Whether this state of affairs could be altered by better propaganda methods is disputable. I note that people newly returned from the U.S.A. or with knowledge of conditions there, especially Canadians, are concerned about Anglo-American relations and very anxious that the British war effort should be more loudly boosted in the U.S.A. Britain's propaganda problems, however, are more complex than most people realize. To take one example, it is politically necessary to flatter the Dominions, which involves playing down the British. As a result the Germans are able to say plausibly that Britain's fighting is done for her by colonial troops, but this is held to be lesser evil than offending the Australians, who are only very loosely attached to the Empire and culturally hostile to Britain. This dilemma presents itself over and over again, in endless variations. As to America, some propagandists actually hold that it is better for the Americans to be anti-British, as this gives them a good opinion of themselves and "keeps their morale up". Others are dismayed because we are represented in America by people like Lord Halifax -- who, it is feared, may be taken for a typical Englishman. The usual line is "Why can't we send over a few working men from Wigan or Bradford to show them we're ordinary decent people like themselves?" This seems to me sentimentality. It is true, of course, that Lord Halifax is just about as representative of Britain as a Red Indian chieftain is of the United States, but the theory that the common people of all nations love each other at sight is not backed up by experience. The common people nearly everywhere are xenophobe, because they cannot accustom themselves to foreign food and foreign habits. Holding leftwing opinions makes no difference to this, a fact which impressed itself on me in the Spanish Civil War. The popular goodwill towards the U.S.S.R. in this country partly depends on the fact that few Englishmen have ever seen a Russian. And one has only to look round the English-speaking world, with its labyrinth of cultural hatreds, to see that speaking the same language is no guarantee of friendship.
Whatever happens, Britain will not go the way that France went, and the growing animosity between British and Americans may not have any real importance till the war is over. But it might have a direct influence on events if -- as is now widely expected -- Germany is defeated some time in 1943 or 1944 and it then takes about two more years to settle Japan. In that case the war against Japan might quite easily be represented as "an American war", a more plausible variant of "a Jewish war". The masses in Britain have it fixed in their minds that Hitler is the enemy, and it is quite common to hear soldiers say "I'm packing up as soon as Germany is finished." That doesn't mean that they genuinely intend or would be able to do this, and I think in practice majority opinion would be for staying in the war, unless by that time Russia had changed sides again. But the question "What are we fighting for?" is bound to come up in a sharper form when Germany is knocked out, and there are pro-Japanese elements in this country which might be clever enough to make use of popular war weariness. From the point of view of the man in the street the war in the Far East is a war for the rubber companies and the Americans, and in that context American unpopularity might be important. The British ruling class has never stated its real war aims, which happen to be unmentionable, and so long as things went badly Britain was driven part of the way towards a revolutionary strategy. There was always the possibility, therefore, of democratizing the war without losing it in the process. Now, however, the tide begins to turn and immediately the dreary world which the American millionaires and their British hangers-on intend to impose upon us begins to take shape. The British people, in the mass, don't want such a world, and might say so fairly vigorously when the Nazis are out of the way. What they want, so far as they formulate their thoughts at all, is some kind of United States of Europe dominated by a close alliance between Britain and the U.S.S.R. Sentimentally, the majority of people in this world would far rather be in a tie-up with Russia than with America, and it is possible to imagine situations in which the popular cause would become the anti-American cause. There were signs of this alignment in the reactions to the Darlan business. Whether any leader or party capable of giving a voice to these tendencies will arise even when Hitler is gone and Europe is in turmoil, I do not know. None is visible at this moment, and the reactionaries are tightening their grip everywhere. But one can at least foresee at what point a radical change will again become possible.
There is not much more news. Another Fascist party has started up, the British National Party. It is the usual stuff -- anti-Bolshevik, anti-Big Business, etc. These people have got hold of some money from somewhere but do not appear to have a serious following. The Common Wealth people have quarrelled and split, but the main group is probably making headway. There have been further signs of the growth of a leftwing faction in the Church of England, which has had tendencies in this direction for some years past. These centre not, as one might expect, in the "modernists" but in the Anglo-Catholics, dogmatically the extreme "right wing" of the Church.
The Church Times, which is more or less the official paper of the C. of E.3 (enormous circulation in country vicarages), has for some years past been a mildly leftwing paper and politically quite intelligent. Parts of the Roman Catholic press have gone more markedly proFascist since the Darlan affair. There is evidently a split in the Catholic intelligentsia over the whole question of Fascism, and they have been attacking one another in public in a way they usually avoid doing. There is still antisemitism, but no sign that it is growing. Our food is much as usual. The Christmas puddings, my clue to the shipping situation, were about the same colour as last year. It is getting hard to live with prices and taxes as they now are, and what between long working hours and then firewatching, the Home Guard, A.R.P. or what-not, one seems to have less and less spare time, especially as all journeys now are slow and uncomfortable. Good luck for 1943.
