To Noel Willmett
18 May 1944
10a Mortimer Crescent NW 6
10a Mortimer Crescent NW 6
Many thanks for your letter. You ask whether
totalitarianism, leader-worship etc. are really on the up-grade and instance
the fact that they are not apparently growing in this country and the USA.
I must say I believe, or fear, that taking the world as a whole
these things are on the increase. Hitler, no doubt, will soon disappear, but
only at the expense of strengthening (a) Stalin, (b) the Anglo-American
millionaires and (c) all sorts of petty fuhrers° of the type of de Gaulle. All
the national movements everywhere, even those that originate in resistance to
German domination, seem to take non-democratic forms, to group themselves round
some superhuman fuhrer (Hitler, Stalin, Salazar, Franco, Gandhi, De Valera are
all varying examples) and to adopt the theory that the end justifies the means.
Everywhere the world movement seems to be in the direction of centralised
economies which can be made to ‘work’ in an economic sense but which are not
democratically organised and which tend to establish a caste system. With this
go the horrors of emotional nationalism and a tendency to disbelieve in the
existence of objective truth because all the facts have to fit in with the
words and prophecies of some infallible fuhrer. Already history has in a sense
ceased to exist, ie. there is no such thing as a history of our own times which
could be universally accepted, and the exact sciences are endangered as soon as
military necessity ceases to keep people up to the mark. Hitler can say that
the Jews started the war, and if he survives that will become official history.
He can’t say that two and two are five, because for the purposes of, say,
ballistics they have to make four. But if the sort of world that I am afraid of
arrives, a world of two or three great superstates which are unable to conquer
one another, two and two could become five if the fuhrer wished it.1 That, so far
as I can see, is the direction in which we are actually moving, though, of
course, the process is reversible.
As to the
comparative immunity of Britain and the USA. Whatever the pacifists etc. may
say, we have not gone totalitarian yet and
this is a very hopeful symptom. I believe very deeply, as I explained in my
book The
Lion and the Unicorn, in the English people and in their capacity to centralise their
economy without destroying freedom in doing so. But one must remember that
Britain and the USA haven’t been really tried, they haven’t known defeat or
severe suffering, and there are some bad symptoms to balance the good ones. To
begin with there is the general indifference to the decay of democracy. Do you
realise, for instance, that no one in England under 26 now has a vote and that
so far as one can see the great mass of people of that age don’t give a damn
for this? Secondly there is the fact that the intellectuals are more
totalitarian in outlook than the common people. On the whole the English
intelligentsia have opposed Hitler, but only at the price of accepting Stalin.
Most of them are perfectly ready for dictatorial methods, secret police,
systematic falsification of history etc. so long
as they feel that it is on ‘our’ side. Indeed the statement that we haven’t a
Fascist movement in England largely means that the young, at this moment, look
for their fuhrer elsewhere. One can’t be sure that that won’t change, nor can
one be sure that the common people won’t think ten years hence as the
intellectuals do now. I hope they won’t, I even
trust they won’t, but if so it will be at the cost of a struggle. If one simply
proclaims that all is for the best and doesn’t point to the sinister symptoms,
one is merely helping to bring totalitarianism nearer.
You also ask, if I think the world tendency is towards
Fascism, why do I support the war. It is a choice of evils—I fancy nearly every
war is that. I know enough of British imperialism not to like it, but I would
support it against Nazism or Japanese imperialism, as the lesser evil.
Similarly I would support the USSR against Germany because I think the USSR
cannot altogether escape its past and retains enough of the original ideas of
the Revolution to make it a more hopeful phenomenon than Nazi Germany. I think,
and have thought ever since the war began, in 1936 or thereabouts, that our
cause is the better, but we have to keep on making it the better, which
involves constant criticism.
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