 |
|
Orwell's press card portrait, taken in 1933
|
INTERNET SOURCE: http://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/pacifism/english/e_patw
George
Orwell
Pacifism
and the War
About
a year ago I and a number of others were engaged in broadcasting literary
programmes to India, and among other things we broadcast a good deal of verse
by contemporary and near-contemporary English writers — for example, Eliot,
Herbert Read, Auden, Spender, Dylan Thomas, Henry Treece, Alex Comfort, Robert
Bridges, Edmund Blunden, D. H. Lawrence. Whenever it was possible we had poems
broadcast by the people who wrote them. Just why these particular programmes (a
small and remote out-flanking movement in the radio war) were instituted there
is no need to explain here, but I should add that the fact that we were
broadcasting to an Indian audience dictated our technique to some extent. The
essential point was that our literary broadcasts were aimed at the Indian
university students, a small and hostile audience, unapproachable by anything
that could be described as British propaganda. It was known in advance that we
could not hope for more than a few thousand listeners at the most, and this
gave us an excuse to be more ‘highbrow’ than is generally possible on the air.
Since
I don’t suppose you want to fill an entire number of P.R. (Partisan Review)
with squalid controversies imported from across the Atlantic, I will lump
together the various letters you have sent on to me (from Messrs Savage,
Woodcock and Comfort), as the central issue in all of them is the same. But I
must afterwards deal separately with some points of fact raised in various of
the letters.
Pacifism.
Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you
hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help that of the other. Nor
is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In
practice, ‘he that is not with me is against me’. The idea that you can somehow
remain aloof from and superior to the struggle, while living on food which
British sailors have to risk their lives to bring you, is a bourgeois illusion
bred of money and security. Mr Savage remarks that ‘according to this type of
reasoning, a German or Japanese pacifist would be “objectively pro-British”.’
But of course he would be! That is why pacifist activities are not permitted in
those countries (in both of them the penalty is, or can be, beheading) while
both the Germans and the Japanese do all they can to encourage the spread of
pacifism in British and American territories. The Germans even run a spurious
‘freedom’ station which serves out pacifist propaganda indistinguishable from
that of the P.P.U. They would stimulate pacifism in Russia as well if they
could, but in that case they have tougher babies to deal with. In so far as it
takes effect at all, pacifist propaganda can only be effective against
those countries where a certain amount of freedom of speech is still permitted;
in other words it is helpful to totalitarianism.
I
am not interested in pacifism as a ‘moral phenomenon’. If Mr Savage and others
imagine that one can somehow ‘overcome’ the German army by lying on one’s back,
let them go on imagining it, but let them also wonder occasionally whether this
is not an illusion due to security, too much money and a simple ignorance of
the way in which things actually happen. As an ex-Indian civil servant, it
always makes me shout with laughter to hear, for instance, Gandhi named as an
example of the success of non-violence. As long as twenty years ago it was
cynically admitted in Anglo-Indian circles that Gandhi was very useful to the
British government. So he will be to the Japanese if they get there. Despotic
governments can stand ‘moral force’ till the cows come home; what they fear is
physical force. But though not much interested in the ‘theory’ of pacifism, I am
interested in the psychological processes by which pacifists who have started
out with an alleged horror of violence end up with a marked tendency to be
fascinated by the success and power of Nazism. Even pacifists who wouldn’t own
to any such fascination are beginning to claim that a Nazi victory is desirable
in itself. In the letter you sent on to me, Mr Comfort considers that an artist
in occupied territory ought to ‘protest against such evils as he sees’, but
considers that this is best done by ‘temporarily accepting the status quo’
(like Déat or Bergery, for instance?). a few weeks back he was hoping for a
Nazi victory because of the stimulating effect it would have upon the arts:
As
far as I can see, no therapy short of complete military defeat has any chance
of re-establishing the common stability of literature and of the man in the
street. One can imagine the greater the adversity the greater the sudden
realization of a stream of imaginative work, and the greater the sudden
katharsis of poetry, from the isolated interpretation of war as calamity to the
realization of the imaginative and actual tragedy of Man. When we have access
again to the literature of the war years in France, Poland and Czechoslovakia,
I am confident that that is what we shall fined. (From a letter to Horizon.)
I
pass over the money-sheltered ignorance capable of believing that literary life
is still going on in, for instance, Poland, and remark merely that statements
like this justify me in saying that our English pacifists are tending towards
active pro-Fascism. But I don’t particularly object to that. What I object to
is the intellectual cowardice of people who are objectively and to some extent
emotionally pro-Fascist, but who don’t care to say so and take refuge behind
the formula ‘I am just as anti-fascist as anyone, but—’. The result of this is
that so-called peace propaganda is just as dishonest and intellectually
disgusting as war propaganda. Like war propaganda, it concentrates on putting
forward a ‘case’, obscuring the opponent’s point of view and avoiding awkward
questions. The line normally followed is ‘Those who fight against Fascism go
Fascist themselves.’ In order to evade the quite obvious objections that can be
raised to this, the following propaganda-tricks are used:
1. The Fascizing processes occurring in
Britain as a result of war are systematically exaggerated.