3. Church of England.
Partisan Review, March-April 1943
45. Pamphlet Literature
One cannot adequately review fifteen pamphlets in a thousand words, and if I have picked out that number it is because between them they make a representative selection of eight out of the nine main trends in current pamphleteering. (The missing trend is pacifism: I don't happen to have a recent pacifist pamphlet by me.) I list them under their separate headings, with short comments, before trying to explain certain rather curious features in the revival of pamphleteering during recent years.
1. Anti-Left and crypto-Fascist: A Soldier's New World. 2d. (Sub-titled, "An anti-crank pamphlet written in camp"; this wallops the highbrow and proves that the common man does not want Socialism. Key phrase: "the Clever Ones have never learned to delight in simple things".) Gollancz in the German Wonderland. 1s. (Vansittartite). World Order or World Ruin. 6d. (Anti-planning; G. D. H. Cole demolished.)
2. Conservative: Bomber Command Continues. 7d. (Good specimen of an official pamphlet.)
3. Social Democrat: The Case of Austria. 6d. (Published by the Free Austrian Movement.)
4. Communist: Clear out Hitler's Agents. 2d. (Sub-titled, "An exposure of Trotskyist disruption being organized in Britain"; exceptionally mendacious.)
5. Trotskyist and Anarchist: The Kronstadt Revolt. 2d. (Anarchist pamphlet, largely an attack on Trotsky.)
6. Non-party radical: What's Wrong with the Army? 6d. (A Hurricane Book, well-informed and well-written anti-Blimp document.) I, James Blunt. 6d. (Good flesh-creeper, founded on the justified assumption that the mass of the English people haven't yet heard of Fascism.) Battle of Giants. Unpriced, probably 6d. (Interesting specimen of popular non-Communist russophile literature.)
7. Religious: A Letter to a Country Clergyman. 2d. (Fabian pamphlet, leftwing Anglican.) Fighters Ever. 6d. (Buchman vindicated.)
8. Lunatic: Britain's Triumphant Destiny, or Righteousness no longer on the Defensive. 6d. (British Israel, profusely illustrated.) When Russia Invades Palestine. 1s. (British Israel. The author, A. J. Ferris, B.A., has written a long series of pamphlets on kindred subjects, some of them enjoying enormo
us sales. His When Russia Bombs Germany, published in 1940, sold over 60,000.) Hitler's Story and Programme to Conquer England, by "Civis Britannicus Sum". 1s. (Specimen passage: "It is a grand thing to 'play the game', and to know that one is doing it. Then, when the day comes that stumps are drawn or the whistle blows for the last time:
The Great Scorer will come to write against your name,
Not if you have won or lost; but How you Played the Game.")
These few that I have named are only a drop in the ocean of pamphlet literature, and for the sake of giving a good cross-section I have included several that the average reader is likely to have heard of. What conclusions can one draw from this small sample? The interesting fact, not easily explicable, is that pamphleteering has revived upon an enormous scale since about 1935, and has done so without producing anything of real value. My own collection, made during the past six years, would run into several hundreds, but probably does not represent anywhere near ten per cent of the total output. Some of these pamphlets have had huge sales, especially the religio-patriotic ones, such as those of Mr Ferris, B.A., and the scurrilous ones, such as Hitler's Last Will and Testament, which is said to have sold several millions. Directly political pamphlets sometimes sell in big numbers, but the circulation of any pamphlet which is "party line" (any party) is likely to be spurious. Looking through my collection, I find that it is practically all trash, interesting only to bibliographies. Though I have classified current pamphlets under nine headings they could be finally reduced to two main schools, roughly describable as Party Line and Astrology. There is totalitarian rubbish and paranoiac rubbish, but in each case it is rubbish. Even the well-informed Fabian pamphlets are hopelessly dull, considered as reading matter. The liveliest pamphlets are almost always non-party, a good example being Bless 'em All, which should be regarded as a pamphlet, though it costs one and sixpence.
The reason why the badness of contemporary pamphlets is somewhat surprising is that the pamphlet ought to be the literary form of an age like our own. We live in a time when political passions run high, channels of free expression are dwindling, and organized lying exists on a scale never before known. For plugging the holes in history the pamphlet is the ideal form. Yet lively pamphlets are very few, and the only explanation I can offer -- a rather lame one -- is that the publishing trade and the literary papers have never gone to the trouble of making the reading public pamphlet-conscious. One difficulty of collecting pamphlets is that they are not issued in any regular manner, cannot always be procured even in the libraries of museums, and are seldom advertised and still more seldom reviewed. A good writer with something he passionately wanted to say -- and the essence of pamphleteering is to have something you want to say now, to as many people as possible -- would hesitate to cast it in pamphlet form, because he would hardly know how to set about getting it published, and would be doubtful whether the people he wanted to reach would ever read it. Probably he would water his idea down into a newspaper article or pad it out into a book. As a result by far the greater number of pamphlets are either written by lonely lunatics who publish at their own expense, or belong to the sub-world of the crank religions, or are issued by political parties. The normal way of publishing a pamphlet is through a political party, and the party will see to it that any "deviation" -- and hence any literary value -- is kept out. There have been a few good pamphlets in fairly recent years. D. H. Lawrence's Pornography and Obscenity was one, Potocki de Montalk's Snobbery with Violence was another, and some of Wyndham Lewis's essays in The Enemy really come under this heading. At present the most hopeful symptom is the appearance of the non-party leftwing pamphlet, such as the Hurricane Books. If productions of this type were as sure of being noticed in the press as are novels or books of verse, something would have been done towards bringing the pamphlet back to the attention of its proper public, and the level of the whole genre might rise. When one considers how flexible a form the pamphlet is, and how badly some of the events of our time need documenting, this is a thing to be desired.
