Partisan Review, Winter 1944–45
Dear Editors,
It is close on four years since I first wrote to you, and I have told you several times that I would like to write one letter which should be a sort of commentary on the previous ones. This seems to be a suitable moment.
Now that we have seemingly won the war and lost the peace, it is possible to see earlier events in a certain perspective, and the first thing I have to admit is that up to at any rate the end of 1942 I was grossly wrong in my analysis of the situation. It is because, so far as I can see, everyone else was wrong too that my own mistakes are worth commenting on.
I have tried to tell the truth in these letters, and I believe your readers have got from them a not too distorted picture of what was happening at any given moment. Of course there are many mistaken predictions (e.g., in 1941 I prophesied that Russia and Germany would go on collaborating and in 1942 that Churchill would fall from power), many generalizations based on little or no evidence, and also, from time to time, spiteful or misleading remarks about individuals. For instance, I particularly regret having said in one letter that Julian Symons ‘writes in a vaguely Fascist strain’—a quite unjustified statement based on a single article which I probably misunderstood. But this kind of thing results largely from the lunatic atmosphere of war, the fog of lies and misinformation in which one has to work and the endless sordid controversies in which a political journalist is involved. By the low standards now prevailing I think I have been fairly accurate about facts. Where I have gone wrong is in assessing the relative importance of different trends. And most of my mistakes spring from a political analysis which I had made in the desperate period of 1940 and continued to cling to long after it should have been clear that it was untenable.
The essential error is contained in my very first letter, written at the end of 1940, in which I stated that the political reaction which was already visibly under weigh ‘is not going to make very much ultimate difference.’ For about eighteen months I repeated this in various forms again and again. I not only assumed (what is probably true) that the drift of popular feeling was towards the Left, but that it would be quite impossible to win the war without democratizing it. In 1940 I had written, ‘Either we turn this into a revolutionary war, or we lose it,’ and I find myself repeating this word for word as late as the middle of 1942. This probably coloured my judgment of actual events and made me exaggerate the depth of the political crisis in 1942, the possibilities of Cripps as a popular leader and of Common Wealth as a revolutionary party, and also the socially levelling process occurring in Britain as a result of the war. But what really matters is that I fell into the trap of assuming that ‘the war and the revolution are inseparable.’ There were excuses for this belief, but still it was a very great error. For after all we have not lost the war, unless appearances are very deceiving, and we have not introduced Socialism. Britain is moving towards a planned economy, and class distinctions tend to dwindle, but there has been no real shift of power and no increase in genuine democracy. The same people still own all the property and usurp all the best jobs. In the United States the development appears to be away from Socialism. The United States is indeed the most powerful country in the world, and the most capitalistic. When we look back at our judgments of a year or two ago, whether we ‘opposed’ the war or whether we ‘supported’ it, I think the first admission we ought to make is that we were all wrong.
Among the British and American intelligentsia, using the word in a wide sense, there were five attitudes towards the war:
Position (1) was taken by radicals everywhere, and by Stalinists after the entry of the USSR. Trotskyists of various colours took either position (2) or position (4). Pacifists took position (4) and generally used (5) as an additional argument. (1) merely amounts to saying, ‘I don’t like Fascism,’ and is hardly a guide to political action: it does not make any prediction about what will happen. But the other theories have all been completely falsified. The fact that we were fighting for our lives has not forced us to ‘go Socialist,’ as I foretold that it would, but neither has it driven us into Fascism. So far as I can judge, we are somewhat further away from Fascism than we were at the beginning of the war. It seems to me very important to realize that we have been wrong, and say so. Most people nowadays, when their predictions are falsified, just impudently claim that they have been justified, and squeeze the facts accordingly. Thus many people who took the line that I did will in effect claim that the revolution has already happened, that class privilege and economic injustice can never return, etc., etc. Pacifists claim with even greater confidence that Britain is already a Fascist country and indistinguishable from Nazi Germany, although the very fact that they are allowed to write and agitate contradicts them. From all sides there is a chorus of ‘I told you so,’ and complete shamelessness about past mistakes. Appeasers, Popular Front-ers, Communists, Trotskyists, Anarchists, Pacifists, all claim—and in almost exactly the same tone of voice— that their prophecies and no others have been borne out by events. Particularly on the Left, political thought is a sort of masturbation fantasy in which the world of facts hardly matters.
But to return to my own mistakes. I am not here concerned with correcting those mistakes, so much as with explaining why I made them. When I suggested to you that Britain was on the edge of drastic political changes, and had already made an advance from which there could be no drawing back, I was not trying to put a good face on things for the benefit of the American public. I expressed the same ideas, and much more violently, in books and articles only published at home. Here are a few samples:
‘The choice is between Socialism and defeat. We must go forward, or perish.’ ‘Laissez-faire capitalism is dead.’ ‘The English revolution started several years ago, and it began to gather momentum when the troops came back from Dunkirk.’ ‘With its present social structure England cannot survive.’ ‘This war, unless we are defeated, will wipe out most of the existing class privileges.’ ‘Within a year, perhaps even within six months, if we are still unconquered, we shall see the rise of something that has never existed before, a specifically English Socialist movement.’ ‘The last thing the British ruling class wants is to acquire fresh territory.’ ‘The real quarrel of the Fascist powers with British imperialism is that they know that it is disintegrating.’ ‘The war will bankrupt the majority of the public schools if it continues for another year or two.’ ‘This war is a race between the consolidation of Hitler’s empire and the growth of democratic consciousness.’
