Fifty Orwell Essays

by George Orwell

Eurasian boundaries, of momentary Appeasement and Infiltration (England,

  the United States).

  I do not think it is fanciful to suggest that the unnecessary capital

  letters with which this passage is loaded are intended to have a hypnotic

  effect on the reader. Burnham is trying to build up a picture of

  terrifying, irresistible power, and to turn a normal political manoeuvre

  like infiltration into Infiltration adds to the general portentousness.

  The essay should be read in full. Although it is not the kind of tribute

  that the average russophile would consider acceptable, and although

  Burnham himself would probably claim that he is being strictly objective,

  he is in effect performing an act of homage, and even of self-abasement.

  Meanwhile, this essay gives us another prophecy to add to the list: i.e.

  that the USSR will conquer the whole of Eurasia, and probably a great

  deal more. And one must remember that Burnham's basic theory contains, in

  itself, a prediction which still has to be tested--that is, that whatever

  else happens, the "managerial" form of society is bound to prevail.

  Burnham's earlier prophecy, of a Germany victory in the war and the

  integration of Europe round the German nucleus, was falsified, not only

  in its main outlines, but in some important details. Burnham insists all

  the way through that "managerialism" is not only more efficient than

  capitalist democracy or Marxian Socialism, but also more acceptable to

  the masses. The slogans of democracy and national self-determination, he

  says, no longer have any mass appeal: "managerialism", on the other hand,

  can rouse enthusiasm, produce intelligible war aims, establish fifth

  columns everywhere, and inspire its soldiers with a fanatical morale. The

  "fanaticism" of the Germans, as against the "apathy" or "indifference" of

  the British, French, etc, is much emphasised, and Nazism is represented

  as a revolutionary force sweeping across Europe and spreading its

  philosophy "by contagion". The Nazi fifth columns "cannot be wiped out",

  and the democratic nations are quite incapable of projecting any

  settlement which the German or other European masses would prefer to the

  New Order. In any case, the democracies can only defeat Germany if they

  go "still further along the managerial road than Germany has yet gone".

  The germ of truth in all this is that the smaller European states,

  demoralised by the chaos and stagnation of the pre-war years, collapsed

  rather more quickly than they need have done, and might conceivably have

  accepted the New Order if the Germans had kept some of their promises.

  But the actual experience of German rule aroused almost at once such a

  fury of hatred and vindictiveness as the world has seldom seen. After

  about the beginning of 1941 there was hardly any need of a positive war

  aim, since getting rid of the Germans was a sufficient objective. The

  question of morale, and its relation to national solidarity, is a

  nebulous one, and the evidence can be so manipulated as to prove almost

  anything. But if one goes by the proportion of prisoners to other

  casualties, and the amount of quislingism, the totalitarian states come

  out of the comparison worse than the democracies. Hundreds of thousands

  of Russians appear to have gone over to the Germans during the course of

  the war, while comparable numbers of Germans and Italians had gone over

  to the Allies before the war started: the corresponding number of

  American or British renegades would have amounted to a few scores. As an

  example of the inability of "capitalist ideologies" to enlist support,

  Burnham cites "the complete failure of voluntary military recruiting in

  England (as well as the entire British Empire) and in the United States".

  One would gather from this that the armies of the totalitarian states

  were manned by volunteers. Actually, no totalitarian state has ever so

  much as considered voluntary recruitment for any purpose, nor, throughout

  history, has a large army ever been raised by voluntary means. [Note at

  end of paragraph] It is not worth listing the many similar arguments that

  Burnham puts forward. The point is that he assumes that the Germans must

  win the propaganda war as well as the military one, and that, at any rate

  in Europe, this estimate was not borne out by events.

  [Note: Great Britain raised a million volunteers in the earlier part of

  the 1914-18 war. This must be a world's record, but the pressures applied

  were such that it is doubtful whether the recruitment ought to be

  described as voluntary. Even the most "ideological" wars have been fought

  largely by pressed men. In the English civil war, the Napoleonic wars,

  the American civil war, the Spanish civil war, etc, both sides resorted

  to conscription or the press gang. (Author's footnote.)]

  It will be seen that Burnham's predictions have not merely, when they

  were verifiable, turned out to be wrong, but that they have sometimes

  contradicted one another in a sensational way. It is this last fact that

  is significant. Political predictions are usually wrong, because they are

  usually based on wish-thinking, but they can have symptomatic value,

  especially when they change abruptly. Often the revealing factor is the

  date at which they are made. Dating Burnham's various writings as

  accurately as can be done from internal evidence, and then noting what

  events they coincided with, we find the following relationships:

  In THE MANAGERIAL REVOLUTION Burnham prophesies a German victory,

  postponement of the Russo-German war until after Britain is defeated,

  and, subsequently, the defeat of Russia. The book, or much of it, was

  written in the second half of 1940--i.e. at a time when the Germans had

  overrun western Europe and were bombing Britain, and the Russians were

  collaborating with them fairly closely, and in what appeared, at any

  rate, to be a spirit of appeasement.

