Fifty Orwell Essays

by George Orwell

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 own 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 Petain, 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.

  WELLS, HITLER AND THE WORLD STATE (1941)

  "In March or April, say the wiseacres, there is to be a stupendous

  knockout blow at Britain...What Hitler has to do it with, I cannot

  imagine. His ebbing and dispersed military resources are now probably

  not so very much greater than the Italians' before they were put to the

  test in Greece and Africa."

  "The German air power has been largely spent. It is behind the times

  and its first-rate men are mostly dead or disheartened or worn out."

  "In 1914 the Hohenzollern army was the best in the world. Behind that

  screaming little defective in Berlin there is nothing of the sort...

  Yet our military 'experts' discuss the waiting phantom. In their

  imaginations it is perfect in its equipment and invincible in

  discipline. Sometimes it is to strike a decisive 'blow' through Spain

  and North Africa and on, or march through the Balkans, march from the

  Danube to Ankara, to Persia, to India, or 'crush Russia', or 'pour' over

  the Brenner into Italy. The weeks pass and the phantom does none of

  these things--for one excellent reason. It does not exist to that

  extent. Most of such inadequate guns and munitions as it possessed must

  have been taken away from it and fooled away in Hitler's silly feints to

  invade Britain. And its raw jerry-built discipline is wilting under the

  creeping realisation that the Blitzkrieg is spent, and the war is coming

  home to roost."

  These quotations are not taken from the CAVALRY QUARTERLY but from a

  series of newspaper articles by Mr H.G. Wells, written at the beginning

  of this year and now reprinted in a book entitled GUIDE TO THE NEW

  WORLD. Since they were written, the German army has overrun the Balkans

  and reconquered Cyrenaica, it can march through Turkey or Spain at such

  time as may suit it, and it has undertaken the invasion of Russia. How

  that campaign will turn out I do not know, but it is worth noticing that

  the German general staff, whose opinion is probably worth something,

  would not have begun it if they had not felt fairly certain of finishing

  it within three months. So much for the idea that the German army is a

  bogey, its equipment inadequate, its morale breaking down, etc etc.

  What has Wells to set against the "screaming little defective in

  Berlin"? The usual rigmarole about a World State, plus the Sankey

  Declaration, which is an attempted definition of fundamental human

  rights, of anti-totalitarian tendency. Except that he is now especially

  concerned with federal world control of air power, it is the same gospel

  as he has been preaching almost without interruption for the past forty

  years, always with an air of angry surprise at the human beings who can

  fail to grasp anything so obvio
us.

  What is the use of saying that we need federal world control of the air?

  The whole question is how we are to get it. What is the use of pointing

  out that a World State is desirable? What matters is that not one of the

  five great military powers would think of submitting to such a thing.

  All sensible men for decades past have been substantially in agreement

  with what Mr Wells says; but the sensible men have no power and, in too

  many cases, no disposition to sacrifice themselves. Hitler is a criminal

  lunatic, and Hitler has an army of millions of men, aeroplanes in

  thousands, tanks in tens of thousands. For his sake a great nation has

  been willing to overwork itself for six years and then to fight for two

  years more, whereas for the commonsense, essentially hedonistic

  world-view which Mr Wells puts forward, hardly a human creature is

  willing to shed a pint of blood. Before you can even talk of world

  reconstruction, or even of peace, you have got to eliminate Hitler,

  which means bringing into being a dynamic not necessarily the same as

  that of the Nazis, but probably quite as unacceptable to "enlightened"

  and hedonistic people. What has kept England on its feet during the past

  year? In part, no doubt, some vague idea about a better future, but

  chiefly the atavistic emotion of patriotism, the ingrained feeling of

  the English-speaking peoples that they are superior to foreigners. For

  the last twenty years the main object of English left-wing intellectuals

  has been to break this feeling down, and if they had succeeded, we might

  be watching the SS men patrolling the London streets at this moment.