And so on and so on. How could I write such things? Well, there is a clue in the fact that my predictions, especially about military events, were by no means always wrong. Looking back through my diaries and the news commentaries1 which I wrote for the BBC over a period of two years, I see that I was often right as against the bulk of the left-wing intelligentsia. I was right to the extent that I was not defeatist, and after all the war has not been lost. The majority of left-wing intellectuals, whatever they might say in print, were blackly defeatist in 1940 and again in 1942. In the summer of 1942, the turning-point of the war, most of them held it as an article of faith that Alexandria would fall and Stalingrad would not. I remember a fellow broadcaster, a Communist saying to me with a kind of passion, ‘I would bet you anything, anything, that Rommel will be in Cairo in a month.’ What this person really meant, as I could see at a glance, was, ‘I hope Rommel will be in Cairo in a month.’ I myself didn’t hope anything of the kind, and therefore I was able to see that the chances of holding on to Egypt were fairly good. You have here an example of the wish-thinking that underlies almost all political prediction at present.
I could be right on a point of this kind, because I don’t share the average English intellectual’s hatred of his own country and am not dismayed by a British victory. But just for the same reason I failed to form a true picture of political developments. I hate to see England either humiliated or humiliating anybody else. I wanted to think that we would not be defeated, and I wanted to think that the class distinctions and imperialist exploitation of which I am ashamed would not return. I over-emphasized the anti-Fascist character of the war, exaggerated the social changes that were actually occurring; and under-rated the enormous strength of the forces of reaction. This unconscious falsification coloured all my earlier letters to you, though perhaps not the more recent ones.
So far as I can see, all political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome. For example, right up to May of this year the more disaffected English intellectuals refused to believe that a Second Front would be opened. They went on refusing while, bang in front of their faces, the endless convoys of guns and landing craft rumbled through London on their way to the coast. One could point to countless other instances of people hugging quite manifest delusions because the truth would be wounding to their pride. Hence the absence of reliable political prediction. To name just one easily isolated example: Who foresaw the Russo–German pact of 1939? A few pessimistic Conservatives foretold an agreement between Germany and Russia, but the wrong kind of agreement, and for the wrong reasons. So far as I am aware, no intellectual of the Left, whether Russophile or Russophobe, foresaw anything of the kind. For that matter, the Left as a whole failed to foresee the rise of Fascism and failed to grasp that the Nazis were dangerous even when they were on the verge of seizing power. To appreciate the danger of Fascism the Left would have had to admit its own shortcomings, which was too painful: so the whole phenomenon was ignored or misinterpreted, with disastrous results.
The most one can say is that people can be fairly good prophets when their wishes are realizable. But a truly objective approach is almost impossible, because in one form or another almost everyone is a nationalist. Left-wing intellectuals do not think of themselves as nationalists, because as a rule they transfer their loyalty to some foreign country, such as the USSR, or indulge it in a merely negative form, in hatred of their own country and its rulers. But their outlook is essentially nationalist, in that they think entirely in terms of power politics and competitive prestige. In looking at any situation they do not say, ‘What are the facts? What are the probabilities,’ but, ‘How can I make it appear to myself and others that my faction is getting the better of some rival faction?’ To a Stalinist it is impossible that Stalin could ever be wrong, and to a Trotskyist it is equally impossible that Stalin could ever be right. So also with Anarchists, Pacifists, Tories or what-have-you. And the atomization of the world, the lack of any real contact between one country and another, makes delusions easier to preserve. To an astonishing extent it is impossible to discover what is happening outside one’s own immediate circle. An illustration of this is that no one, so far as I know, can calculate the casualties in the present war within ten millions. But one expects governments and newspapers to tell lies. What is worse, to me, is the contempt even of intellectuals for objective truth so long as their own brand of nationalism is being boosted. The most intelligent people seem capable of holding schizophrenic beliefs, of disregarding plain facts, of evading serious questions with debating-society repartees, or swallowing baseless rumours and of looking on indifferently while history is falsified. All these mental vices spring ultimately from the nationalistic habit of mind, which is itself, I suppose, the product of fear and of the ghastly emptiness of machine civilization. But at any rate it is not surprising that in our age the followers of Marx have not been much more successful as prophets than the followers of Nostradamus.
I believe that it is possible to be more objective than most of us are, but that it involves a moral effort. One cannot get away from one’s own subjective feelings, but at least one can know what they are and make allowance for them. I have made attempts to do this, especially latterly, and for that reason I think the later ones among my letters to you, roughly speaking from the middle of 1942 onwards, give a more truthful picture of developments in Britain than the earlier ones. As this letter has been largely a tirade against the left-wing intelligentsia, I would like to add, without flattery, that judging from such American periodicals as I see, the mental atmosphere in the USA is still a good deal more breathable than it is in England.
I began this letter three days ago. World-shaking events are happening all over the place, but in London nothing new.2 The change-over from the blackout to the so-called dim-out3 has made no difference as yet. The streets are still inky dark. On and off it is beastly cold and it looks as though fuel will be very short this winter. People’s tempers get more and more ragged, and shopping is a misery. The shopkeepers treat you like dirt, especially if you want something that happens to be in short supply at the moment. The latest shortages are combs and teats for babies’ feeding bottles. Teats have been actually unprocurable in some areas, and what do exist are made of reconditioned rubber. At the same time contraceptives are plentiful and made of good rubber. Whisky is rarer than ever, but there are more cars on the roads, so the petrol situation must have let up a little. The Home Guard has been stood down and firewatching greatly reduced. More U.S. soldiers have looked me up, using PR as an introduction. I am always most happy to meet any reader of PR. I can generally be got at the Tribune, but failing that my home number is CAN 3751.
George Orwell