by-products of revolution, though in this case it was only the beginnings
of a revolution, and obviously foredoomed to failure.
4
The struggle for power between the Spanish Republican parties is an
unhappy, far-off thing which I have no wish to revive at this date. I
only mention it in order to say: believe nothing, or next to nothing, of
what you read about internal affairs on the Government side. It is all,
from whatever source, party propaganda--that is to say, lies. The broad
truth about the war is simple enough. The Spanish bourgeoisie saw their
chance of crushing the labour movement, and took it, aided by the Nazis
and by the forces of reaction all over the world. It is doubtful whether
more than that will ever be established.
I remember saying once to Arthur Koestler, 'History stopped in 1936', at
which he nodded in immediate understanding. We were both thinking of
totalitarianism in general, but more particularly of the Spanish civil
war. Early in life I have noticed that no event is ever correctly
reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw
newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even
the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles
reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where
hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely
denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot
fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers
in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional
superstructures over events that had never happened. I saw, in fact,
history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to
have happened according to various 'party lines'. Yet in a way, horrible
as all this was, it was unimportant. It concerned secondary
issues--namely, the struggle for power between the Comintern and the
Spanish left-wing parties, and the efforts of the Russian Government to
prevent revolution in Spain. But the broad picture of the war which the
Spanish Government presented to the world was not untruthful. The main
issues were what it said they were. But as for the Fascists and their
backers, how could they come even as near to the truth as that? How
could they possibly mention their real aims? Their version of the war
was pure fantasy, and in the circumstances it could not have been
otherwise.
The only propaganda line open to the Nazis and Fascists was to represent
themselves as Christian patriots saving Spain from a Russian
dictatorship. This involved pretending that life in Government Spain was
just one long massacre (VIDE the CATHOLIC HERALD or the DAILY MAIL--but
these were child's play compared with the Continental Fascist press), and
it involved immensely exaggerating the scale of Russian intervention. Out
of the huge pyramid of lies which the Catholic and reactionary press all
over the world built up, let me take just one point--the presence in
Spain of a Russian army. Devout Franco partisans all believed in this;
estimates of its strength went as high as half a million. Now, there was
no Russian army in Spain. There may have been a handful of airmen and
other technicians, a few hundred at the most, but an army there was not.
Some thousands of foreigners who fought in Spain, not to mention millions
of Spaniards, were witnesses of this. Well, their testimony made no
impression at all upon the Franco propagandists, not one of whom had set
foot in Government Spain. Simultaneously these people refused utterly to
admit the fact of German or Italian intervention at the same time as the
Germany and Italian press were openly boasting about the exploits of
their' legionaries'. I have chosen to mention only one point, but in fact
the whole of Fascist propaganda about the war was on this level.
This kind of thing is frightening to me, because it often gives me the
feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the
world. After all, the chances are that those lies, or at any rate similar
lies, will pass into history. How will the history of the Spanish war be
written? If Franco remains in power his nominees will write the history
books, and (to stick to my chosen point) that Russian army which never
existed will become historical fact, and schoolchildren will learn about
it generations hence. But suppose Fascism is finally defeated and some
kind of democratic government restored in Spain in the fairly near
future; even then, how is the history of the war to be written? What kind
of records will Franco have left behind him? Suppose even that the
records kept on the Government side are recoverable--even so, how is a
true history of the war to be written? For, as I have pointed out
already, the Government, also dealt extensively in lies. From the
anti-Fascist angle one could write a broadly truthful history of the war,
but it would be a partisan history, unreliable on every minor point. Yet,
after all, some kind of history will be written, and after those who
actually remember the war are dead, it will be universally accepted. So
for all practical purposes the lie will have become truth.
I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies
anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part
inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the
abandonment of the idea that history COULD be truthfully written. In the
past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they
wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must
make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that 'facts' existed
and were more or less discoverable. And in practice there was always a
considerable body of fact which would have been agreed to by almost
everyone. If you look up the history of the last war in, for instance,
the ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA, you will find that a respectable amount of
the material is drawn from German sources. A British and a German
historian would disagree deeply on many things, even on fundamentals, but
there would still be that body of, as it were, neutral fact on which
neither would seriously challenge the other. It is just this common basis
of agreement, with its implication that human beings are all one species
of animal, that totalitarianism destroys. Nazi theory indeed specifically
denies that such a thing as 'the truth' exists. There is, for instance,
no such thing as 'Science'. There is only 'German Science', 'Jewish
Science', etc. The implied objective of this line of thought is a
nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not
only the future but THE PAST. If the Leader says of such and such an
event, 'It never happened'--well, it never happened. If he says that two
and two are five--well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me
much more than bombs--and after our experiences of the last few years
that is not a frivolous statement.