  Similarly, why are the Russians fighting like tigers against the German

  invasion? In part, perhaps, for some half-remembered ideal of Utopian

  Socialism, but chiefly in defence of Holy Russia (the "sacred soil of

  the Fatherland", etc etc), which Stalin has revived in an only slightly

  altered form. The energy that actually shapes the world springs from

  emotions--racial pride, leader-worship, religious belief, love of

  war--which liberal intellectuals mechanically write off as anachronisms,

  and which they have usually destroyed so completely in themselves as to

  have lost all power of action.

  The people who say that Hitler is Antichrist, or alternatively, the Holy

  Ghost, are nearer an understanding of the truth than the intellectuals

  who for ten dreadful years have kept it up that he is merely a figure

  out of comic opera, not worth taking seriously. All that this idea

  really reflects is the sheltered conditions of English life. The Left

  Book Club was at bottom a product of Scotland Yard, just as the Peace

  Pledge Union is a product of the navy. One development of the last ten

  years has been the appearance of the "political book", a sort of

  enlarged pamphlet combining history with political criticism, as an

  important literary form. But the best writers in this line--Trotsky,

  Rauschning, Rosenberg, Silone, Borkenau, Koestler and others--have none

  of them been Englishmen, and nearly all of them have been renegades from

  one or other extremist party, who have seen totalitarianism at close

  quarters and known the meaning of exile and persecution. Only in the

  English-speaking countries was it fashionable to believe, right up to the

  outbreak of war, that Hitler was an unimportant lunatic and the German

  tanks made of cardboard. Mr Wells, it will be seen from the quotations I

  have given above, believes something of the kind still. I do not suppose

  that either the bombs or the German campaign in Greece have altered his

  opinion. A lifelong habit of thought stands between him and an

  understanding of Hitler's power.

  Mr Wells, like Dickens, belongs to the non-military middle class. The

  thunder of guns, the jingle of spurs, the catch in the throat when the

  old flag goes by, leave him manifestly cold. He has an invincible hatred

  of the fighting, hunting, swashbuckling side of life, symbolised in all

  his early books by a violent propaganda against horses. The principal

  villain of his OUTLINE OF HISTORY is the military adventurer, Napoleon.

  If one looks through nearly any book that he has written in the last

  forty years one finds the same idea constantly recurring: the supposed

  antithesis between the man of science who is working towards a planned

  World State and the reactionary who is trying to restore a disorderly

  past. In novels, Utopias, essays, films, pamphlets, the antithesis crops

  up, always more or less the same. On the one side science, order,

  progress, internationalism, aeroplanes, steel, concrete, hygiene: on the

  other side war, nationalism, religion, monarchy, peasants, Greek

  professors, poets, horses. History as he sees it is a series of

  victories won by the scientific man over the romantic man. Now, he is

  probably right in assuming that a "reasonable", planned form of society,

  with scientists rather than witch-doctors in control, will prevail

  sooner or later, but that is a different matter from assuming that it is

  just round the corner. There survives somewhere or other an interesting

  controversy which took place between Wells and Churchill at the time of

  the Russian Revolution. Wells accuses Churchill of not really believing

  his own propaganda about the Bolsheviks being monsters dripping with

  blood etc, but of merely fearing that they were going to introduce an

  era of common sense and scientific control, in which flag-wavers like

  Churchill himself would have no place. Churchill's estimate of the

  Bolsheviks, however, was nearer the mark than Wells's. The early

  Bolsheviks may have been angels or demons, according as one chooses to

  regard them, but at any rate they were not sensible men. They were not

  introducing a Wellsian Utopia but a Rule of the Saints, which, like the

  English Rule of the Saints, was a military despotism enlivened by

  witchcraft trials. The same misconception reappears in an inverted form

  in Wells's attitude to the Nazis. Hitler is all the war-lords and

  witch doctors in history rolled into one. Therefore, argues Wells, he is

  an absurdity, a ghost from the past, a creature doomed to disappear

  almost immediately. But unfortunately the equation of science with

  common sense does not really hold good. The aeroplane, which was looked

  forward to as a civilising influence but in practice has hardly been

  used except for dropping bombs, is the symbol of that fact. Modern

  Germany is far more scientific than England, and far more barbarous.

