A Collection of Essays

by George Orwell

  22 May

  It is said that Molotov is not only in London but that the new Anglo-Russian treaty is already signed. This however comes from Warburg who is alternately over-optimistic and over-pessimistic -- at any rate, always believes in the imminence of enormous and dramatic changes. If true, it would be a godsend for the filling-up of my newsletters. It is getting harder and harder to find anything to put into these, with nothing happening except on the Russian front, and the news from there, whether from Russian or German sources, growing more and more phoney. I wish I could spare a week to go through the Russian and German broadcast of the past year and tot up their various claims. I should say the Germans would have killed 10 million men and the Russians must have advanced to somewhere well out in the Atlantic Ocean. . .

  22 May

  More rumours that Molotov is in London. Also cryptic paras in the papers suggesting that this may be so (no mention of names, of course).

  30 May

  Almost every day in the neighbourhood of Upper Regent Street one can see a tiny, elderly, very yellow Japanese, with a face like a suffering monkey's, walking slowly along with an enormous policeman walking beside him. On some days they are holding a solemn conversation. I suppose he is one of the Embassy staff. But whether the policeman is there to prevent him committing acts of sabotage, or to protect him from the infuriated mob, there is no knowing.

  The Molotov rumour seems to have faded out. Warburg, who accepted the Molotov story without question, has now forgotten it and is full of the inner story of why Garvin89 was sacked from the Observer. It was because he refused to attack Churchill. The Astors are determined to get rid of Churchill because he is pro-Russian and the transformation of the Observer is part of this manoeuvre. The Observer is to lead the attack on Churchill and at the same time canalize the gifted young journalists who are liable to give the war a revolutionary meaning, making them use their energy on futilities until they can be dispensed with. All inherently probable. On the other hand, I don't believe that David Astor, who acts as the decoy elephant, is consciously taking part in any such thing. It is amusing to see not only the Beaverbrook press, which is not plus royallste que le roi so far as Russia is concerned, but the T[rade] U[nion] weekly Labour's Northern Voice, suddenly discovering Garvin as a well-known anti-Fascist who has been sacked for his radical opinions. One thing that strikes one about nearly everyone nowadays is the shortness of their memories. Desmond Hawkins90 told me a little while back that he recently bought some fried fish, wrapped up in a sheet of newspaper dating from 1940. On one side was an article proving that the Red Army was no good, on the other a write-up of that gallant sailor and well-known anglophile, Admiral Darlan91. . .

  89. J. L. Garvin (1868-1947), rightwing journalist, editor of the Observer 1908-42. At the beginning of the war, when he was of advanced age, he disagreed with Viscount Astor, the proprietor of the paper, about the suitability of Churchill being at the same time Prime Minister and Minister of Defence -- Lord Astor querying the advisability of this. Lord Astor had made his second son, the Hon. David Astor (1912- ), a minority shareholder in the paper and, although David Astor spent the war in the Marines, he had a voice in the paper's affairs. At the end of the war the Astors made the Observer into a trust. In 1946 David Astor became its foreign editor and from 1948 he has been its editor. He met Orwell at the beginning of the war and they remained friends until Orwell's death.

  90. Desmond Hawkins (1908- ), novelist, literary critic and broadcaster, who did much freelance work with the Indian Service of the B.B.C. during the war.

  91. Admiral Darlan (1881-1942), French naval officer and politician. He commanded all the French naval forces until the fall of France in May 1940. He became Naval Minister in Petain's Government and was regarded as being next in succession to him. He was in North Africa at the time of the invasion in November 1942 and his transfer of support to the Allied side and his appointment as Chief of State in North Africa caused wide controversy. He was assassinated by a young French anti-Fascist in Algiers in November 1942.