But is it perhaps childish or morbid to terrify oneself with vision
s of a
totalitarian future? Before writing off the totalitarian world as a
nightmare that can't come true, just remember that in 1925 the world of
today would have seemed a nightmare that couldn't come true. Against that
shifting phantasmagoric world in which black may be white tomorrow and
yesterday's weather can be changed by decree, there are in reality only
two safeguards. One is that however much you deny the truth, the truth
goes on existing, as it were, behind your back, and you consequently
can't violate it in ways that impair military efficiency. The other is
that so long as some parts of the earth remain unconquered, the liberal
tradition can be kept alive. Let Fascism, or possibly even a combination
of several Fascisms, conquer the whole world, and those two conditions no
longer exist. We in England underrate the danger of this kind of thing,
because our traditions and our past security have given us a sentimental
belief that it all comes right in the end and the thing you most fear
never really happens. Nourished for hundreds of years on a literature in
which Right invariably triumphs in the last chapter, we believe
half-instinctively that evil always defeats itself in the long run.
Pacifism, for instance, is founded largely on this belief. Don't resist
evil, and it will somehow destroy itself. But why should it? What
evidence is there that it does? And what instance is there of a modern
industrialized state collapsing unless conquered from the outside by
military force?
Consider for instance the re-institution of slavery. Who could have
imagined twenty years ago that slavery would return to Europe? Well,
slavery has been restored under our noses. The forced-labour camps all
over Europe and North Africa where Poles, Russians, Jews and political
prisoners of every race toil at road-making or swamp-draining for their
bare rations, are simple chattel slavery. The most one can say is that
the buying and selling of slaves by individuals is not yet permitted. In
other ways--the breaking-up of families, for instance--the conditions
are probably worse than they were on the American cotton plantations.
There is no reason for thinking that this state of affairs will change
while any totalitarian domination endures. We don't grasp its full
implications, because in our mystical way we feel that a r�gime founded
on slavery MUST collapse. But it is worth comparing the duration of the
slave empires of antiquity with that of any modern state. Civilizations
founded on slavery have lasted for such periods as four thousand years.
When I think of antiquity, the detail that frightens me is that those
hundreds of millions of slaves on whose backs civilization rested
generation after generation have left behind them no record whatever. We
do not even know their names. In the whole of Greek and Roman history,
how many slaves' names are known to you? I can think of two, or possibly
three. One is Spartacus and the other is Epictetus. Also, in the Roman
room at the British Museum there is a glass jar with the maker's name
inscribed on the bottom, 'FELIX FECIT'. I have a mental picture of poor
Felix (a Gaul with red hair and a metal collar round his neck), but in
fact he may not have been a slave; so there are only two slaves whose
names I definitely know, and probably few people can remember more. The
rest have gone down into utter silence.
5
The backbone of the resistance against Franco was the Spanish working
class, especially the urban trade union members. In the long run--it is
important to remember that it is only in the long run--the working class
remains the most reliable enemy of Fascism, simply because the
working-class stands to gain most by a decent reconstruction of society.
Unlike other classes or categories, it can't be permanently bribed.
To say this is not to idealize the working class. In the long struggle
that has followed the Russian Revolution it is the manual workers who
have been defeated, and it is impossible not to feel that it was their
own fault. Time after time, in country after country, the organized
working-class movements have been crushed by open, illegal violence, and
their comrades abroad, linked to them in theoretical solidarity, have
simply looked on and done nothing; and underneath this, secret cause of
many betrayals, has lain the fact that between white and coloured workers
there is not even lip-service to solidarity. Who can believe in the
class-conscious international proletariat after the events of the past
ten years? To the British working class the massacre of their comrades in
Vienna, Berlin, Madrid, or wherever it might be seemed less interesting
and less important than yesterday's football match. Yet this does not
alter the fact that the working class will go on struggling against
Fascism after the others have caved in. One feature of the Nazi conquest
of France was the astonishing defections among the intelligentsia,
including some of the left-wing political intelligentsia. The
intelligentsia are the people who squeal loudest against Fascism, and yet
a respectable proportion of them collapse into defeatism when the pinch
comes. They are far-sighted enough to see the odds against them, and
moreover they can be bribed--for it is evident that the Nazis think it
worth while to bribe intellectuals. With the working class it is the
other way about. Too ignorant to see through the trick that is being
played on them, they easily swallow the promises of Fascism, yet sooner
or later they always take up the struggle again. They must do so, because
in their own bodies they always discover that the promises of Fascism
cannot be fulfilled. To win over the working class permanently, the
Fascists would have to raise the general standard of living, which they
are unable and probably unwilling to do. The struggle of the working
class is like the growth of a plant. The plant is blind and stupid, but
it knows enough to keep pushing upwards towards the light, and it will do
this in the face of endless discouragements. What are the workers
struggling for? Simply for the decent life which they are more and more
aware is now technically possible. Their consciousness of this aim ebbs
and flows. In Spain, for a while, people were acting consciously, moving
towards a goal which they wanted to reach and believed they could reach.