New Statesman and Nation, 9 January 1943
46. London Letter to Partisan Review
[Late May? 1943]
Dear Editors,
I begin my letter just after the dissolution of the Comintern, and before the full effects of this have become clear. Of course the immediate results in Britain are easy to foretell. Obviously the Communists will make fresh efforts to affiliate with the Labour Party (this has already been refused by the L.P. Executive), obviously they will be told that they must dissolve and join as individuals, and obviously, once inside the Labour Party, they will try to act as an organized faction, whatever promises they may have given beforehand. The real interest lies in trying to foresee the long-term effects of the dissolution on a Communist Party of the British type.
Weighing up the probabilities, I think the Russian gesture should be taken at its face-value -- that is, Stalin is genuinely aiming at a closer tie-up with the U.S.A. and Britain and not merely "deceiving the bourgeoisie" as his followers like to believe. But that would not of itself alter the behaviour of the British Communists. For after all, their subservience to Moscow during the last fifteen years did not rest on any real authority. The British Communists could not be shot or exiled if they chose to disobey, and so far as I know they have not even had any money from Moscow in recent years. Moreover the Russians made it reasonably clear that they despised them. Their obedience depended on the mystique of the Revolution, which had gradually changed itself into a nationalistic loyalty to the Russian state. The English leftwing intelligentsia worship Stalin because they have lost their patriotism and their religious belief without losing the need for a god and a fatherland. I have always held that many of them would transfer their allegiance to Hitler if Germany won. So long as "Communism" merely means furthering the interests of the Russian Foreign Office, it is hard to see that the disappearance of the Comintern makes any difference. Nearly always one can see at a glance what policy is needed, even if there is no central organization to hand out directives.
However, one has got to consider the effect on the working-class membership, who have a different outlook from the salaried hacks at the top of the Party. To these people the open declaration that the International is dead must make a difference, although it was in fact a ghost already. And even in the central committee of the Party there are differences in outlook which might widen if after a while the British Communist Party came to think of itself as an independent party. One must allow here for the effects of self-deception. Even long-term Communists often won't admit to themselves that they are merely Russian agents, and therefore don't necessarily see what move is required until the instructions arrive from Moscow. Thus, as soon as the Franco-Russian military pact was signed, it was obvious that the French and British Communists must go all patriotic, but to my knowledge some of them failed to grasp this. Or again, after the signing of the Russo-German Pact several leading members refused to accept the antiwar line and had to do some belly-crawling before their mutiny was forgiven. In the months that followed the two chief publicists of the Party became extremely sympathetic to the Nazi Weltanschauung, evidently to the dismay of some of the others. The line of division is between deracinated intellectuals like Palme Dutt and trade-union men like Pollitt and Hannington. After all the years they have had on the job none of these men can imagine any occupation except boosting Soviet Russia, but they might differ as to the best way of doing it if Russian leadership has really been withdrawn. All in all, I should expect the dissolution of the Comintern to produce appreciable results, but not immediately. I should say that for six months, perhaps more, the British Communists will carry on as always, but that thereafter rifts will appear and the Party will either wither away or develop into a looser, less russophile organization under more up-to-date leadership.
There remains the bigger puzzle of why the Comintern was dissolved. If I am right and the Russians did it to inspire confidence, one must assume that th
e rulers of Britain and the U.S.A. wanted the dissolution and perhaps demanded it as part of the price of a Second Front. But in Britain at any rate there has been little sign in the past dozen years that the ruling class seriously objected to the existence of the Communist Party. Even during the People's Convention period they showed it an astonishing amount of tolerance. At all other times from 1935 onwards it has had powerful support from one or other section of the capitalist press. A thing that it is difficult to be sure about is where the Communists get their money from. It is not likely that they get all of it from their declared supporters, and I believe they tell the truth in saying that they get nothing from Moscow. The difference is that they are "helped" from time to time by wealthy English people who see the value of an organization which acts as an eel-trap for active Socialists. Beaverbrook for instance is credited, rightly or wrongly, with having financed the Communist Party during the past year or two. This is perhaps not less significant as a rumour than it would be as a fact. When one thinks of the history of the past twenty years it is hard not to feel that the Comintern has been one of the worst enemies the working class has had. Yet the Upper Crust is evidently pleased to see it disappear -- a fact which I record but cannot readily explain.
A Collection of Essays Page 36