George Orwell
As I Please
Tribune, 12 May 1944 Reading
recently a batch of rather shallowly optimistic progressive books, I was
struck by the automatic way in which people go on repeating certain phrases which were
fashionable before 1914. Two great favourites are the abolition of distance
and the disappearance of frontiers. I do not know how often I have met with
the statements that the aeroplane and the radio have abolished distance and
all parts of the world are now interdependent.
Actually, the effect of modern inventions has been to increase
nationalism, to make travel enormously more difficult, to cut down the means of
communication between one country and another, and to make the various parts of the world less,
not more dependent on one another for food and manufactured goods. This is not the result
of the war. The same tendencies had been at work ever since 1918, though they were
intensified after the World
Depression.
Take simply the instance of travel. In the nineteenth century
some parts of the world were unexplored, but there was almost no restriction on travel. Up
to 1914 you did not need a passport for any country except Russia. The European emigrant,
if he could scrape together a few pounds for the passage, simply set sail for America or
Australia, and when he got there no questions were asked. In the eighteenth century it had
been quite normal and safe to travel in a country with which your own country was at war.
In our own time, however, travel has been becoming steadily more
difficult. It is worth listing the parts of the world which were already inaccessible
before the war started.
First of all, the whole of central Asia. Except perhaps for a
very few tried Communists, no
foreigner has entered Soviet Asia for many years past. Tibet, thanks to Anglo-Russian
jealousy, has been a closed country since about 1912. Sinkiang, theoretically part of
China, was equally un-get-atable. Then the whole of the Japanese Empire, except Japan
itself, was practically barred to foreigners. Even India has been none too accessible
since 1918. Passports were often refused even to British subjects sometimes even to
Indians!
Even in Europe the limits of travel were constantly narrowing.
Except for a short visit it was very difficult to enter Britain, as many a wretched anti-Fascist refugee discovered.
Visas for the U.S.S.R. were issued very grudgingly from about 1935 onwards. All the
Fascist countries were barred to anyone with a known anti-Fascist record. Various areas
could only be crossed if you undertook not to get out of the train. And along all the
frontiers were barbed wire, machine-guns and prowling sentries, frequently wearing
gas-masks.
As to migration, it had practically dried up since the
nineteen-twenties. All the countries of the New World did their best to keep the immigrant
out unless he brought considerable sums of money with him. Japanese and Chinese
immigration into the Americas had been completely stopped. Europes Jews had to stay
and be slaughtered because there was nowhere for them to go, whereas in the case of the
Czarist pogroms forty years earlier they had been able to flee in all directions. How, in
the face of all this, anyone can say that modern methods of travel promote
intercommunication between different countries defeats me.
Intellectual contacts have also been diminishing for a long time
past. It is nonsense to say that the radio puts people in touch with foreign countries. If
anything, it does the opposite. No ordinary person ever listens in to a foreign radio; but
if in any country large numbers of people show signs of doing so, the government prevents
it either by ferocious penalties, or by confiscating short-wave sets, or by setting up
jamming stations. The result is that each national radio is a sort of totalitarian world of its
own, braying propaganda night and day to people who can listen to nothing else. Meanwhile,
literature grows less and less international. Most totalitarian countries bar foreign
newspapers and let in only a small number of foreign books, which they subject to careful
censorship and sometimes issue in garbled versions. Letters going from one country to
another are habitually tampered with on the way. And in many countries, over the past
dozen years, history books have been rewritten in far more nationalistic terms than
before, so that children may grow up with as false a picture as possible of the world
outside.
The trend towards economic self-sufficiency
(autarchy) which has been going on since about 1930 and has been intensified
by the war, may or may not be reversible. The industrialization of countries like India
and South America increases their purchasing power and therefore ought, in theory, to help
world trade. But what is not grasped by those who say cheerfully that all parts of
the world are interdependent is that they dont any longer have to be
interdependent. In an age when wool can be made out of milk and rubber out of oil, when
wheat can be grown almost on the Arctic Circle, when atebrin will do instead of quinine
and vitamin C tablets are a tolerable substitute for fruit, imports dont matter very
greatly. Any big area can seal itself off much more completely than in the days when Napoleons Grand Army, in
spite of the embargo, marched to Moscow wearing British overcoats. So long as the world
tendency is towards nationalism
and totalitarianism, scientific progress simply helps it along.
Here are some current prices. Small Swiss-made alarm clock, price before
the war, 5/ or 10/: present price, £3 15s. Second-hand portable typewriter,
price before the war, £12 new: present price, £30. Small, very bad quality coconut fibre
scrubbing-brush, price before the war, 3d: present price 1/9d. Gas lighter, price before
the war, about 1/: present price, 5/9d.
I could quote other similar prices. It is worth noticing that,
for instance, the clock mentioned above must have been manufactured before the war at the
old price. But, on the whole, the worst racket seems to be in second-hand goods for
instance, chairs, tables, clothes, watches, prams, bicycles and bed linen. On inquiry, I
find that there is now a law against overcharging on second-hand goods. This comforts me a
great deal, just as it must comfort the 18b-ers to hear about Habeas Corpus, or Indian coolies to
learn that all British subjects are equal before the law.
In Hoopers Campaign of Sedan there is an account of the
interview in which General de Wympffen tried to obtain the best possible terms for the
defeated French army. It is to your interest, he said, from a political
standpoint, to grant us honourable conditions . . . . A peace based on conditions which
would flatter the amour-propre of the army would be durable, whereas rigorous
measures would awaken bad passions, and, perhaps, bring on an endless war between France
and Prussia.
Here Bismarck,
the Iron Chancellor, chipped in, and his words are recorded from his memoirs:
I said to him that we might build on the gratitude of a prince, but
certainly not on the gratitude of a people least of all on the gratitude of the
French. That in France neither institutions nor circumstances were enduring; that
governments and dynasties were constantly changing, and one need not carry out what the
other had bound itself to do . . . . As things stood it would be folly if we did not make
full use of our success.
The modern cult of realism is generally held to have started
with Bismarck. That imbecile speech was considered magnificently realistic
then, and so it would be now. Yet what Wympffen said, though he was only trying to bargain
for terms, was perfectly true. If the Germans had behaved with ordinary generosity (i.e.
by the standards of the time) it might have been impossible to whip up the revanchiste
spirit in France. What would Bismarck have said if he had been told that harsh terms now
would mean a terrible defeat forty-eight years later? There is not much doubt of the
answer: he would have said that the terms ought to have been harsher still. Such is
realism and on the same principle, when the medicine makes the patient
sick, the doctor responds by doubling the dose. |