2. The actual record of Fascism,
especially its pre-war history, is ignored or pooh-poohed as ‘propaganda’.
Discussion of what the world would actually be like if the Axis dominated it is
evaded.
3. Those who want to struggle against
Fascism are accused of being wholehearted defenders of capitalist ‘democracy’.
The fact that the rich everywhere tend to be pro-Fascist and the working class
are nearly always anti-Fascist is hushed up.
4. It is tacitly pretended that the war
is only between Britain and Germany. Mention of Russia and China, and their
fate if Fascism is permitted to win, is avoided. (You won’t find one word about
Russia or China in the three letters you sent to me.)
Now
as to one or two points of fact which I must deal with if your correspondents’
letters are to be printed in full.
My past and present. Mr Woodcock tries to discredit me by saying that (a) I
once served in the Indian Imperial Police, (b) I have written article for the Adelphi
and was mixed up with the Trotskyists in Spain, and (c) that I am at the B.B.C.
‘conducting British propaganda to fox the Indian masses’. With regard to (a),
it is quite true that I served five years in the Indian Police. It is also true
that I gave up that job, partly because it didn’t suit me but mainly because I
would not any longer be a servant of imperialism. I am against imperialism
because I know something about it from the inside. The whole history of this is
to be found in my writings, including a novel (Burmese Days) which I
think I can claim was a kind of prophecy of what happened this year in Burma.
(b) Of course I have written for the Adelphi. Why not? I once wrote an
article for a vegetarian paper. Does that make me a vegetarian? I was
associated with the Trotskyists in Spain. It was chance that I was serving in
the P.O.U.M. militia and not another, and I largely disagreed with the P.O.U.
M. ‘line’ and told its leaders so freely, but when they were afterwards accused
of pro-Fascist activities I defended them as best it could. How does this
contradict my present anti-Hitler attitude? It is news to me that Trotskyists
are either pacifists or pro-Fascists. (c) Does Mr Woodcock really know what
kind of stuff I put out in the Indian broadcasts? He does not — though I would
be quite glad to tell him about it. He is careful not to mention what other
people are associated with these Indian broadcasts. One for instance is Herbert
Read, whom he mentions with approval. Others are T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster,
Reginald Reynolds, Stephen Spender, J. B. S. Haldane, Tom Wintringham. Most of
our broadcasters are Indian left-wing intellectual, from Liberals to
Trotskyists, some of them bitterly anti-British. They don’t do it to ‘fox the Indian
masses’ but because they know what a Fascist victory would mean to the chances
of India’s independence. Why not try to find out what I am doing before
accusing my good faith?
‘Mr
Orwell is intellectual-hunting again’ (Mr Comfort). I have never attacked
‘the intellectuals’ or ‘the intelligentsia’ en bloc. I have used a lot
of ink and done myself a lot of harm by attacking the successive literary
cliques which have infested this country, not because they were intellectuals
but precisely because they were not what I mean by true intellectuals.
The life of a clique is about five years and I have been writing long enough to
see three of them come and two go — the Catholic gang, the Stalinist gang, and
the present pacifist or, as they are sometimes nicknamed, Fascifist gang. My
case against all of them is that they write mentally dishonest propaganda and
degrade literary criticism to mutual arse-licking. But even with these various
schools I would differentiate between individuals. I would never think of coupling
Christopher Dawson with Arnold Lunn, or Malraux with Palme Dutt, or Max Plowman
with the Duke of Bedford. And even the work of one individual can exist at very
different levels. For instance Mr Comfort himself wrote one poem I value
greatly (‘The Atoll in the Mind’), and I wish he would write more of them
instead of lifeless propaganda tracts dressed up as novels. But his letter he
has chosen to send you is a different matter. Instead of answering what I have
said he tries to prejudice an audience to whom I am little known by a
misrepresentation of my general line and sneers about my ‘status’ in England.
(A writer isn’t judged by his ‘status’, he is judged by his work.) That is on a
par with ‘peace’ propaganda which has to avoid mention of Hitler’s invasion of
Russian, and it is not what I mean by intellectual honesty. It is just because
I do take the function of the intelligentsia seriously that I don’t like the
sneers, libels, parrot phrased and financially profitable back-scratching which
flourish in our English literary world, and perhaps in yours also.
1942
THE
END
No comments:
Post a Comment