Orwell’s press card portrait, 1943
The history of British relations with Mussolini illustrated the structural weakness of a capitalist state. Granting that power politics are not moral, to attempt to buy Italy out of the Axis — and clearly this idea underlay British policy from 1934 onwards — was a natural strategic move. But it was not a move which Baldwin, Chamberlain and the rest of them were capable of carrying out. It could only have been done by being so strong that Mussolini would not dare to side with Hitler. This was impossible, because an economy ruled by the profit motive is simply not equal to rearming on a modern scale. Britain only began to arm when the Germans were in Calais. Before that, fairly large sums had, indeed, been voted for armaments, but they slid peaceably into the pockets of the shareholders and the weapons did not appear. Since they had no real intention of curtailing their own privileges, it was inevitable that the British ruling class should carry out every policy half-heartedly and blind themselves to the coming danger. But the moral collapse which this entailed was something new in British politics. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, British politicians might be hypocritical, but hypocrisy implies a moral code. It was something new when Tory M.P.s cheered the news that British ships had been bombed by Italian aeroplanes, or when members of the House of Lords lent themselves to organized libel campaigns against the Basque children who had been brought here as refugees.
When one thinks of the lies and betrayals of those years, the cynical abandonment of one ally after another, the imbecile optimism of the Tory press, the flat refusal to believe that the dictators meant war, even when they shouted it from the house-tops, the inability of the moneyed class to see anything wrong whatever in concentration camps, ghettos, massacres and undeclared wars, one is driven to feel that moral decadence played its part as well as mere stupidity. By 1937 or thereabouts it was not possible to be in doubt about the nature of the Fascist régimes. But the lords of property had decided that Fascism was on their side and they were willing to swallow the most stinking evils so long as their property remained secure. In their clumsy way they were playing the game of Machiavelli, of “political realism”, of “anything is right which advances the cause of the Party” — the Party in this case, of course, being the Conservative Party.
All this “Cassius” brings out, but he does shirk its corollary. Throughout his book it is implied that only Tories are immoral. “Yet there is still another England,” he says. “This other England detested Fascism from the day of its birth… this was the England of the Left, the England of Labour.” True, but only part of the truth. The actual behaviour of the Left has been more honourable than its theories. It has fought against Fascism, but its representative thinkers have entered just as deeply as their opponents into the evil world of “realism” and power politics.
“Realism” (it used to be called dishonesty) is part of the general political atmosphere of our time. It is a sign of the weakness of “Cassius”s position that one could compile a quite similar book entitled The Trial of Winston Churchill, or The Trial of Chiang Kai-shek, or even The Trial of Ramsay MacDonald. In each case you would find the leaders of the Left contradicting themselves almost as grossly as the Tory leader quoted by “Cassius”. For the Left has also been willing to shut its eyes to a great deal and to accept some very doubtful allies. We laugh now to hear the Tories abusing Mussolini when they were flattering him five years ago, but who would have foretold in 1927 that the Left would one day take Chiang Kai-shek to its bosom? Who would have foretold just after the General Strike that ten years later Winston Churchill would be the darling of the Daily Worker? In the years 1935-9, when almost any ally against Fascism seemed acceptable, left-wingers found themselves praising Mustapha Kemal and then developing tenderness for Carol of Rumania.
George Orwell, “Who are the War Criminals?”, Tribune, 1943-10-22.
July 28, 2019
QotD: Anglo-Italian relations, 1922-1940
Comments Off on QotD: Anglo-Italian relations, 1922-1940
No Comments
No comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
