giving coffee to a 'Boche'. But his feelings, he told me, had undergone a
change at the sight of ce pauvre mort beside the bridge: it had suddenly
brought home to him the meaning of war. And yet, if we had happened to
enter the town by another route, he might have been spared the experience
of seeing one corpse out of the--perhaps--twenty million that the war
has produced.
THE SPORTING SPIRIT
Now that the brief visit of the Dynamo football team has come to an end,
it is possible to say publicly what many thinking people were saying
privately before the Dynamos ever arrived. That is, that sport is an
unfailing cause of ill-will, and that if such a visit as this had any
effect at all on Anglo-Soviet relations, it could only be to make them
slightly worse than before.
Even the newspapers have been unable to conceal the fact that at least
two of the four matches played led to much bad feeling. At the Arsenal
match, I am told by someone who was there, a British and a Russian player
came to blows and the crowd booed the referee. The Glasgow match, someone
else informs me, was simply a free-for-all from the start. And then there
was the controversy, typical of our nationalistic age, about the
composition of the Arsenal team. Was it really an all-England team, as
claimed by the Russians, or merely a league team, as claimed by the
British? And did the Dynamos end their tour abruptly in order to avoid
playing an all-England team? As usual, everyone answers these questions
according to his political predilections. Not quite everyone, however. I
noted with interest, as an instance of the vicious passions that football
provokes, that the sporting correspondent of the russophile NEWS
CHRONICLE took the anti-Russian line and maintained that Arsenal was NOT
an all-England team. No doubt the controversy will continue to echo for
years in the footnotes of history books. Meanwhile the result of the
Dynamos' tour, in so far as it has had any result, will have been to
create fresh animosity on both sides.
And how could it be otherwise? I am always amazed when I hear people
saying that sport creates goodwill between the nations, and that if only
the common peoples of the world could meet one another at football or
cricket, they would have no inclination to meet on the battlefield. Even
if one didn't know from concrete examples (the 1936 Olympic Games, for
instance) that international sporting contests lead to orgies of hatred,
one could deduce it from general principles.
Nearly all the sports practised nowadays are competitive. You play to
win, and the game has little meaning unless you do your utmost to win. On
the village green, where you pick up sides and no feeling of local
patriotism is involved, it is possible to play simply for the fun and
exercise: but as soon as the question of prestige arises, as soon as you
feel that you and some larger unit will be disgraced if you lose, the
most savage combative instincts are aroused. Anyone who has played even
in a school football match knows this. At the international level sport
is frankly mimic warfare. But the significant thing is not the behaviour
of the players but the attitude of the spectators: and, behind the
spectators, of the nations who work themselves into furies over these
absurd contests, and seriously believe--at any rate for short
periods--that running, jumping and kicking a ball are tests of national
virtue.
Even a leisurely game like cricket, demanding grace rather than strength,
can cause much ill-will, as we saw in the controversy over body-line
bowling and over the rough tactics of the Australian team that visited
England in 1921. Football, a game in which everyone gets hurt and every
nation has its own style of play which seems unfair to foreigners, is far
worse. Worst of all is boxing. One of the most horrible sights in the
world is a fight between white and coloured boxers before a mixed
audience. But a boxing audience is always disgusting, and the behaviour
of the women, in particular, is such that the army, I believe, does not
allow them to attend its contests. At any rate, two or three years ago,
when Home Guards and regular troops were holding a boxing tournament, I
was placed on guard at the door of the hall, with orders to keep the
women out.
In England, the obsession with sport is bad enough, but even fiercer
passions are aroused in young countries where games playing and
nationalism are both recent developments. In countries like India or
Burma, it is necessary at football matches to have strong cordons of
police to keep the crowd from invading the field. In Burma, I have seen
the supporters of one side break through the police and disable the
goalkeeper of the opposing side at a critical moment. The first big
football match that was played in Spain about fifteen years ago led to an
uncontrollable riot. As soon as strong feelings of rivalry are aroused,
the notion of playing the game according to the rules always vanishes.
People want to see one side on top and the other side humiliated, and
they forget that victory gained through cheating or through the
intervention of the crowd is meaningless. Even when the spectators don't
intervene physically they try to influence the game by cheering their own
side and "rattling" opposing players with boos and insults. Serious sport
has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy,
boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing
violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting.
