That is why all Fascist writers for years past have agreed that England's
power must be destroyed. England must be "exterminated", must be
"annihilated", must "cease to exist". Strategically it would be possible
for this war to end with Hitler in secure possession of Europe, and with
the British Empire intact and British sea-power barely affected. But
ideologically it is not possible; were Hitler to make an offer along
those lines, it could only be treacherously, with a view to conquering
England indirectly or renewing the attack at some more favourable moment.
England cannot possibly be allowed to remain as a sort of funnel through
which deadly ideas from beyond the Atlantic flow into the police states
of Europe. And turning it round to our own point of view, we see the
vastness of the issue before us, the all-importance of preserving our
democracy more or less as we have known it. But to PRESERVE is always to
EXTEND. The choice before us is not so much between victory and defeat as
between revolution and apathy. If the thing we are fighting for is
altogether destroyed, it will have been destroyed partly by our own act.
It could happen that England could introduce the beginnings of Socialism,
turn this war into a revolutionary war, and still be defeated. That is at
any rate thinkable. But, terrible as it would be for anyone who is now
adult, it would be far less deadly than the "compromise peace" which a
few rich men and their hired liars are hoping for. The final ruin of
England could only be accomplished by an English government acting under
orders from Berlin. But that cannot happen if England has awakened
beforehand. For in that case the defeat would be unmistakable, the
struggle would continue, the IDEA would survive. The difference between
going down fighting, and surrendering without a fight, is by no means a
question of "honour" and schoolboy heroics. Hitler said once that to
ACCEPT defeat destroys the soul of a nation. This sounds like a piece of
claptrap, but it is strictly true. The defeat of 1870 did not lessen the
world-influence of France. The Third Republic had more influence,
intellectually, than the France of Napoleon III. But the sort of peace
that Petain, Laval and Co have accepted can only be purchased by
deliberately wiping out the national culture. The Vichy Government will
enjoy a spurious independence only on condition that it destroys the
distinctive marks of French culture: republicanism, secularism, respect
for the intellect, absence of colour prejudice. We cannot be UTTERLY
defeated if we have made our revolution beforehand. We may see German
troops marching down Whitehall, but another process, ultimately deadly to
the German power-dream, will have been started. The Spanish people were
defeated, but the things they learned during those two and a half
memorable years will one day come back upon the Spanish Fascists like a
boomerang.
A piece of Shakespearean bombast was much quoted at the beginning of the
war. Even Mr Chamberlain quoted it once, if my memory does not deceive
me:
Come the four corners of the world in arms
And we shall shock them: naught shall make us rue
If England to herself do rest but true.
It is right enough, if you interpret it rightly. But England has got to
be true to herself. She is not being true to herself while the refugees
who have sought our shores are penned up in concentration camps, and
company directors work out subtle schemes to dodge their Excess Profits
Tax. It is goodbye to the TATLER and the BYSTANDER, and farewell to the
lady in the Rolls-Royce car. The heirs of Nelson and of Cromwell are not
in the House of Lords. They are in the fields and the streets, in the
factories and the armed forces, in the four-ale bar and the suburban back
garden; and at present they are still kept under by a generation of
ghosts. Compared with the task of bringing the real England to the
surface, even the winning of the war, necessary though it is, is
secondary. By revolution we become more ourselves, not less. There is no
question of stopping short, striking a compromise, salvaging "democracy",
standing still. Nothing ever stands still. We must add to our heritage or
lose it, we must grow greater or grow less, we must go forward or
backward. I believe in England, and I believe that we shall go forward.
WELLS, HITLER AND THE WORLD STATE (1941)
"In March or April, say the wiseacres, there is to be a stupendous
knockout blow at Britain...What Hitler has to do it with, I cannot
not so very much greater than the Italians' before they were put to the
test in Greece and Africa."
"The German air power has been largely spent. It is behind the times
and its first-rate men are mostly dead or disheartened or worn out."
"In 1914 the Hohenzollern army was the best in the world. Behind that
screaming little defective in Berlin there is nothing of the sort...
Yet our military 'experts' discuss the waiting phantom. In their
imaginations it is perfect in its equipment and invincible in
discipline. Sometimes it is to strike a decisive 'blow' through Spain
and North Africa and on, or march through the Balkans, march from the
Danube to Ankara, to Persia, to India, or 'crush Russia', or 'pour' over
the Brenner into Italy. The weeks pass and the phantom does none of
these things--for one excellent reason. It does not exist to that
extent. Most of such inadequate guns and munitions as it possessed must
have been taken away from it and fooled away in Hitler's silly feints to
invade Britain. And its raw jerry-built discipline is wilting under the
creeping realisation that the Blitzkrieg is spent, and the war is coming
home to roost."