  4 June

  Very hot weather. Struck by the normality of everything -- lack of hurry, fewness of uniforms, general unwarlike appearance of the crowds who drift slowly through the streets, pushing prams or loitering in the squares to look at the hawthorn bushes. It is already noticeable that there are much fewer cars, however. Here and there a car with a fuel converter at the back, having slightly the appearance of an old-fashioned milk cart. Evidently there is not so much bootleg petrol about after all.

  6 June

  The Molotov rumour still persists. He was here to negotiate the treaty, and has gone back, so it is said. No hint about this in any newspaper, however.

  There is said to be much disagreement on the staff of the New Statesman over the question of the Second Front. Having squealed for a year that we must open a Second Front immediately, Kingsley Martin92 now has cold feet. He says that the army cannot be trusted, the soldiers will shoot their officers in the back etc. -- this after endeavouring throughout the war to make the soldiers mistrust their officers. Meanwhile I think now that a Second Front is definitely projected, at any rate if enough shipping can be scraped together.

  92. Kingsley Martin (1897-1969), leftwing journalist, editor of the New Statesman 1931-60.

  7 June

  The Sunday Express has also gone cold on the Second Front. The official line now appears to be that our air raids are a Second Front. Obviously there has been some kind of government hand-out telling the papers to pipe down on this subject. If the government merely wishes to stop them spreading misleading rumours, the puzzle is why they weren't silenced earlier. It is just possible that the invasion has now been definitely decided on and the papers have been told to go anti-Second Front in order to throw the enemy off the scent. In this labyrinth of lies in which we are living the one explanation one never believes is the obvious one. Cf. David Astor's story about the two German Jews meeting in the train:

  First Jew: "Where are you going to?"

  Second Jew: "Berlin."

  First Jew: "Liar! You just say that to deceive me. You know that if you say you are going to Berlin I shall think you are going to Leipzig, and all the time, you dirty crook, you really are going to Berlin!'

  Last Tuesday spent a long evening with Cripps (who had expressed a desire to meet some literary people) together with Empson, Jack Common, David Owen, Norman Cameron, Guy Burgess93 and another man (an official) whose name I didn't get. About 21/2 hours of it, with nothing to drink. The usual inconclusive discussion. Cripps, however, very human and willing to listen. The person who stood up to him most successfully was Jack Common. Cripps said several things that amazed and slightly horrified me. One was that many people whose opinion was worth considering believed that the war would be over by October -- i.e. that Germany would be flat out by that time. When I said that I should look on that as a disaster pure and simple (because if the war were won as easily as that there would have been no real upheaval here and the American millionaires would still be in situ) he appeared not to understand. He said that once the war was won the surviving great powers would in any case have to administer the world as a unit, and seemed not to feel that it made much difference whether the great powers were capitalist or Socialist. Both David Owen and the man whose name I don't know supported him. I saw that I was up against the official mind, which sees everything as a problem in administration and does not grasp that at a certain point, i.e. when certain economic interests are threatened, public spirit ceases to function. The basic assumption of such people is that everyone wants the world to function properly and will do his best to keep the wheels running. They don't realize that most of those who have the power don't care a damn about the world as a whole and are only intent on feathering their own nests.

  93. William Empson, the poet and critic; Jack Common, a working-class writer, editor and friend of Orwell's; David Owen, Cripps's secretary; Norman Cameron (1905-53), a poet whose works includ
e The Winter House, a friend and disciple of Robert Graves; Guy Burgess (1911-63), educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, an unsuspected Communist, of considerable gifts, wit and charm. After working for the British Security Services and the B.B.C. in liaison with the Foreign Office, he joined the Foreign Office. His pro-Soviet activities went undetected until, in May 1951, he suddenly left for Moscow with Donald Maclean and remained there until his death.

  I can't help feeling a strong impression that Cripps has already been got at. Not with money or anything of that kind of course, nor even by flattery and the sense of power, which in all probability he genuinely doesn't care about: but simply by responsibility, which automatically makes a man timid. Besides, as soon as you are in power your perspectives are foreshortened. Perhaps a bird's eye view is as distorted as a worm's eye view. . .

