entirely unmoral, and for that reason to be admired; the explanations of
it, which were numerous and self-contradictory, could come afterwards.
Until recently the characteristic adventure stories of the
English-speaking peoples have been stories in which the hero fights
AGAINST ODDS. This is true all the way from Robin Hood to Pop-eye the
Sailor. Perhaps the basic myth of the Western world is Jack the
Giant-killer, but to be brought up to date this should be renamed Jack
the Dwarf-killer, and there already exists a considerable literature
which teaches, either overtly or implicitly, that one should side with
the big man against the little man. Most of what is now written about
foreign policy is simply an embroidery on this theme, and for several
decades such phrases as 'Play the game', 'Don't hit a man when he's down'
and 'It's not cricket' have never failed to draw a snigger from anyone of
intellectual pretensions. What is comparatively new is to find the
accepted pattern, according to which (a) right is right and wrong is
wrong, whoever wins, and (b) weakness must be respected, disappearing
from popular literature as well. When I first read D. H. Lawrence's
novels, at the age of about twenty, I was puzzled by the fact that there
did not seem to be any classification of the characters into 'good' and
'bad'. Lawrence seemed to sympathize with all of them about equally, and
this was so unusual as to give me the feeling of having lost my bearings.
Today no one would think of looking for heroes and villains in a serious
novel, but in lowbrow fiction one still expects to find a sharp
distinction between right and wrong and between legality and illegality.
The common people, on the whole, are still living in the world of
absolute good and evil from which the intellectuals have long since
escaped. But the popularity of NO ORCHIDS and the American books and
magazines to which it is akin shows how rapidly the doctrine of 'realism'
is gaining ground.
Several people, after reading NO ORCHIDS, have remarked to me, 'It's pure
Fascism'. This is a correct description, although the book has not the
smallest connexion with politics and very little with social or economic
problems. It has merely the same relation to Fascism as, say Trollope's
novels have to nineteenth-century capitalism. It is a daydream
appropriate to a totalitarian age. In his imagined world of gangsters
Chase is presenting, as it were, a distilled version of the modern
political scene, in which such things as mass bombing of civilians, the
use of hostages, torture to obtain confessions, secret prisons, execution
without trial, floggings with rubber truncheons, drownings in cesspools,
systematic falsification of records and statistics, treachery, bribery,
and quislingism are normal and morally neutral, even admirable when they
are done in a large and bold way. The average man is not directly
interested in politics, and when he reads, he wants the current struggles
of the world to be translated into a simple story about individuals. He
can take an interest in Slim and Fenner as he could not in the G.P.U. and
the Gestapo. People worship power in the form in which they are able to
understand it. A twelve-year-old boy worships Jack Dempsey. An adolescent
in a Glasgow slum worships Al Capone. An aspiring pupil at a business
college worships Lord Nuffield. A NEW STATESMAN reader worships Stalin.
There is a difference in intellectual maturity, but none in moral
outlook. Thirty years ago the heroes of popular fiction had nothing in
common with Mr. Chase's gangsters and detectives, and the idols of the
English liberal intelligentsia were also comparatively sympathetic
figures. Between Holmes and Fenner on the one hand, and between Abraham
Lincoln and Stalin on the other, there is a similar gulf.
One ought not to infer too much from the success of Mr. Chase's books. It
is possible that it is an isolated phenomenon, brought about by the
mingled boredom and brutality of war. But if such books should definitely
acclimatize themselves in England, instead of being merely a
half-understood import from America, there would be good grounds for
dismay. In choosing RAFFLES as a background for NO ORCHIDS I deliberately
chose a book which by the standards of its time was morally equivocal.
Raffles, as I have pointed out, has no real moral code, no religion,
certainly no social consciousness. All he has is a set of reflexes the
nervous system, as it were, of a gentleman. Give him a sharp tap on this
reflex or that (they are called 'sport', 'pal', 'woman', 'king and
country' and so forth), and you get a predictable reaction. In Mr.
complete. Freud and Machiavelli have reached the outer suburbs. Comparing
the schoolboy atmosphere of the one book with the cruelty and corruption
of the other, one is driven to feel that snobbishness, like hypocrisy, is
a check upon behaviour whose value from a social point of view has been
underrated.
ANTISEMITISM IN BRITAIN (1945)
There are about 400,000 known Jews in Britain, and in addition some
thousands or, at most, scores of thousands of Jewish refugees who have
entered the country from 1934 onwards. The Jewish population is almost
entirely concentrated in half a dozen big towns and is mostly employed
in the food, clothing and furniture trades. A few of the big monopolies,
such as the ICI, one or two leading newspapers and at least one big
chain of department stores are Jewish-owned or partly Jewish-owned, but
it would be very far from the truth to say that British business life is
dominated by Jews. The Jews seem, on the contrary, to have failed to
keep up with the modern tendency towards big amalgamations and to have
remained fixed in those trades which are necessarily carried out on a
small scale and by old-fashioned methods.