Instead of blah-blahing about the clean, healthy rivalry of the football
field and the great part played by the Olympic Games in bringing the
nations together, it is more useful to inquire how and why this modern
cult of sport arose. Most of the games we now play are of ancient origin,
but sport does not seem to have been taken very seriously between Roman
times and the nineteenth century. Even in the English public schools the
games cult did not start till the later part of the last century. Dr
Arnold, generally regarded as the founder of the modern public school,
looked on games as simply a waste of time. Then, chiefly in England and
the United States, games were built up into a heavily-financed activity,
capable of attracting vast crowds and rousing savage passions, and the
infection spread from country to country. It is the most violently
combative sports, football and boxing, that have spread the widest. There
cannot be much doubt that the whole thing is bound up with the rise of
nationalism--that is, with the lunatic modern habit of identifying
oneself with large power units and seeing everything in terms of
competitive prestige. Also, organised games are more likely to flourish
in urban communities where the average human being lives a sedentary or
at least a confined life, and does not get much opportunity for creative
labour. In a rustic community a boy or young man works off a good deal of
his surplus energy by walking, swimming, snowballing, climbing trees,
ri
ding horses, and by various sports involving cruelty to animals, such
as fishing, cock-fighting and ferreting for rats. In a big town one must
indulge in group activities if one wants an outlet for one's physical
strength or for one's sadistic impulses. Games are taken seriously in
London and New York, and they were taken seriously in Rome and Byzantium:
in the Middle Ages they were played, and probably played with much
physical brutality, but they were not mixed up with politics nor a cause
of group hatreds.
If you wanted to add to the vast fund of ill-will existing in the world
at this moment, you could hardly do it better than by a series of
football matches between Jews and Arabs, Germans and Czechs, Indians and
British, Russians and Poles, and Italians and Jugoslavs, each match to be
watched by a mixed audience of 100,000 spectators. I do not, of course,
suggest that sport is one of the main causes of international rivalry;
big-scale sport is itself, I think, merely another effect of the causes
that have produced nationalism. Still, you do make things worse by
sending forth a team of eleven men, labelled as national champions, to do
battle against some rival team, and allowing it to be felt on all sides
that whichever nation is defeated will "lose face".
I hope, therefore, that we shan't follow up the visit of the Dynamos by
sending a British team to the USSR. If we must do so, then let us
send a second-rate team which is sure to be beaten and cannot be claimed
to represent Britain as a whole. There are quite enough real causes of
trouble already, and we need not add to them by encouraging young men to
kick each other on the shins amid the roars of infuriated spectators.
YOU AND THE ATOMIC BOMB (1945)
Considering how likely we all are to be blown to pieces by it within the
next five years, the atomic bomb has not roused so much discussion as
might have been expected. The newspapers have published numerous
diagrams, not very helpful to the average man, of protons and neutrons
statement that the bomb 'ought to be put under international control.'
But curiously little has been said, at any rate in print, about the
question that is of most urgent interest to all of us, namely: 'How
difficult are these things to manufacture?'
Such information as we--that is, the big public--possess on this
subject has come to us in a rather indirect way, apropos of President
Truman's decision not to hand over certain secrets to the USSR. Some
months ago, when the bomb was still only a rumour, there was a widespread
belief that splitting the atom was merely a problem for the physicists,
and that when they had solved it a new and devastating weapon would be
within reach of almost everybody. (At any moment, so the rumour went,
some lonely lunatic in a laboratory might blow civilisation to
smithereens, as easily as touching off a firework.)
Had that been true, the whole trend of history would have been abruptly
altered. The distinction between great states and small states would have
been wiped out, and the power of the State over the individual would have
been greatly weakened. However, it appears from President Truman's
remarks, and various comments that have been made on them, that the bomb
is fantastically expensive and that its manufacture demands an enormous
industrial effort, such as only three or four countries in the world are
capable of making. This point is of cardinal importance, because it may
mean that the discovery of the atomic bomb, so far from reversing
history, will simply intensify the trends which have been apparent for a
dozen years past.
It is a commonplace that the history of civilisation is largely the
history of weapons. In particular, the connection between the discovery
of gunpowder and the overthrow of feudalism by the bourgeoisie has been
pointed out over and over again. And though I have no doubt exceptions
can be brought forward, I think the following rule would be found
generally true: that ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or
difficult to make will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the
dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance.
Thus, for example, thanks, battleships and bombing planes are inherently
tyrannical weapons, while rifles, muskets, long-bows and hand-grenades
are inherently democratic weapons. A complex weapon makes the strong
stronger, while a simple weapon--so long as there is no answer to
it--gives claws to the weak.
The great age of democracy and of national self-determination was the age
of the musket and the rifle. After the invention of the flintlock, and
before the invention of the percussion cap, the musket was a fairly
efficient weapon, and at the same time so simple that it could be
produced almost anywhere. Its combination of qualities made possible the
success of the American and French revolutions, and made a popular
insurrection a more serious business than it could be in our own day.
