On this date in 1944, Orwell asked a fascinating question. We received this submission and decided to run it as more of a philosophical conversation starter rather than any accounting of current affairs. – RVA staff
On this date in 1944, Orwell asked a fascinating question. We received this submission and decided to run it as more of a philosophical conversation starter rather than any accounting of current affairs. – RVA staff
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“Of all the unanswered questions of our time, perhaps the most important is: ‘What is Fascism?’”
-George Orwell in his column, As I Please, Tribune. 24MAR1944
During the Spanish civil war I found myself feeling very strongly that a true history of this war never would or could be written. Accurate figures, objective accounts of what was happening, simply did not exist. Even if Franco is overthrown, what kind of records will the future historian have to go upon? And if Franco or anyone at all resembling him remains in power, the history of the war will consist quite largely of “facts” which millions of people now living know to be lies. So for practical purposes the lie will have to become truth.
The general uncertainty as to what is really happening makes it easier to cling to lunatic beliefs. The average man is not directly interested in politics and, when he reads, he wants the current struggles of the world to be translated into a simple story about individuals. In real life one is usually a passive victim, whereas in the adventure story one can think of oneself as being at the centre of events. People worship power in the form in which they are able to understand it.
One must remember that Britain and the US 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 realize, 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? Indeed the statement that we haven’t a Fascist movement in England largely means that the young, at this moment, look for a fuehrer elsewhere. Secondly – and this is much more important – I mean the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests.
All the cults that have been fashionable in the last dozen years, Communism, Fascism, and pacifism, are in the last analysis forms of power worship. Fascism is power hunger tempered by self-deception. The abiding purpose of every Fascist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he had chosen to sink his own individuality. He sees history, especially contemporary history, as the endless rise and decline of great power units, and every event that happens seems to him a demonstration that his own side is on the up-grade and some hated rival on the down-grade.
The following are the principal characteristics of Fascist thought: Obsession – As nearly as possible, no fascist ever thinks, talks or writes about anything except the superiority of his own power unit. Instability – God, the King, the Empire, the Union Jack – all the overthrown idols can reappear under different names, and because they are not recognized for what they are they can be worshipped with a good conscience. Indifference to Reality – A known fact may be so unbearable that it is habitually pushed aside and not allowed to enter into the logical processes, or on the other hand it may enter into every calculation and yet never be admitted as a fact, even in one’s own mind.
Having picked his side, he persuades himself that it is the strongest, and is able to stick to his belief even when the facts are overwhelmingly against him. All Fascist controversy is at the debating-society level. It is always entirely inconclusive, since each contestant invariably believes himself to have won the victory. More probably they feel that their own version was what happened in the sight of God, and that one is justified in rearranging the records accordingly.
Everywhere in the world movement seems to be in the direction of centralized economies which can be made to “work” in an economic sense but which are not democratically organized and which tend to establish a case system. With this go the horrors of emotional Fascism 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 fuehrer. A tyrant is all the more admired if he happens to be a blood-stained crook as well, and “the end justifies the means” often becomes, in effect, “the means justify themselves” provided they are dirty enough. It is important to notice that the cult of power tends to be mixed up with a love of cruelty and wickedness for their own sakes. So long as the world tendency is towards Fascism and totalitarianism, scientific progress simply helps it along.
A truly objective approach is almost impossible, because in one form or another almost everyone is a Fascist. There is the fact that the intellectuals are more totalitarian in outlook than the common people. 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. The most intelligent people seem capable of holding schizophrenic beliefs, or disregarding plain facts, of evading serious questions with debating-society repartees, or swallowing baseless rumors and of looking on indifferently while history is falsified. In looking at any situation they do not say, “what are the facts? What are the probabilities?” but, “How can I make it appear to myself and others that my faction is getting the better of some rival faction?” One could point to countless other instances of people hugging quite manifest delusions because the truth would be wounding to their pride. Most people nowadays, when their predictions are falsified, just impudently claim that they have been justified, and squeeze the facts accordingly. Political or military commentators, like astrologers, can survive almost any mistake, because their more devoted followers do not look to them for an appraisal of the facts but for the stimulation of Fascist loyalties. All these mental vices spring ultimately from the Fascist habit of mind, which is itself, I suppose, the product of fear and of the ghastly emptiness of machine civilization.
But when one has admitted that Fascism has not triumphed everywhere, that there are still people whose judgements are not at the mercy of their desires, the fact does remain that the pressing problems – India, Poland, Palestine, the Spanish civil war, the Moscow trials, the American Negroes, the Russo-German Pact or what have you – cannot be, or at least never are discussed upon a reasonable level. The point is that as soon as fear, hatred, jealousy and power worship are involved, the sense of reality becomes unhinged. And, as I have pointed out already, that sense of right and wrong becomes unhinged also. There is no crime, absolutely none, that cannot be condoned when “our” side commits it. Even if one does not deny that the crime has happened, even if one knows that it is exactly the same crime as one has condemned in some other case, even if one admits in an intellectual sense that it is unjustified – still one cannot feel that it is wrong. Loyalty is involved, and so pity ceases to function.
Man is non-perfectible, merely political changes can effect nothing, progress is an illusion. The connection between this belief and political reaction is, of course, obvious. If there is nothing new under the sun, if the past in some shape or another always returns, then the future when it comes will be something familiar. It is not very difficult to see that this idea is rooted in the fear of progress. This belief obviously superstitious though it is, is widely held nowadays and, is common among Fascists and near Fascists. The pessimist has many more opportunities of saying “I told you so” than the optimist. From all sides there is a chorus of “I told you so”, and complete shamelessness about past mistakes. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored with they are unwelcome. Political thought is a sort of masturbation fantasy in which the world of facts hardly matters. This school of thought seems to be gaining ground among youngish intellectuals who have passed through the usual process of disillusionment and become disillusioned with that. The thing that is common to all these people is their refusal to believe that human society can be fundamentally improved. Other- worldliness is the best alibi a rich man can have. “Men cannot be made better by act of Parliament; therefore I may as well go on drawing my dividends.” By and large the prophets of doom have been righter than those who imagined that a real step forward would be achieved by universal education, female suffrage, the League of Nations, or what not. At any rate what will never come – since it has never come before – is that hated, dreaded thing, a world of free and equal human beings.
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. Any really big-scale massacre, if it really happened, would be quite largely the punishment of the guilty by the guilty. 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 with the time comes. 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. What is important is that revenge and “punishment” should have no part in our policy or even our day-dreams.
The left wingers who tried to make the public see that Fascism was an unspeakable horror were fighting against their own propaganda of the last 15 years. It seems to me very important to realise that we have been wrong, and say so. Where I have gone wrong is in assessing the relative importance of different trends.
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 fuehrer wished it.
If we see ourselves as the savages we are, some improvement is possible, or at least thinkable.
Words George Orwell, from Volume 3 Essays, Journalism & Letters. Remixed by a jingo with a bullet hole in him. Work should be considered as Scholarly and Artistic exploration.