I start off with these background facts, which are already known to any
well-informed person, in order to emphasise that there is no real Jewish
"problem" in England. The Jews are not numerous or powerful enough, and
it is only in what are loosely called "intellectual circles" that they
have any noticeable influence. Yet it is generally admitted that
antisemitism is on the increase, that it has been greatly exacerbated by
the war, and that humane and enlightened people are not immune to it. It
does not take violent forms (English people are almost invariably gentle
and law-abiding), but it is ill-natured enough, and in favourable
circumstances it could have political results. Here are some samples of
antisemitic remarks that have been made to me during the past year or
two:
Middle-aged office employee: "I generally come to work by bus. It takes
longer, but I don't care about using the Underground from Golders Green
nowadays. There's too many of the Chosen Race travelling on that line."
Tobacconist (woman): "No, I've got no matches for you. I should try the
lady down the street. SHE'S always got matches. One of the Chosen Race,
you see."
Young intellectual, Communist or near-Communist: "No, I do NOT like
Jews. I've never made any secret of that. I can't stick them. Mind you,
I'm not antisemitic, of course."
Middle-class woman: "Well, no one could call me antisemitic, but I do
think the way these Jews behave is too absolutely stinking. The way they
push their way to the head of queues, and so on. They're so abominably
selfish. I think they're responsible for a lot of what happens to them."
Milk roundsman: "A Jew don't do no work, not the same as what an
Englishman does. 'E's too clever. We work with this 'ere" (flexes his
biceps). "They work with that there" (taps his forehead).
Chartered accountant, intelligent, left-wing in an undirected way:
"These bloody Yids are all pro-German. They'd change sides tomorrow if
the Nazis got here. I see a lot of them in my business. They admire
Hitler at the bottom of their hearts. They'll always suck up to anyone
who kicks them."
Intelligent woman, on being offered a book dealing with antisemitism and
German atrocities: "Don't show it me, PLEASE don't show it to me. It'll
only make me hate the Jews more than ever."
I could fill pages with similar remarks, but these will do to go on
with. Two facts emerge from them. One--which is very important and which
I must return to in a moment--is that above a certain intellectual level
people are ashamed of being antisemitic and are careful to draw a
distinction between "antisemitism" and "disliking Jews". The other is
that antisemitism is an irrational thing. The Jews are accused of
specific offences (for instance, bad behaviour in food queues) which the
person speaking feels strongly about, but it is obvious that these
accusations merely rationalise some deep-rooted prejudice. To attempt to
counter them with facts and statistics is useless, and may sometimes be
worse than useless. As the last of the above-quoted remarks shows,
fully aware that their outlook is indefensible. If you dislike somebody,
you dislike him and there is an end of it: your feelings are not made
any better by a recital of his virtues.
It so happens that the war has encouraged the growth of antisemitism and
even, in the eyes of many ordinary people, given some justification for
it. To begin with, the Jews are one people of whom it can be said with
complete certainty that they will benefit by an Allied victory.
Consequently the theory that "this is a Jewish war" has a certain
plausibility, all the more so because the Jewish war effort seldom gets
its fair share of recognition. The British Empire is a huge
heterogeneous organisation held together largely by mutual consent, and
it is often necessary to flatter the less reliable elements at the
expense of the more loyal ones. To publicise the exploits of Jewish
soldiers, or even to admit the existence of a considerable Jewish army
in the Middle East, rouses hostility in South Africa, the Arab countries
and elsewhere: it is easier to ignore the whole subject and allow
the man in the street to go on thinking that Jews are exceptionally
clever at dodging military service. Then again, Jews are to be found in
exactly those trades which are bound to incur unpopularity with the
civilian public in war-time. Jews are mostly concerned with selling
food, clothes, furniture and tobacco--exactly the commodities of which
there is a chronic shortage, with consequent overcharging,
black-marketing and favouritism. And again, the common charge that Jews
behave in an exceptionally cowardly way during air raids was given a
certain amount of colour by the big raids of 1940. As it happened, the
Jewish quarter of Whitechapel was one of the first areas to be heavily
blitzed, with the natural result that swarms of Jewish refugees
distributed themselves all over London. If one judged merely from these
war-time phenomena, it would be easy to imagine that antisemitism is a
quasi-rational thing, founded on mistaken premises. And naturally the
antisemite thinks of himself as a reasonable being. Whenever I have
touched on this subject in a newspaper article, I have always had a
considerable "come-back", and invariably some of the letters are from
well-balanced, middling people--doctors, for example--with no apparent
economic grievance. These people always say (as Hitler says in MEIN KAMPF)
that they started out with no anti-Jewish prejudice but were driven into
their present position by mere observation of the facts. Yet one of the
marks of antisemitism is an ability to believe stories that could not
possibly be true. One could see a good example of this in the strange
accident that occurred in London in 1942, when a crowd, frightened by a
bomb-burst nearby, fled into the mouth of an Underground station, with the
result that something over a hundred people were crushed to death. The
very same day it was repeated all over London that "the Jews were
responsible". Clearly, if people will believe this kind of thing, one will
not get much further by arguing with them. The only useful approach is to
discover WHY they can swallow absurdities on one particular subject while
remaining sane on others.
