A Collection of Essays

by George Orwell

  Ordinary working people do not seem either to hate the Germans or to distinguish between Germans and Nazis. Here and there there was violent anti-German feeling at the time of the bad air raids, but it has worn off. The term "Hun" has not caught on with the working classes this time. They call Germans Jerries, which may have a mildly obscene meaning but is not unfriendly. All the blame for everything is placed on Hitler, even more than on the Kaiser during the last war. After an air raid one often used to hear people say "He was over again last night" -- "he" being Hitler. The Italians are generally called Eye-ties, which is less offensive than Wops, and there is no popular feeling against them whatever, nor against the Japanese as yet. To judge from photos in the newspapers, the Land Girls are quite ready to get off with Italian prisoners working on the farms. As to the smaller nations who are supposed to be at war with us, no one remembers which is which. The women who a year ago were busy knitting stockings for the Finns are now busy knitting them for the Russians, but there is no ill feeling. The chief impression one derives from all this chaos of opinions is how little the lack of a positive war aim, or even of any definite mental picture of the enemy, matters to people who are at any rate at one in not wanting to be governed by foreigners.

  OUR ALLIES

  Whatever may be happening among the higher-ups, the effect of the Russian alliance has been a tremendous net increase of pro-Russian sentiment. It is impossible to discuss the war with ordinary working-class and middle-class people without being struck by this. But the enthusiasm that ordinary people feel for Russia is not coupled with the faintest interest in the Russian political system. All that has happened is that Russia has become respectable. An enormous hammer and sickle flag flies daily over Selfridge's, the biggest shop in London. The Communists have not caused so much friction as I expected. They have been tactful in their posters and public pronouncements, and have gone to unheard-of lengths in supporting Churchill. But though they may have gained in numbers as a result of the Russian alliance, they do not seem to have gained in political influence. To a surprising extent ordinary people fail to grasp that there is any connexion between Moscow and the Communist Party, or even that Communist policy has changed as a result of Russia's entry into the war. Everyone is delighted that the Germans have failed to take Moscow, but no one sees in this any reason for paying any attention to what Palme Dutt and Co. may say. In practice this attitude is sensible, but at the bottom of it there lies a profound lack of interest in doctrinaire politics. The ban has not been taken off the Daily Worker. Immediately after it was suppressed it reappeared as a factory sheet which was illegally printed, but was winked at. Now, under the title of the British Worker, it is sold on the streets without interference. But it has ceased to be a daily and has lost most of its circulation. In the more important parts of the press the Communist influence has not been regained.

  There is no corresponding increase in pro-American sentiment -- the contrary, if anything. It is true that the entry of Japan and America into the war was expected by everyone, whereas the German invasion of Russia came as a surprise. But our new alliance has simply brought out the immense amount of anti-American feeling that exists in the ordinary lowbiow middle class. English cultural feelings towards America are complicated but can be defined fairly accurately. In the middle class, the people who are not anti-American are the declassed technician type (people like radio engineers) and the younger intelligentsia. Up till about 1930 nearly all "cultivated" people loathed the U.S.A., which was regarded as the vulgarizer of England and Europe. The disappearance of this attitude was probably connected with the fall of Latin and Greek from their dominant position as school subjects. The younger intellectuals have no objection to the American language and tend to have a masochistic attitude towards the U.S.A., which they believe to be richer and more powerful than Britain. Of course it is exactly this that excites the jealousy of the ordinary patriotic middle class. I know people who automatically switch off the radio as soon as any American news comes on, and the most banal English film will always get middle-class support because "it's such a relief to get away from those American voices". Americans are supposed to be boastful, bad-mannered and worshippers of money, and are also suspected of plotting to inherit the British Empire. There is also business jealousy, which is very strong in the trades which have been hit by the Lend-Lease agreement. The working-class attitude is quite different. English working-class people nearly always dislike Americans when in actual contact with them, but they have no preconceived cultural hostility. In the big towns they are being more and more Americanized in speech through the medium of the cinema.

  It is uncertain whether English xenophobia is being broken down by the presence in England of large numbers of foreigners. I think it is, but plenty of people disagree with me. There is no doubt that in the summer of 1940 working-class suspicion of foreigners helped to make possible the internment of the refugees. At the time I talked with countless people, and except for left intellectuals I could find no one who saw anything wrong in it. The Blimps were after the refugees because they were largely Socialists, and the working-class line was "What did they want to come here for?" Underlying this, a hangover from an earlier period, was a resentment against these foreigners who were supposedly taking Englishmen's jobs. In the years before the war it was largely trade-union opposition that prevented a big influx of German Jewish refugees. Of late feelings have grown more friendly, partly because there is no longer a scramble for jobs, but partly also, I think, owing to personal contacts. The foreign troops who are quartered here in large numbers seem to get on unexpectedly well with the population, the Poles in particular being a great success with the girls. On the other hand there is a certain amount of antisemitism. One is constantly coming on pockets of it, hot violent, but pronounced enough to be disquieting. The Jews are supposed to dodge military service, to be the worst offenders on the Black Market etc. etc. I have heard this kind of talk even from country people who had probably never seen a Jew in their lives. But no one wants actually to do anything to the Jews, and the idea that the Jews are responsible for the war never seems to have caught on with the big public, in spite of the efforts of the German radio.