These quotations are not taken from the CAVALRY QUARTERLY but from a
series of newspaper articles by Mr H.G. Wells, written at the beginning
of this year and now reprinted in a book entitled GUIDE TO THE NEW
WORLD. Since they were written, the German army has overrun the Balkans
and reconquered Cyrenaica, it can march through Turkey or Spain at such
time as may suit it, and it has undertaken the invasion of Russia. How
that campaign will turn out I do not know, but it is worth noticing that
the German general staff, whose opinion is probably worth something,
would not have begun it if they had not felt fairly certain of finishing
it within three months. So much for the idea that the German army is a
bogey, its equipment inadequate, its morale breaking down, etc etc.
What has Wells to set against the "screaming little defective in
Berlin"? The usual rigmarole about a World State, plus the Sankey
Declaration, which is an attempted definition of fundamental human
rights, of anti-totalitarian tendency. Except that he is now especially
concerned with federal world control of air power, it is the same gospel
as he has been preaching almost without interruption for the past forty
years, always with an air of angry surprise at the human beings who can
fail to grasp anything so obvio
us.
What is the use of saying that we need federal world control of the air?
The whole question is how we are to get it. What is the use of pointing
out that a World State is desirable? What matters is that not one of the
five great military powers would think of submitting to such a thing.
All sensible men for decades past have been substantially in agreement
with what Mr Wells says; but the sensible men have no power and, in too
many cases, no disposition to sacrifice themselves. Hitler is a criminal
lunatic, and Hitler has an army of millions of men, aeroplanes in
thousands, tanks in tens of thousands. For his sake a great nation has
been willing to overwork itself for six years and then to fight for two
years more, whereas for the commonsense, essentially hedonistic
world-view which Mr Wells puts forward, hardly a human creature is
willing to shed a pint of blood. Before you can even talk of world
reconstruction, or even of peace, you have got to eliminate Hitler,
which means bringing into being a dynamic not necessarily the same as
that of the Nazis, but probably quite as unacceptable to "enlightened"
and hedonistic people. What has kept England on its feet during the past
year? In part, no doubt, some vague idea about a better future, but
chiefly the atavistic emotion of patriotism, the ingrained feeling of
the English-speaking peoples that they are superior to foreigners. For
the last twenty years the main object of English left-wing intellectuals
has been to break this feeling down, and if they had succeeded, we might
be watching the SS men patrolling the London streets at this moment.
Similarly, why are the Russians fighting like tigers against the German
invasion? In part, perhaps, for some half-remembered ideal of Utopian
Socialism, but chiefly in defence of Holy Russia (the "sacred soil of
the Fatherland", etc etc), which Stalin has revived in an only slightly
altered form. The energy that actually shapes the world springs from
war--which liberal intellectuals mechanically write off as anachronisms,
and which they have usually destroyed so completely in themselves as to
have lost all power of action.
The people who say that Hitler is Antichrist, or alternatively, the Holy
Ghost, are nearer an understanding of the truth than the intellectuals
who for ten dreadful years have kept it up that he is merely a figure
out of comic opera, not worth taking seriously. All that this idea
really reflects is the sheltered conditions of English life. The Left
Book Club was at bottom a product of Scotland Yard, just as the Peace
Pledge Union is a product of the navy. One development of the last ten
years has been the appearance of the "political book", a sort of
enlarged pamphlet combining history with political criticism, as an
important literary form. But the best writers in this line--Trotsky,
Rauschning, Rosenberg, Silone, Borkenau, Koestler and others--have none
of them been Englishmen, and nearly all of them have been renegades from
one or other extremist party, who have seen totalitarianism at close
quarters and known the meaning of exile and persecution. Only in the
English-speaking countries was it fashionable to believe, right up to the
outbreak of war, that Hitler was an unimportant lunatic and the German
tanks made of cardboard. Mr Wells, it will be seen from the quotations I
have given above, believes something of the kind still. I do not suppose
that either the bombs or the German campaign in Greece have altered his
opinion. A lifelong habit of thought stands between him and an
understanding of Hitler's power.
Mr Wells, like Dickens, belongs to the non-military middle class. The
thunder of guns, the jingle of spurs, the catch in the throat when the
old flag goes by, leave him manifestly cold. He has an invincible hatred
of the fighting, hunting, swashbuckling side of life, symbolised in all
his early books by a violent propaganda against horses. The principal
villain of his OUTLINE OF HISTORY is the military adventurer, Napoleon.
