"For [Hitler's]
sake a great nation has been willing to overwork itself for six years and then
to fight for two years more, whereas for the commonsense, essentially
hedonistic world-view which Mr Wells puts forward, hardly a human creature is
willing to shed a pint of blood.
"Before you can even talk of world
reconstruction, or even of peace, you have got to eliminate Hitler, which means
bringing into being a dynamic not necessarily the same as that of the Nazis,
but probably quite as unacceptable to "enlightened" and hedonistic people.
"What
has kept England on its feet during the past year? In part, no doubt, some
vague idea about a better future, but chiefly the atavistic emotion of
patriotism, the ingrained feeling of the English-speaking peoples that they are
superior to foreigners. For the last twenty years the main object of English
left-wing intellectuals has been to break this feeling down, and if they had
succeeded, we might be watching the SS men patrolling the London streets at
this moment.
"Similarly, why are the Russians fighting like tigers against the
German invasion? In part, perhaps, for some half-remembered ideal of Utopian
Socialism, but chiefly in defence of Holy Russia (the "sacred soil of the
Fatherland", etc etc), which Stalin has revived in an only slightly altered
form.
"The energy that actually shapes the world springs from
emotions–racial pride, leader-worship, religious belief, love of
war–which liberal intellectuals mechanically write off as anachronisms,
and which they have usually destroyed so completely in themselves as to have
lost all power of action.
George Orwell, 1941, 'Wells, Hitler and the World State'.
No comments:
Post a Comment