  DEFEATISM AND GERMAN PROPAGANDA

  Appeasement of the Chamberlain type is not "dead", as the newspapers are constantly assuring us, but is lying very low. But there exists another school of rightwing defeatism which can be conveniently studied in the weekly paper Truth. Truth has had a curious history and is a distinctly influential paper. At one time it was a non-political factual paper specializing in a genteel form of muck-raking (exposure of patent medicine frauds, etc.), and was taken in as a matter of course in every club and regimental mess throughout the Empire. So far as I know it still has the same circulation, but latterly it has taken a definite political and economic line and become a stronghold of the worst kind of rightwing Toryism. Sir Ernest Benn, for instance, writes in it every week. It is not only anti-Labour, but in a discreet way anti-Churchill, anti-Russian and, more markedly, anti-American. It opposed the exchange of naval bases for American destroyers, the only other opposers being the Blackshirts and Communists. The strategy it advocates is to avoid entangling alliances, keep out of Europe and concentrate on self-defence on sea and in the air. The obvious logic of this is to make a compromise peace at the earliest possible moment. The quantity of advertisements for banks and insurance companies which Truth contains shows how well it is thought of in those quarters, and recently questions in Parliament brought out the fact that it is partly owned by the Conservative Party machine.

  Leftwing defeatism is quite different and much more interesting. One or two of the minor political parties (for instance the British Anarchists, who followed up the German invasion of Russia with a terrific and very able anti-Soviet pamphlet, The Truth about Russia) follow a line which by implication is "revolutionary defeatist". The I.L.P.1 is preaching what amounts to a watered version of the Ten Propositions' set forth in the Part
isan Review, but in very indefinite terms, never clearly stating whether or not it "supports" the war. But the really interesting development is the increasing overlap between Fascism and pacifism, both of which overlap to some extent with "left" extremism. The attitude of the very young is more significant than that of the New Statesman pinks who warmongered between 1935 and 1939 and then sulked when the war started. So far as I know, the greater part of the very young intelligentsia are antiwar -- this doesn't stop them from serving in the armed forces, of course -- don't believe in any "defence of democracy", are inclined to prefer Germany to Britain, and don't feel the horror of Fascism that we who are somewhat older feel. The entry of Russia into the war didn't alter this, though most of these people pay lip-service to Russia. With the out-and-out, turn-the-other-cheek pacifists you come upon the much stranger phenomenon of people who have started by renouncing violence, ending by championing Hitler. The antisemitic motif is very strong, though usually soft-pedalled in print. But not many English pacifists have the intellectual courage to think their thoughts down to the roots, and since there is no real answer to the charge that pacifism is objectively proFascist, nearly all pacifist literature is forensic -- i.e. specializes in avoiding awkward questions. To take one example, during the earlier period of the war the pacifist monthly the Adelphi, edited by Middleton Murry, accepted at its face value the German claim to be a "Socialist" state fighting against "plutocratic" Britain, and more or less equated Germany with Russia. Hitler's invasion of Russia made nonsense of this line of thought and, in the five or six issues that have followed, the Adelphi has performed the surprising feat of not mentioning the Russo-German war. The Adelphi has once or twice engaged in Jew-baiting of a mild kind. Peace News, now also edited by Middleton Murry, follows its old tradition of opposing war for different and incompatible reasons, at one moment because violence is wicked, at another because peace will "preserve the British Empire", etc.

  1. Independent Labour Party.

  For some years past there has been a tendency for Fascists and currency reformers to write in the same papers, and it is only recently that they have been joined by the pacifists. I have in front of me a copy of the little antiwar paper Now which contains contributions from, among others, the Duke of Bedford, Alexander Comfort, Julian Symons and Hugh Ross Williamson. Alexander Comfort is a "pure" pacifist of the other-cheek school. The Duke of Bedford has for years been one of the main props of the Douglas Credit2 movement, and is also a devout Anglican, a pacifist or near-pacifist, and a landowner upon an enormous scale. In the early months of the war (then Marquis of Tavistock) he went to Dublin on his own initiative and obtained or tried to obtain a draft of peace terms from the German Embassy. Recently he has published pamphlets urging the impossibility of winning the war and describing Hitler as a misunderstood man whose good faith has never really been tested. Julian Symons writes in a vaguely Fascist strain but is also given to quoting Lenin. Hugh Ross Williamson has been mixed up in the Fascist movement for some time, but in the split-off section of it to which William Joyce ("Lord Haw-Haw") also belongs. Just before the war he and others formed a fresh Fascist party calling itself the People's Party, of which the Duke of Bedford was a member. The People's Party apparently came to nothing, and in the first period of the war Williamson devoted himself to trying to bring about a get-together between the Communists and Mosley's followers. You see here an example of what I mean by the overlap between Fascism and pacifism.

