Fifty Orwell Essays

by George Orwell

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

  doing their stuff, and there has been much reiteration of the useless

  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

  assumed that this means bigger and bloodier wars, and perhaps an actual

  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,