Haunted by an idea
The English Revolution is the third and final part of George Orwell's The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius. Reading it, I have learned a new word - fainéant - and once again been given pause by an idea: "Instead of taking the mechanically anti-British attitude which is usual on the Left, it is better to consider what the world would really be like if the English-speaking culture perished."
During the past twenty years the negative, fainéant outlook which has been fashionable among English left-wingers, the sniggering of the intellectuals at patriotism and physical courage, the persistent effort to chip away English morale and spread a hedonistic, what-do-I-get-out-of-it attitude to life, has done nothing but harm. It would have been harmful even if we had been living in the squashy League of Nations universe that these people imagined. In an age of fuehrers and bombing planes it was a disaster. However little we may like it, toughness is the price of survival. A nation trained to think hedonistically cannot survive amid peoples who work like slaves and breed like rabbits, and whose chief national industry is war.
And these words, which might usefully be memorized by Canadian schoolchildren, were democracy a value we yet cherished.
‘Between democracy and totalitarianism,’ says Mussolini, ‘there can be no compromise.’ The two creeds cannot even, for any length of time, live side by side. So long as democracy exists, even in its very imperfect English form, totalitarianism is in deadly danger. The whole English-speaking world is haunted by the idea of human equality, and though it would be simply a lie to say that either we or the Americans have ever acted up to our professions, still, the idea is there, and it is capable of one day becoming a reality. From the English-speaking culture, if it does not perish, a society of free and equal human beings will ultimately arise. But it is precisely the idea of human equality – the ‘Jewish’ or ‘Judaeo-Christian’ idea of equality – that Hitler came into the world to destroy. He has, heaven knows, said so often enough. The thought of a world in which black men would be as good as white men and Jews treated as human beings brings him the same horror and despair as the thought of endless slavery brings to us.
Our enemies continue to tell us that between democracy and totalitarianism there can be no compromise. They say so both in word an in ever more grotesque deed. Precious few of us are listening. "Freedom go to hell," they say, but it is teenage protesters and journalists with "Jewish sounding" last names who are bullied by the courts and their kangaroo equivalents.
And the following, and the prospect of the forces of reaction taking the Presidency in November. It is to be democracy or an apologia for totalitarianism.
It is important to keep in mind how irreconcilable these two viewpoints are. Some time within the next year a pro-Hitler reaction within the left-wing intelligentsia is likely enough. There are premonitory signs of it already. Hitler's positive achievement appeals to the emptiness of these people, and, in the case of those with pacifist leanings, to their masochism.
Exactly. But we cannot expect the left to forget a lesson they never troubled to learn; now the rest of us are doomed to repeat it.
Posted by Ghost of a flea at May 23, 2008 06:33 AM
