03 January 2006

News of Today, Written in 1944

From a letter to H.J. Willmett, dated 18 May 1944, from who else but Standing Eight's Patron Saint, George Orwell (all italics ours, some line breaks ours for ease of onscreen reading):

...You ask whether totalitarianism, leader worship, etc., are really on the up-grade and instance the fact that they are not apparently growing in this country and the USA.

I must say I believe, or fear, that taking the world as a whole these things are on the increase. Hitler, no doubt, will soon disappear, but only at the expense of strengthening (a) Stalin, (b) the Anglo-American millionaires and (c) all sorts of petty fuehrers of the type of de Gaulle. All the national movements everywhere, even those that originate in resistance to German domination, seem to take non-democratic forms, to group themselves round some superhuman fuehrer (Hitler, Stalin, Salazar, Franco, Gandhi, De Valera are all varying examples) and to adopt the theory that the end justifies the means. Everywhere the world movement seems to be in the direction of centralized economies which can be made to 'work' in an economic sense but which are not democratically organized and which tend to establish a caste system.

With this go the horrors of emotional nationalism and a tendency to disbelieve in the existence of objective truth because all the facts have to fit in with the words and prophecies of some infallible fuehrer. Already history has in a sense ceased to exist, i.e. there is no such thing as a history of our own times which could be universally accepted, and the exact sciences are endangered as soon as military ceases to keep people up to the mark. Hitler can say that the Jews started the war, and if he survives that will become official history. He can't say that two and two are five, because for the purposes of, say, ballistics, they have to make four. But if the sort of world that I am afraid of arrives, a world of two or three great superstates which are unable to conquer one another, two and two could become five if the fuehrer wished it. That, so far as I can see, is the direction in which we are moving, though, of course, the process is reversible.

As to the comparative immunity of Britain and the U.S.A. Whatever the pacifists, etc., may say, we have not gone totalitarian yet and this is a very hopeful symptom. I believe very deeply, as I explained in my book 'The Lion and the Unicorn', in the English people and in their capacity to centralize the economy without destroying freedom in doing so. But one must remember that Britain and the U.S.A. haven't been really tried, they haven't known defeat or severe suffering, and there are some bad symptoms to balance the good ones.

To begin with, there is the general indifference to the decay of democracy... Secondly there is the fact that the intellectuals are more totalitarian in outlook than the common people. On the whole the English intelligentsia have opposed Hitler, but only at the price of accepting Stalin. most of them are perfectly ready for dictatorial methods, secret police, systematic falsifications of our history, etc., so long as they feel that it is on 'our' side. Indeed the statement that we haven't a Fascist movement in England largely means that the young, at this moment, look for their fuehrer elsewhere. One can't be sure that that won't change, nor can one be sure that the common people won't think ten years hence as the intellectuals do now. I hope they won't, I even trust they won't, but if so it will be at the cost of a struggle. If one simply proclaims that all is for the best and doesn't point to the sinister symptoms, one is merely helping to bring totalitarianism nearer.

You also ask, if I think the world tendency is towards Fascism, why do I support the war. It is a choice of evils - I fancy nearly every war is that. I know enough of British imperialism not to like it, but I would support it against Nazism or Japanese imperialism, as the lesser evil. Similarly I would support the U.S.S.R. against Germany because I think the U.S.S.R. cannot altogether escape its past and retains enough of the original ideas of the Revolution to make it a more hopeful phenomenon than Nazi Germany. I think and have thought, ever since the war began, in 1936 or thereabouts, that our cause is the better, but we have to keep on making it the better, which involves constant criticism.

Yours sincerely
Geo. Orwell

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