  In the supplementary note added to the English edition of the book,

  Burnham appears to assume that the USSR is already beaten and the

  splitting-up process is about to begin. This was published in the spring

  of 1942 and presumably written at the end of 1941; i.e. when the Germans

  were in the suburbs of Moscow.

  The prediction that Russia would gang up with Japan against the USA was

  written early in 1944, soon after the conclusion of a new Russo-Japanese

  treaty.

  The prophecy of Russian world conquest was written in the winter of 1944,

  when the Russians were advancing rapidly in eastern Europe while the

  Western Allies were still held up in Italy and northern France.

  It will be seen that at each point Burnham is predicting A CONTINUATION

  OF THE THING THAT IS HAPPENING. Now the tendency to do this is not simply

  a bad habit, like inaccuracy or exaggeration, which one can correct by

  taking thought. It is a major mental disease, and its roots lie partly in

  cowardice and partly in the worship of power, which is not fully

  separable from cowardice.

  Suppose in 1940 you had taken a Gallup poll, in England, on the question

  "Will Germany win the war?" You would have found, curiously enough, that


  the group answering "Yes" contained a far higher percentage of

  intelligent people--people with IQ of over 120, shall we say--than the

  group answering "No". The same would have held good in the middle of

  1942. In this case the figures would not have been so striking, but if

  you had made the question "Will the Germans capture Alexandria?" or "Will

  the Japanese be able to hold on to the territories they have captured ?",

  then once again there would have been a very marked tendency for

  intelligence to concentrate in the "Yes" group. In every case the

  less-gifted person would have been likelier to give a right answer.

  If one went simply by these instances, one might assume that high

  intelligence and bad military judgement always go together. However, it

  is not so simple as that. The English intelligentsia, on the whole, were

  more defeatist than the mass of the people--and some of them went on being

  defeatist at a time when the war was quite plainly won--partly because

  they were better able to visualise the dreary years of warfare that lay

  ahead. Their morale was worse because their imaginations were stronger.

  The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it, and if one finds the

  prospect of a long war intolerable, it is natural to disbelieve in the

  possibility of victory. But there was more to it than that. There was

  also the disaffection of large numbers of intellectuals, which made it

  difficult for them not to side with any country hostile to Britain. And

  deepest of all, there was admiration--though only in a very few cases

  conscious admiration--for the power, energy, and cruelty of the Nazi

  r�gime. It would be a useful though tedious labour to go through the

  left-wing press and enumerate all the hostile references to Nazism during

  the years 1935-45. One would find, I have little doubt, that they reached

  their high-water mark in 1937-8 and 1944-5, and dropped off noticeably in

  the years 1939-42--that is, during the period when Germany seemed to be

  winning. One would find, also, the same people advocating a compromise

  peace in 1940 and approving the dismemberment of Germany in 1945. And if

  one studied the reactions of the English intelligentsia towards the USSR,

  there, too, one would find genuinely progressive impulses mixed up with

  admiration for power and cruelty. It would be grossly unfair to suggest

  that power worship is the only motive for russophile feeling, but it is

  one motive, and among intellectuals it is probably the strongest one.

  Power worship blurs political judgement because it leads, almost

  unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is

  winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible. If the Japanese

  have conquered south Asia, then they will keep south Asia for ever, if

  the Germans have captured Tobruk, they will infallibly capture Cairo; if

  the Russians are in Berlin, it will not be long before they are in

  London: and so on. This habit of mind leads also to the belief that

  things will happen more quickly, completely, and catastrophically than

  they ever do in practice. The rise and fall of empires, the disappearance

  of cultures and religions, are expected to happen with earthquake

  suddenness, and processes which have barely started are talked about as

  though they were already at an end. Burnham's writings are full of

  apocalyptic visions. Nations, governments, classes and social systems are

  constantly described as expanding, contracting, decaying, dissolving,

  toppling, crashing, crumbling, crystallising, and, in general, behaving

  in an unstable and melodramatic way. The slowness of historical change,

  the fact that any epoch always contains a great deal of the last epoch,

  is never sufficiently allowed for. Such a manner of thinking is bound to

  lead to mistaken prophecies, because, even when it gauges the direction

  of events rightly, it will miscalculate their tempo. Within the space of

  five years Burnham foretold the domination of Russia by Germany and of

  Germany by Russia. In each case he was obeying the same instinct: the

  instinct to bow down before the conqueror of the moment, to accept the

  existing trend as irreversible. With this in mind one can criticise his

  theory in a broader way.