  10 June

  The only time when one hears people singing in the B.B.C. is in the early morning, between 6 and 8. That is the time when the charwomen are at work. A huge army of them arrives all at the same time. They sit in the reception hall waiting for their brooms to be issued to them and making as much noise as a parrot house, and then they have wonderful choruses, all singing together as they sweep the passages. The place has a quite different atmosphere at this time from what it has later in the day.

  11 June

  The Germans announce over the wireless that as the inhabitants of a Czech village called Lidice (about 1,200 inhabitants) were guilty of harbouring the assassins of Heydrich, they have shot all the males in the village, sent all the women to concentration camps, sent all the children to be "re-educated", razed the whole village to the ground and changed its name. I am keeping a copy of the announcement, as recorded in the B.B.C. monitoring report.

  It does not particularly surprise me that people do this kind of thing, nor even that they announce that they are doing them. What does impress me, however, is that other people's reaction to such happenings is governed solely by the political fashion of the moment. Thus before the war the pinks believed any and every horror story that came out of Germany or China. Now the pinks no longer believe in German or Japanese atrocities and automatically write off all horror stories as "propaganda". In a little while you will be jeered at if you suggest that the story of Lidice could possibly [be] true. And yet there the facts are, announced by the Germans themselves and recorded on gramophone discs which no doubt will still be available. Cf. the long list of atrocities from 1914 onwards, German atrocities in Belgium, Bolshevik atrocities, Turkish atrocities, British atrocities in India, American atrocities in Nicaragua, Nazi atrocities, Italian atrocities in Abyssinia and Cyrenaica, red and white atrocities in Spain, Japanese atrocities in China -- in every case believed in or disbelieved in according to political predilection, with utter non-interest in the facts and with complete willingness to alter one's beliefs as soon as the political scene alters.

  ATROCITIES (POST 1918)

  DateBelieved in by the RightBelieved in by the Left

  c. 1920Turkish atrocities (Smyrna)Turkish atrocities (Smyrna)

  Sinn Fein atrocitiesBlack & Tan atrocities

  Bolshevik atrocitiesBritish atrocities in India

  (Amritsar)

  1923 French atrocities (the Ruhr)

  1928American atrocities

  (Nicaragua) (?)

  1933Bolshevik atrocities

  (Ukraine famine)

  1934-9 Nazi atrocities

  1935Italian atrocities (Abyssinia

  and Cyrenaica)

  1936-9 Red atrocities in SpainFascist atrocities in Spain

  1937Bolshevik atrocitiesJapanese atrocities

  (the purges)(Nanking)

  1939 et seq.German atrocitiesBritish atrocities (the

  ss Dunera etc.)

  1941 et seq.Japanese atrocities

  13 June

  The most impressive fact about the Molotov visit is that the Germans knew nothing about it. Not a word on the radio about Molotov's presence in London till the signature of the treaty was officially announced, although all the while the German radio was shouting about the Bolshevization of Britain. Obviously they would have spilt the beans if they had really known. Taken in conjunction with certain other things (e.g. the capture last year of two very amateurish spies dropped by parachute, with portable wireless transmitters and actually with chunks of German sausage in their suitcases) this suggests that the German spy system in this country cannot be up to much. . .

  15 June

  From B.B.C. monitoring report.

  Prague (Czech Home Stations) in German for Protectorate. 10.6.42. Heydnch Revenge: Village Wiped Out: All Men Shot:

  ANNOUNCEMENT

  It is officially announced: The search and investigation for the murderers of S.S. Obergruppenfuhrer Gen. Heydrich has established unimpeachable indications (sic) that the population of the locality of Lidice, near Klando, supported and gave assistance to the circle (sic) of perpetrators in question. In spite of the interrogation of the local inhabitants, the pertinent means of evidence were secured without the help of the population. The attitude of the inhabitants to the outrage thus manifested, is emphasized also by other acts hostile to the Reich, by the discoveries of printed matter hostile to the Reich, of dumps of arms and ammunition, of an illegal wireless transmitter, and of huge quantities of controlled goods, as well as by the fact that inhabitants of the locality are in active enemy service abroad. Since the inhabitants of this village (sic) have flagrantly violated the laws which have been issued, by their activity and by the support given to the murderers of S.S. Obergruppenfuhrer Heydrich, the male adults have been shot, the women have been sent to a concentration camp and the children have been handed over to appropriate educational authorities. The buildings of the locality have been levelled to the ground, and the name of the community has been obliterated.

