Fifty Orwell Essays

by George Orwell

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