It accounted for the curiously buoyant feeling that life in Government
Spain had during the early months of the war. The common people knew in
their bones that the Republic was their friend and Franco was their
enemy. They knew that they were in the right, because they were fighting
for something which the world owed them and was able to give them.
One has to remember this to see the Spanish war in its true perspective.
When one thinks of the cruelty, squalor, and futility of War--and in
this particular case of the intrigues, the persecutions, the lies and the
misunderstandings--there is always the temptation to say: 'One side is
as bad as the other. I am neutral'. In practice, however, one cannot b
e
neutral, and there is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no
difference who wins. Nearly always one stands more or less for progress,
the other side more or less for reaction. The hatred which the Spanish
Republic excited in millionaires, dukes, cardinals, play-boys, Blimps,
and what-not would in itself be enough to show one how the land lay. In
essence it was a class war. If it had been won, the cause of the common
people everywhere would have been strengthened. It was lost, and the
dividend-drawers all over the world rubbed their hands. That was the real
issue; all else was froth on its surface.
6
The outcome of the Spanish war was settled in London, Paris, Rome,
Berlin--at any rate not in Spain. After the summer of 1937 those with
eyes in their heads realized that the Government could not win the war
unless there were some profound change in the international set-up, and
in deciding to fight on Negrin and the others may have been partly
influenced by the expectation that the world war which actually broke out
in 1939 was coming in 1938. The much-publicized disunity on the
Government side was not a main cause of defeat. The Government militias
were hurriedly raised, ill-armed and unimaginative in their military
outlook, but they would have been the same if complete political
agreement had existed from the start. At the outbreak of war the average
Spanish factory-worker did not even know how to fire a rifle (there had
never been universal conscription in Spain), and the traditional pacifism
of the Left was a great handicap. The thousands of foreigners who served
in Spain made good infantry, but there were very few experts of any kind
among them. The Trotskyist thesis that the war could have been won if the
revolution had not been sabotaged was probably false. To nationalize
factories, demolish churches, and issue revolutionary manifestoes would
not have made the armies more efficient. The Fascists won because they
were the stronger; they had modern arms and the others hadn't. No
political strategy could offset that.
The most baffling thing in the Spanish war was the behaviour of the great
powers. The war was actually won for Franco by the Germans and Italians,
whose motives were obvious enough. The motives of France and Britain are
less easy to understand. In 1936 it was clear to everyone that if Britain
would only help the Spanish Government, even to the extent of a few
million pounds' worth of arms, Franco would collapse and German strategy
would be severely dislocated. By that time one did not need to be a
clairvoyant to foresee that war between Britain and Germany was coming;
one could even foretell within a year or two when it would come. Yet in
the most mean, cowardly, hypocritical way the British ruling class did
all they could to hand Spain over to Franco and the Nazis. Why? Because
they were pro-Fascist, was the obvious answer. Undoubtedly they were, and
yet when it came to the final showdown they chose to Stand up to Germany.
It is still very uncertain what plan they acted on in backing Franco, and
they may have had no clear plan at all. Whether the British ruling class
are wicked or merely stupid is one of the most difficult questions of our
time, and at certain moments a very important question. As to the
Russians, their motives in the Spanish war are completely inscrutable.
Did they, as the pinks believed, intervene in Spain in order to defend
Democracy and thwart the Nazis? Then why did they intervene on such a
niggardly scale and finally leave Spain in the lurch? Or did they, as the
Catholics maintained, intervene in order to foster revolution in Spain?
Then why did they do all in their power to crush the Spanish
revolutionary movements, defend private property and hand power to the
middle class as against the working class? Or did they, as the
Trotskyists suggested, intervene simply in order to PREVENT a Spanish
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