compromise themselves with the Government. Orwell dislikes the French intellectuals licking up Hitler's crumbs, but what's the difference between them and our intellectuals who are licking up Churchill's? However: we "don't believe in any 'defence of democracy', are inclined to prefer Germany to Britain, and don't feel the horror of Fascism that we who are somewhat older feel". I can only speak for myself, of course, but surely the "defence of democracy" is best served by defending one's own concrete liberties, not by equating democracy with Britain, and allowing all democracy to be destroyed in order that we may fight better -- for "Britain"; and Orwell should not need to be told what, or who, "Britain" now is.
I am not greatly taken in by Britain's "democracy", particularly as it is gradually vanishing under the pressure of the war. Certainly I would never fight and kill for such a phantasm. I do not greatly admire the part "my country" has played in world events. I consider that spiritually Britain has lost all meaning; she once stood for something, perhaps, but who can pretend that the idea of "Britain" now counts for anything in the world? This is not cynicism. I feel identified with my country in a deep sense, and want her to regain her meaning, her soul, if that be possible
: but the unloading of a billion tons of bombs on Germany won't help this forward an inch. The pretence exists in some quarters that, although Britain has been a sick nation, now, engaged in war, she has "found her soul", and by this one gathers that the sickness was exemplified by Chamberlain and the soul-finding by Churchill. Unfortunately, deep changes do not occur so easily as that. England does not even know what she is fighting for, only what she is fighting against. The pacifists' "championing" of Hitler referred to by Orwell is simply a recognition by us that Hitler and Germany contain a real historical dynamic, whereas we do not. Whereas the rest of the nation is content with calling down obloquy on Hitler's head, we regard this as superficial. Hitler requires, not condemnation, but understanding. This does not mean that we like, or defend him. Personally I do not care for Hitler. He is, however, "realler" than Chamberlain, Churchill, Cripps, etc., in that he is the vehicle of raw historical forces, whereas they are stuffed dummies, waxwork figures, living in unreality. We do not desire a German "victory"; we would not lift a finger to help either Britain or Germany to "win"; but there would be a profound justice, I feel, however terrible, in a German victory. (In actuality, any ruler would find us rather awkward customers, one no less than another.)