  2. The Social Credit movement, which was based on the ideas of Major C. H. Douglas, claimed that prosperity could be achieved through a reform of the monetary system. To a letter to Partisan Review, September-October 1942, from Gorham Munson correcting Orwell about Social Credit and Fascism, Orwell replied: "I am sorry if I gave the impression that Social Creditors, as such, are proFascist. Certainly Hargrave and the group now running the New English Weekly aren't. I am very glad to hear that they have dropped the Duke of Bedford, and apologize for not having known this, which I ought to have done."

  What is interesting is that every section of antiwar opinion has one section of German radio propaganda, as it were, assigned to it. Since the outbreak of war the Germans have done hardly any direct propaganda in England otherwise than by wireless. The best known of their broadcasts, indeed the only ones that can be said to have been listened to to any appreciable extent, are those of William Joyce. No doubt these are often extravagantly untruthful, but they are a more or less responsible type of broadcast, well delivered and giving news rather than straight propaganda. But in addition the Germans maintain four spurious "freedom" stations, actually operating on the continent but pretending to be operating illegally in England. The best known of these is the New British Broadcasting Station, which earlier in the war the Blackshirts used to advertise by means of stickybacks. The general line of these broadcasts is "uncensored news", or "what the Government is hiding from you". They affect a pessimistic, well-informed manner, as of someone who is on the inside of the inside, and go in for enormous figures of shipping losses, etc. They urge the dismissal of Churchill, talk apprehensively about "the Communist danger", and are anti-American. The anti-American strain is even stronger in Joyce's broadcasts. The Americans are swindling us over the Lend-Lease agreement, are gradually absorbing the Empire, etc. etc. More interesting than the New British is the Workers' Challenge Station. This goes in for a line of red-hot revolutionary talks under such titles as "Kick Churchill Out", delivered by an authentic British working man who uses plenty of unprintable words. We are to overthrow the corrupt capitalist government which is selling us to the enemy, and set up a real Socialist government which will come to the rescue of our heroic comrades of the Red Army and give us victory over Fascism. (This German station does not hesitate to talk about "the menace of Nazism", "the horrors of the Gestapo" etc.) The Workers' Challenge is not overtly defeatist. The line is always that it is probably too late, the Red Army is done for, but that we may be able to save ourselves if only we can "overthrow capitalism", which is to be done by means of strikes, mutinies, sabotage in the armament factories, and so forth. The other two 'freedom' stations are the Christian Peace Movement (pacifism) and Radio Caledonia (Scottish nationalism).

  You can see how each strain of German propaganda corresponds to one existing, or at any rate potential, defeatist faction. Lord Haw-Haw and the New British are aimed at the anti-American middle class, roughly speaking the people who read Truth, and the business interests that have suffered from the war. The Workers' Challenge is aimed at the Communists and the Left extremists generally. The Christian Peace Movement is aimed at the P.P.U. I don't want to give the impression, however, that German propaganda has much effect at this moment. There is little doubt that it has been an almost complete flop, especially during the last eighteen months. Various things that have happened have suggested that since the outbreak of war the Germans have not been well informed about internal conditions in England, and much of their propaganda, even if listened to, would fail because of simple psychological errors on which anyone with a real knowledge of England could put them right. But the various strains of defeatist feelings are there, and at some time they may grow. In some of what I have said above I may have seemed to mention people and factions too insignificant to be worth noticing, but in this bloodstained harlequinade in which we are living one never knows what obscure individual or half-lunatic theory may not become important. I do seem to notice a tendency in intellectuals, especially the younger ones, to come to terms with Fascism, and it is a thing to keep one's eye on. The quisling intellectual is a phenomenon of the last two years. Previously we all used to assume that Fascism was so self-evidently horrible that no thinking person would have anything to do with it, and also that the Fascists always wiped out the intelligentsia when they had the opportunity. Neither assumption was true, as we can see from what happened in France. Both Vichy and the Germans have found it quite easy to keep a facade of "French culture" in existence. Plenty of intellectuals were
ready to go over, and the Germans were quite ready to make use of them, even when they were "decadent". At this moment Drieu la Rochelle is editing the Nouvelle Revue Francaise, Pound is bellowing against the Jews on the Rome radio, and Celine is a valued exhibit in Paris, or at least his books are. All of these would come under the heading of Kulturbolschewismus, but they are also useful cards to play against the intelligentsia in Britain and the U.S.A. If the Germans got to England, similar things would happen, and I think I could make out at least a preliminary list of the people who would go over.