But now let me come back to that point I mentioned earlier--that there
is widespread awareness of the prevalence of antisemitic feeling, and
unwillingness to admit sharing it. Among educated people, antisemitism
is held to be an unforgivable sin and in a quite different category from
other kinds of racial prejudice. People will go to remarkable lengths to
demonstrate that they are NOT antisemitic. Thus, in 1943 an intercession
service on behalf of the Polish Jews was held in a synagogue in St
John's Wood. The local authorities declared themselves anxious to
participate in it, and the service was attended by the mayor of the
borough in his robes and chain, by representatives of all the churches,
and by detachments of RAF, Home Guards, nurses, Boy Scouts and what not.
On the surface it was a touching demonstration of solidarity with the
suffering Jews. But it was essentially a CONSCIOUS effort to behave
decently by people whose subjective feelings must in many cases have
been very different. That quarter of London is partly Jewish,
antisemitism is rife there, and, as I well knew, some of the men sitting
round me in the synagogue were tinged by it. Indeed, the commander of my
own platoon of Home Guards, who had been especially keen beforehand that
we should "make a good show" at the intercession service, was an
ex-member of Mosley's Blackshirts. While this division of feeling
exists, tolerance of mass violence against Jews, or, what is more
important, antisemitic legislation, are not possible in England. It is
not at present possible, indeed, that antisemitism should BECOME
RESPECTABLE. But this is less of an advantage than it might appear.
One effect of the persecutions in Germany has been to prevent
antisemitism from being seriously studied. In England a brief inadequate
survey was made by Mass Observation a year or two ago,
but if there has
been any other investigation of the subject, then its findings have been
kept strictly secret. At the same time there has been conscious
suppression, by all thoughtful people, of anything likely to wound
Jewish susceptibilities. After 1934 the Jew joke disappeared as though
by magic from postcards, periodicals and the music-hall stage, and to
put an unsympathetic Jewish character into a novel or short story came
to be regarded as antisemitism. On the Palestine issue, too, it was DE
RIGUEUR among enlightened people to accept the Jewish case as proved and
avoid examining the claims of the Arabs--a decision which might be
correct on its own merits, but which was adopted primarily because the
Jews were in trouble and it was felt that one must not criticise them.
Thanks to Hitler, therefore, you had a situation in which the press was
in effect censored in favour of the Jews while in private antisemitism
was on the up-grade, even, to some extent, among sensitive and
intelligent people. This was particularly noticeable in 1940 at the time
of the internment of the refugees. Naturally, every thinking person felt
that it was his duty to protest against the wholesale locking-up of
unfortunate foreigners who for the most part were only in England
because they were opponents of Hitler. Privately, however, one heard
very different sentiments expressed. A minority of the refugees behaved
in an exceedingly tactless way, and the feeling against them necessarily
had an antisemitic undercurrent, since they were largely Jews. A very
eminent figure in the Labour Party--I won't name him, but he is one of
the most respected people in England--said to me quite violently: "We
never asked these people to come to this country. If they choose to come
here, let them take the consequences." Yet this man would as a matter of
course have associated himself with any kind of petition or manifesto
against the internment of aliens. This feeling that antisemitism is
something sinful and disgraceful, something that a civilised person does
not suffer from, is unfavourable to a scientific approach, and indeed
many people will admit that they are frightened of probing too deeply
into the subject. They are frightened, that is to say, of discovering
not only that antisemitism is spreading, but that they themselves are
infected by it.
To see this in perspective one must look back a few decades, to the days
when Hitler was an out-of-work house-painter whom nobody had heard of.
One would then find that though antisemitism is sufficiently in evidence
now, it is probably LESS prevalent in England than it was thirty years
ago. It is true that antisemitism as a fully thought-out racial or
religious doctrine has never flourished in England. There has never been
much feeling against inter-marriage, or against Jews taking a prominent
part in public life. Nevertheless, thirty years ago it was accepted more
or less as a law of nature that a Jew was a figure of fun and--though
superior in intelligence--slightly deficient in "character". In theory a
Jew suffered from no legal disabilities, but in effect he was debarred
from certain professions. He would probably not have been accepted as an
officer in the navy, for instance, nor in what is called a "smart"
regiment in the army. A Jewish boy at a public school almost invariably
had a bad time. He could, of course, live down his Jewishness if he was
exceptionally charming or athletic, but it was an initial disability
comparable to a stammer or a birthmark. Wealthy Jews tended to disguise
themselves under aristocratic English or Scottish names, and to the
average person it seemed quite natural that they should do this, just as
it seems natural for a criminal to change his identity if possible.
About twenty years ago, in Rangoon, I was getting into a taxi with a
friend when a small ragged boy of fair complexion rushed up to us and