  The mistakes I have pointed out do not disprove Burnham's theory, but

  they do cast light on his probable reasons for holding it. In this

  connection one cannot leave out of account the fact that Burnham is an

  American. Every political theory has a certain regional tinge about it,

  and every nation, every culture, has its own characteristic prejudices

  and patches of ignorance. There are certain problems that must almost

  inevitably be seen in a different perspective according to the

  geographical situation from which one is looking at them. Now, the

  attitude that Burnham adopts, of classifying Communism and Fascism as

  much the same thing, and at the same time accepting both of them--or, at

  any rate, not assuming that either must be violently struggled against--is

  essentially an American attitude, and would be almost impossible for an

  Englishman or any other western European. English writers who consider

  Communism and Fascism to be THE SAME THING invariably hold that both are

  monstrous evils which must be fought to the death: on the other hand, any

  Englishman who believes Communism and Fascism to be opposites will feel

  that he ought to side with one or the other. [Note 1 at end of paragraph]

  The reason for this difference of outlook is simple enough and, as usual,

  is bound up with wish-thinking. If totalitarianism triumphs and the dreams

  of the geopoliticians come true, Britain will disappear as a world power

  and the whole of western Europe will be swallowed by some single great

  state. This is not a prospect that it is easy for an Englishman to

  contemplate with detachment. Either he does not want Britain to

  disappear--in which case he will tend to construct theories proving the

  thing that he wants-or, like a minority of intellectuals, he will decide

  that his country is finished and transfer his allegiance to some foreign

  power. An American does not have to make the same choice. Whatever

  happens, the United States will survive as a great power, and from the

  American point of view it does not make much difference whether Europe is

  dominated by Russia or by Germany. Most Americans who think of the matter

  at all would prefer to see the world divided between two or three monster

  states which had reached their natural boundaries and could bargain with

  one another on economic issues without being troubled by ideological

  differences. Such a world-picture fits in with the American tendency to

  admire size for its own sake and to feel that success constitutes

  justification, and it fits in with the all-prevailing anti-British

  sentiment. In practice, Britain and the United States have twice been

  forced into alliance against Germany, and will probably, before long, be

  forced into alliance against Russia: but, subjectively, a majority of

  Americans would prefer either Russia or Germany to Britain, and, as

  between Russia and Germany, would prefer whicheve
r seemed stronger at the

  moment. [Note 2 at end of paragraph] It is, therefore, not surprising that

  Burnham's world-view should often be noticeably close to that of the

  American imperialists on the one side, or to that of the isolationists on

  the other. It is a "tough" or "realistic" world view which fits in with the

  American form of wish-thinking. The almost open admiration for Nazi

  methods which Burnham shows in the earlier of his two books, and which

  would seem shocking to almost any English reader, depends ultimately on

  the fact that the Atlantic is wider than the Channel.

  [Note 1: The only exception I am able to think of is Bernard Shaw, who,

  for some years at any rate, declared Communism and Fascism to be much the

  same thing, and was in favour of both of them. But Shaw, after all, is not

  an Englishman, and probably does not feel his fate to be bound up with

  that of Britain. (Author's footnote.)]

  [Note 2 As late as the autumn of 1945, a Gallup poll taken among the

  American troops in Germany showed that 51 percent "thought Hitler did much

  good before 1939". This was after five years of anti-Hitler propaganda.

  The verdict, as quoted, is not very strongly favourable to Germany, but

  it is hard to believe that a verdict equally favourable to Britain would

  be given by anywhere near 51 per cent of the American army. (Author's

  footnote.)]

  As I have said earlier, Burnham has probably been more right than wrong

  about the present and the immediate past. For quite fifty years past the

  general drift has almost certainly been towards oligarchy. The

  ever-increasing concentration of industrial and financial power; the

  diminishing importance of the individual capitalist or shareholder, and

  the growth of the new "managerial" class of scientists, technicians, and

  bureaucrats; the weakness of the proletariat against the centralised

  state; the increasing helplessness of small countries against big ones;

  the decay of representative institutions and the appearance of one-party

  r�gimes based on police terrorism, faked plebiscites, etc: all these

  things seem to point in the same direction. Burnham sees the trend and

  assumes that it is irresistible, rather as a rabbit fascinated by a boa

  constrictor might assume that a boa constrictor is the strongest thing in

  the world. When one looks a little deeper, one sees that all his ideas

  rest upon two axioms which are taken for granted in the earlier book and

  made partly explicit in the second one. They are:

  1. Politics is essentially the same in all ages.

  2. Political behaviour is different from other kinds of behaviour.

  To take the second point first. In THE MACHIAVELLIANS, Burnham insists

  that politics is simply the struggle for power. Every great social

  movement, every war, every revolution, every political programme, however

  edifying and Utopian, really has behind it the ambitions of some

  sectional group which is out to grab power for itself. Power can never be

  restrained by any ethical or religious code, but only by other power. The

  nearest possible approach to altruistic behaviour is the perception by a

  ruling group that it will probably stay in power longer if it behaves

  decently. But curiously enough, these generalisations only apply to

  political behaviour, not to any other kind of behaviour. In everyday life,

  as Burnham sees and admits, one cannot explain every human action by

  applying the principle of CUI BONO? Obviously, human beings have impulses

  which are not selfish. Man, therefore, is an animal that can act morally

  when he acts as an individual, but becomes immoral when he acts

  collectively. But even this generalisation only holds good for the higher

  groups. The masses, it seems, have vague aspirations towards liberty and

  human brotherhood, which are easily played upon by power-hungry

  individuals or minorities. So that history consists of a series of

  swindles, in which the masses are first lured into revolt by the promise