  (Note: This is an identical repetition, in German, of an announcement made in Czech from Prague at 19.00, when reception was very bad.). . .

  No question now that the Second Front has been decided on. All the papers talk of it as a certainty and Moscow is publicizing it widely. Whether it is really feasible remains to be seen, of course.

  21 June

  The thing that strikes one in the B.B.C. -- and it is evidently the same in various of the other departments -- is not so much the moral squalor and the ultimate futility of what we are doing, as the feeling of frustration, the impossibility of getting anything done, even any successful piece of scoundrelism. Our policy is so ill-defined, the disorganization is so great, there are so many changes of plan and the fear and hatred of intelligence are so all-pervading, that one cannot plan any sort of wireless campaign whatever. When one plans some series of talks, with some more or less definite propaganda line behind it, one is first told to go ahead, then choked off on the ground that this or that is "injudicious" or "premature", then told again to go ahead, then told to water everything down and cut out any plain statements that may have crept in here and there, then told to "modify" the series in some way that removes its original meaning; and then at the last moment the whole thing is suddenly cancelled by some mysterious edict from above and one is told to improvise some different series which one feels no interest in and which in any case has no definite idea behind it. One is constantly putting sheer rubbish on the air because of having talks which sound too intelligent cancelled at the last moment. In addition the organization is so overstaffed that numbers of people have almost literally nothing to do. But even when one manages to get something fairly good on the air one is weighed down by the knowledge that hardly anybody is listening. Except, I suppose, in Europe, the B.B.C. simply isn't listened to overseas, a fact known to everyone concerned with overseas broadcasting. Some listener research has been done in America and it is known that in the whole of the U.S.A. about 300,000 people listen to the B.B.C. In India or Australia the number would not be anywhere near that. It has come out recently that (two
years after the Empire service was started) plenty of Indians with shortwave sets don't even know that the B.B.C. broadcasts to India.

  It is the same with the only other public activity I take part in, the Home Guard. After two years no real training has been done, no specialized tactics worked out, no battle positions fixed upon, no fortifications built -- all this owing to endless changes of plan and complete vagueness as to what we are supposed to be aiming at. Details of organization, battle positions, etc. have been changed so frequently that hardly anyone knows at any given moment what the current arrangements are supposed to be. To give just one example, for well over a year our company has been trying to dig a system of trenches in Regents Park, in case airborne troops should land there. Though dug over and over again these trenches have never once been in a completed state, because when they are half done there is always a change of plan and fresh orders. Ditto with everything. Whatever one undertakes, one starts out with the knowledge that presently there will come a sudden change of orders, and then another change, and so on indefinitely. Nothing ever happens except continuous dithering, resulting in progressive disillusionment all round. The best one can hope is that it is much the same on the other side.

  24 June

  Listened in last night to Lord Haw-Haw -- not Joyce, who apparently has been off the air for some time, but a man who sounded to me like a South African, followed by another with more of a cockney voice. There was a good deal about the Congress of the Free India movement in Bangkok. Was amazed to note that all Indian names were mispronounced, and grossly mispronounced -- e.g. Ras Behari Bose rendered as 'Rash Beery Bose'.94 Yet after all the Indians who are broadcasting from Germany are available for advice on these points. They probably go in and out of the same building as Lord Haw-Haw every day. It is rather encouraging to see this kind of slovenliness happening on the other side as well.