George Orwell
As I Please
Tribune, 31 March 1944 The other day I
attended a press conference at which a newly arrived Frenchman, who was described as an
eminent jurist he could not give his name or other specifications
because of his family in France set forth the French point of view on the recent
execution of Pucheu. I was surprised to note that he was distinctly on the defensive, and
seemed to think that the shooting of Pucheu was a deed that would want a good deal of
justification in British and American eyes. His main point was that Pucheu was not shot
for political reasons, but for the ordinary crime of collaborating with the
enemy, which has always been punishable by death under French law.
An American correspondent asked the question: Would
collaborating with the enemy be equally a crime in the case of some petty official
an inspector of police, for example? Absolutely the same, answered the
Frenchman. As he had just come from France he was presumably voicing French opinion, but
one can assume that in practice only the most active collaborators will be put to death.
Any really big-scale massacre, if it really happened, would be quite largely the
punishment of the guilty by the guilty. For there is much evidence that large sections of
the French population were more or less pro-German in 1940 and only changed their minds
when they found out what the Germans were like.
I do not want people like Pucheu to escape, but a few very
obscure quislings, including one or two Arabs, have been shot as well, and this whole
business of taking vengeance on traitors and captured enemies raises questions which are
strategic as well as moral. The point is that if we shoot too many of the small rats now
we may have no stomach for dealing with the big ones when the time comes. It is difficult
to believe that the Fascist
régimes can be thoroughly crushed without the killing of the responsible individuals, to
the number of some hundreds or even thousands in each country. But it could well happen
that all the truly guilty people will escape in the end, simply because public opinion has
been sickened beforehand by hypocritical trials and cold-blooded executions.
In effect this was what happened in the last war. Who that was
alive in those years does not remember the maniacal hatred of the Kaiser that was fostered
in this country? Like Hitler in
this war, he was supposed to be the cause of all our ills. No one doubted that he would be
executed as soon as caught, and the only question was what method would be adopted.
Magazine articles were written in which the rival merits of boiling in oil, drawing and
quartering and breaking on the wheel were carefully examined. The Royal Academy
exhibitions were full of allegorical pictures of incredible vulgarity, showing the Kaiser
being thrown into Hell. And what came of it in the end? The Kaiser retired to Holland and
(though he had been dying of cancer in 1915) lived another twenty-two years,
one of the richest men in Europe.
So also with all the other war criminals. After all
the threats and promises that had been made, no war criminals were tried: to be exact, a
dozen people or so were put on trial, given sentences of imprisonment and soon released.
And though, of course, the failure to crush the German military caste was due to the
conscious policy of the Allied leaders, who were terrified of revolution in Germany, the
revulsion of feeling in ordinary people helped to make it possible. They did not want
revenge when it was in their power. The Belgian atrocities, Miss Cavell, the U-boat captains who had
sunk passenger ships without warning and machine-gunned the survivors somehow it
was all forgotten. Ten million innocent men had been killed, and no one wanted to follow
it up by killing a few thousand guilty ones.
Whether we do or dont shoot the Fascists and quislings who
happen to fall into our hands is probably not very important in itself. What is important
is that revenge and punishment should have no part in our policy or even in
our day-dreams. Up to date, one of the mitigating features of this war is that in this
country there has been very little hatred. There has been none of the nonsensical
racialism that there was last time no pretence that all Germans have faces like
pigs, for instance. Even the word Hun has not really popularized itself. The
Germans in this country, mostly refugees, have not been well treated, but they have not
been meanly persecuted as they were last time. In the last war it would have been very
unsafe, for instance, to speak German in a London street. Wretched little German bakers
and hairdressers had their shops sacked by the mob, German music fell out of favour, even
the breed of dachshunds almost disappeared because no one wanted to have a German
dog. And the weak British attitude in the early period of German rearmament had a
direct connexion with those follies of the war years.
Hatred is an impossible basis for policy, and curiously enough it
can lead to over-softness as well as to over-toughness. In the war of 191418 the
British people were whipped up into a hideous frenzy of hatred, they were fed on
preposterous lies about crucified Belgian babies and German factories where corpses were
made into margarine: and then as soon as the war stopped they suffered the natural
revulsion, which was all the stronger because the troops came home, as British troops
usually do, with a warm admiration for the enemy. The result was an exaggerated pro-German
reaction which set in about 1920 and lasted till Hitler was well in the saddle. Throughout
those years all enlightened opinion (see any number of the Daily Herald
before 1929, for instance) held it as an article of faith that Germany bore no
responsibility for the war. Treitschke,
Bernhardi, the Pan-Germans, the
nordic myth, the open boasts about Der Tag which the Germans had
been making from 1900 onwards all this went for nothing. The Versailles Treaty was the
greatest infamy the world has ever seen: few people had even heard of Brest-Litovsk. All this was the
price of that four years orgy of lying and hatred.
Anyone who tried to awaken public opinion during the years of
Fascist aggression from 1933 onwards knows what the aftereffects of that hate propaganda
were like. Atrocities had come to be looked on as synonymous with
lies. But the stories about the German concentration camps were atrocity
stories: therefore they were lies so reasoned the average man. The left-wingers who
tried to make the public see that Fascism was an unspeakable horror were fighting against
their own propaganda of the past fifteen years.
That is why though I would not save creatures like Pucheu
even if I could I am not happy when I see trials of war criminals,
especially when they are very petty criminals and when witnesses are allowed to make
inflammatory political speeches. Still less am I happy to see the Left associating itself
with schemes to partition Germany, enrol millions of Germans in forced-labour gangs and
impose reparations which will make the Versailles reparations look like a bus fare. All
these vindictive day-dreams, like those of 191418, will simply make it harder to
have a realistic post-war policy. If you think now in terms of making Germany
pay, you will quite likely find yourself praising Hitler in 1950. Results are what
matter, and one of the results we want from this war is to be quite sure that Germany will
not make war again. Whether this is best achieved by ruthlessness or generosity I am not
certain: but I am quite certain that either of these will be more difficult if we allow
ourselves to be influenced by hatred. |