After the musket came the breech-loading rifle. This was a comparatively
complex thing, but it could still be produced in scores of countries,
and it was cheap, easily smuggled and economical of ammunition. Even the
most backward nation could always get hold of rifles from one source or
another, so that Boers, Bulgars, Abyssinians, Moroccans--even
Tibetans--could put up a fight for their independence, sometimes with
success. But thereafter every development in military technique has
favoured the State as against the individual, and the industrialised
country as against the backward one. There are fewer and fewer foci of
power. Already, in 1939, there were only five states capable of waging
war on the grand scale, and now there are only three--ultimately,
perhaps, only two. This trend has been obvious for years, and was
pointed out by a few observers even before 1914. The one thing that
might reverse it is the discovery of a weapon--or, to put it more
broadly, of a method of fighting--not dependent on huge concentrations
of industrial plant.
From various symptoms one can infer that the Russians do not yet possess
the secret of making the atomic bomb; on the other hand, the consensus of
opinion seems to be that they will possess it within a few years. So we
have before us the prospect of two or three monstrous super-states, each
possessed of a weapon by which millions of people can be wiped out in a
few seconds, dividing the world between them. It has been rather hastily
end to the machine civilisation. But suppose--and really this the
likeliest development--that the surviving great nations make a tacit
agreement never to use the atomic bomb against one another? Suppose they
only use it, or the threat of it, against people who are unable to
retaliate? In that case we are back where we were before, the only
difference being that power is concentrated in still fewer hands and that
the outlo
ok for subject peoples and oppressed classes is still more
hopeless.
When James Burnham wrote THE MANAGERIAL REVOLUTION it seemed probable to
many Americans that the Germans would win the European end of the war,
and it was therefore natural to assume that Germany and not Russia would
dominate the Eurasian land mass, while Japan would remain master of East
Asia. This was a miscalculation, but it does not affect the main
argument. For Burnham's geographical picture of the new world has turned
out to be correct. More and more obviously the surface of the earth is
being parceled off into three great empires, each self-contained and cut
off from contact with the outer world, and each ruled, under one disguise
or another, by a self-elected oligarchy. The haggling as to where the
frontiers are to be drawn is still going on, and will continue for some
years, and the third of the three super-states--East Asia, dominated by
China--is still potential rather than actual. But the general drift is
unmistakable, and every scientific discovery of recent years has
accelerated it.
We were once told that the aeroplane had 'abolished frontiers'; actually
it is only since the aeroplane became a serious weapon that frontiers
have become definitely impassable. The radio was once expected to promote
international understanding and co-operation; it has turned out to be a
means of insulating one nation from another. The atomic bomb may complete
the process by robbing the exploited classes and peoples of all power to
revolt, and at the same time putting the possessors of the bomb on a
basis of military equality. Unable to conquer one another, they are
likely to continue ruling the world between them, and it is difficult to
see how the balance can be upset except by slow and unpredictable
demographic changes.
For forty or fifty years past, Mr. H. G. Wells and others have been
warning us that man is in danger of destroying himself with his own
weapons, leaving the ants or some other gregarious species to take over.
Anyone who has seen the ruined cities of Germany will find this notion at
least thinkable. Nevertheless, looking at the world as a whole, the drift
for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the
reimposition of slavery. We may be heading not for general breakdown but
for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity. James
Burnham's theory has been much discussed, but few people have yet
considered its ideological implications--that is, the kind of
world-view, the kind of beliefs, and the social structure that would
probably prevail in a state which was at once UNCONQUERABLE and in a
permanent state of 'cold war' with its neighbors.
Had the atomic bomb turned out to be something as cheap and easily
manufactured as a bicycle or an alarm clock, it might well have plunged
us back into barbarism, but it might, on the other hand, have meant the
end of national sovereignty and of the highly-centralised police state.
If, as seems to be the case, it is a rare and costly object as difficult
to produce as a battleship, it is likelier to put an end to large-scale
wars at the cost of prolonging indefinitely a 'peace that is no peace'.
A GOOD WORD FOR THE VICAR OF BRAY
Some years ago a friend took me to the little Berkshire church of which
the celebrated Vicar of Bray was once the incumbent. (Actually it is a
few miles from Bray, but perhaps at that time the two livings were one.)
In the churchyard there stands a magnificent yew tree which, according to
a notice at its foot, was planted by no less a person than the Vicar of
Bray himself. And it struck me at the time as curious that such a man
should have left such a relic behind him.
The Vicar of Bray, though he was well equipped to be a leader-writer on
THE TIMES, could hardly be described as an admirable character. Yet,