  Much of what Wells has imagined and worked for is physically there in

  Nazi Germany. The order, the planning, the State encouragement of

  science, the steel, the concrete, the aeroplanes, are all there, but all

  in the service of ideas appropriate to the Stone Age. Science is

  fighting on the side of superstition. But obviously it is impossible for

  Wells to accept this. It would contradict the world-view on which his

  own works are based. The war-lords and the witch-doctors MUST fail, the

  common-sense World State, as seen by a nineteenth-century liberal whose

  heart does not leap at the sound of bugles, MUST triumph
. Treachery and

  defeatism apart, Hitler CANNOT be a danger. That he should finally win

  would be an impossible reversal of history, like a Jacobite restoration.

  But is it not a sort of parricide for a person of my age (thirty-eight)

  to find fault with H.G. Wells? Thinking people who were born about the

  beginning of this century are in some sense Wells's own creation. How

  much influence any mere writer has, and especially a "popular" writer

  whose work takes effect quickly, is questionable, but I doubt whether

  anyone who was writing books between 1900 and 1920, at any rate in the

  English language, influenced the young so much. The minds of all of us,

  and therefore the physical world, would be perceptibly different if

  Wells had never existed. Only, just the singleness of mind, the one-sided

  imagination that made him seem like an inspired prophet in the Edwardian

  age, make him a shallow, inadequate thinker now. When Wells was young,

  the antithesis between science and reaction was not false. Society was

  ruled by narrow-minded, profoundly incurious people, predatory

  businessmen, dull squires, bishops, politicians who could quote

  Horace but had never heard of algebra. Science was faintly disreputable

  and religious belief obligatory. Traditionalism, stupidity, snobbishness,

  patriotism, superstition and love of war seemed to be all on the

  same side; there was need of someone who could state the opposite

  point of view. Back in the nineteen-hundreds it was a wonderful

  experience for a boy to discover H.G. Wells. There you were, in a world

  of pedants, clergymen and golfers, with your future employers exhorting

  you to "get on or get out", your parents systematically warping your

  sexual life, and your dull-witted schoolmasters sniggering over their

  Latin tags; and here was this wonderful man who could tell you about the

  inhabitants of the planets and the bottom of the sea, and who knew that

  the future was not going to be what respectable people imagined. A

  decade or so before aeroplanes were technically feasible Wells knew that

  within a little while men would be able to fly. He knew that because he

  himself wanted to be able to fly, and therefore felt sure that research

  in that direction would continue. On the other hand, even when I was a

  little boy, at a time when the Wright brothers had actually lifted their

  machine off the ground for fifty-nine seconds, the generally accepted

  opinion was that if God had meant us to fly He would have given us

  wings. Up to 1914 Wells was in the main a true prophet. In physical

  details his vision of the new world has been fulfilled to a surprising

  extent.

  But because he belonged to the nineteenth century and to a non-military

  nation and class, he could not grasp the tremendous strength of the old

  world which was symbolised in his mind by fox-hunting Tories. He was, and

  still is, quite incapable of understanding that nationalism, religious

  bigotry and feudal loyalty are far more powerful forces than what he

  himself would describe as sanity. Creatures out of the Dark Ages have

  come marching into the present, and if they are ghosts they are at any

  rate ghosts which need a strong magic to lay them. The people who have

  shown the best understanding of Fascism are either those who have

  suffered under it or those who have a Fascist streak in themselves. A

  crude book like THE IRON HEEL, written nearly thirty years ago, is a

  truer prophecy of the future than either BRAVE NEW WORLD or THE SHAPE OF

  THINGS TO COME. If one had to choose among Wells's own contemporaries a

  writer who could stand towards him as a corrective, one might choose

  Kipling, who was not deaf to the evil voices of power and military

  "glory". Kipling would have understood the appeal of Hitler, or for that

  matter of Stalin, whatever his attitude towards them might be. Wells is

  too sane to understand the modern world. The succession of