If one looks through nearly any book that he has written in the last
forty years one finds the same idea constantly recurring: the supposed
antithesis between the man of science who is working towards a planned
World State and the reactionary who is trying to restore a disorderly
past. In novels, Utopias, essays, films, pamphlets, the antithesis crops
up, always more or less the same. On the one side science, order,
progress, internationalism, aeroplanes, steel, concrete, hygiene: on the
other side war, nationalism, religion, monarchy, peasants, Greek
professors, poets, horses. History as he sees it is a series of
victories won by the scientific man over the romantic man. Now, he is
probably right in assuming that a "reasonable", planned form of society,
with scientists rather than witch-doctors in control, will prevail
sooner or later, but that is a different matter from assuming that it is
just round the corner. There survives somewhere or other an interesting
controversy which took place between Wells and Churchill at the time of
the Russian Revolution. Wells accuses Churchill of not really believing
his own propaganda about the Bolsheviks being monsters dripping with
blood etc, but of merely fearing that they were going to introduce an
era of common sense and scientific control, in which flag-wavers like
Churchill himself would have no place. Churchill's estimate of the
Bolsheviks, however, was nearer the mark than Wells's. The early
Bolsheviks may have been angels or demons, according as one chooses to
regard them, but at any rate they were not sensible men. They were not
introducing a Wellsian Utopia but a Rule of the Saints, which, like the
English Rule of the Saints, was a military despotism enlivened by
witchcraft trials. The same misconception reappears in an inverted form
in Wells's attitude to the Nazis. Hitler is all the war-lords and
witch doctors in history rolled into one. Therefore, argues Wells, he is
an absurdity, a ghost from the past, a creature doomed to disappear
almost immediately. But unfortunately the equation of science with
common sense does not really hold good. The aeroplane, which was looked
forward to as a civilising influence but in practice has hardly been
used except for dropping bombs, is the symbol of that fact. Modern
Germany is far more scientific than England, and far more barbarous.
Much of what Wells has imagined and worked for is physically there in
Nazi Germany. The order, the planning, the State encouragement of
science, the steel, the concrete, the aeroplanes, are all there, but all
in the service of ideas appropriate to the Stone Age. Science is
fighting on the side of superstition. But obviously it is impossible for
Wells to accept this. It would contradict the world-view on which his
own works are based. The war-lords and the witch-doctors MUST fail, the
common-sense World State, as seen by a nineteenth-century liberal whose
heart does not leap at the sound of bugles, MUST triumph
. Treachery and
defeatism apart, Hitler CANNOT be a danger. That he should finally win
would be an impossible reversal of history, like a Jacobite restoration.
But is it not a sort of parricide for a person of my age (thirty-eight)
to find fault with H.G. Wells? Thinking people who were born about the
beginning of this century are in some sense Wells's own creation. How
much influence any mere writer has, and especially a "popular" writer
whose work takes effect quickly, is questionable, but I doubt whether
anyone who was writing books between 1900 and 1920, at any rate in the
English language, influenced the young so much. The minds of all of us,
and therefore the physical world, would be perceptibly different if
Wells had never existed. Only, just the singleness of mind, the one-sided
imagination that made him seem like an inspired prophet in the Edwardian
age, make him a shallow, inadequate thinker now. When Wells was young,
the antithesis between science and reaction was not false. Society was
ruled by narrow-minded, profoundly incurious people, predatory
businessmen, dull squires, bishops, politicians who could quote
Horace but had never heard of algebra. Science was faintly disreputable
and religious belief obligatory. Traditionalism, stupidity, snobbishness,
patriotism, superstition and love of war seemed to be all on the
same side; there was need of someone who could state the opposite
point of view. Back in the nineteen-hundreds it was a wonderful
experience for a boy to discover H.G. Wells. There you were, in a world
of pedants, clergymen and golfers, with your future employers exhorting
you to "get on or get out", your parents systematically warping your
sexual life, and your dull-witted schoolmasters sniggering over their
Latin tags; and here was this wonderful man who could tell you about the
inhabitants of the planets and the bottom of the sea, and who knew that
the future was not going to be what respectable people imagined. A
decade or so before aeroplanes were technically feasible Wells knew that
within a little while men would be able to fly. He knew that because he
himself wanted to be able to fly, and therefore felt sure that research
in that direction would continue. On the other hand, even when I was a
little boy, at a time when the Wright brothers had actually lifted their
machine off the ground for fifty-nine seconds, the generally accepted
opinion was that if God had meant us to fly He would have given us
wings. Up to 1914 Wells was in the main a true prophet. In physical
details his vision of the new world has been fulfilled to a surprising
extent.
But because he belonged to the nineteenth century and to a non-military
nation and class, he could not grasp the tremendous strength of the old
world which was symbolised in his mind by fox-hunting Tories. He was, and
still is, quite incapable of understanding that nationalism, religious
bigotry and feudal loyalty are far more powerful forces than what he
himself would describe as sanity. Creatures out of the Dark Ages have
come marching into the present, and if they are ghosts they are at any
rate ghosts which need a strong magic to lay them. The people who have
shown the best understanding of Fascism are either those who have
suffered under it or those who have a Fascist streak in themselves. A
crude book like THE IRON HEEL, written nearly thirty years ago, is a
truer prophecy of the future than either BRAVE NEW WORLD or THE SHAPE OF
THINGS TO COME. If one had to choose among Wells's own contemporaries a
writer who could stand towards him as a corrective, one might choose
Kipling, who was not deaf to the evil voices of power and military
"glory". Kipling would have understood the appeal of Hitler, or for that
matter of Stalin, whatever his attitude towards them might be. Wells is
too sane to understand the modern world. The succession of