AMERICAN FUTURE

George Orwell was a rare individual for his time and place. Few if any of his contemporaries shared both his heartfelt commitment to socialism and his intense antipathy towards the British intellectual left. Throughout World War II and during the early years of the Cold War, Orwell forcefully and repeatedly castigated the Left for a variety of sins, including, among others, (1) a detachment from and disdain for ordinary people, (2) a lack of patriotic feeling that was manifest in its anti-British (and, relatedly, anti-American) sentiments, (3) a denial of the magnitude of the threat posed by Nazi Germany and subsequently by Soviet Russia, (4) an exaggeration of the impact of wartime measures on civil liberties, (5) a defeatist mentality, (6) a pacifism that placed fascism and communism on the same moral plane as democracy, (7) a failure to recognize the equivalence of totalitarianism and theocracy, and (8) an attachment to what would two decades later come to be known as Third-Worldism.

Despite a life-long, deep and abiding interest in the Second World War and the Cold War, I had only a vague awareness of the sentiments of the British intellectual left before reading Orwell’s essays, sixteen of which provide the foundation for this essay.[1] None of the numerous histories I had earlier read did more than touch upon the subject. What I find most remarkable is that the sins Orwell enumerated were committed when his country faced an existential threat and, later, an adversary whose totalitarian nature was not a secret.

The reaction of the Left, both here and in Europe, to the 9/11 attacks and our government’s response to al-Qaeda’s treachery—the Afghanistan War—surprised me.[2][3] Had I read Orwell’s essays before the fateful day, I doubt I would have been caught off-guard. The London blitz notwithstanding, the Left believed that liberal democracy was at best morally equivalent to totalitarianism (in both its Nazi and Soviet versions) and that opposing what was in fact a limited erosion of personal freedoms during wartime was of greater necessity than was defeating a fascist dictatorship having no respect for civil liberties.

The situation of post-9/11 America is obviously not nearly as dire as that of 1940s Britain, which prior to Germany’s invasion of the USSR in June 1941 and Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor six months later, was alone. If members of the British Left could harbor these beliefs at a time when their country was fighting for its life, it is less than surprising that the American Left could react as it did in circumstances that paled in comparison. A 2002 article by Michael Walzer, reviewed at the end of this essay, illustrates the Left’s enduring, immutable belief system.

Orwell’s Words

These words (from his February 1941 essay, “The Lion and the Unicorn“) are a useful point of departure for examining Orwell’s thought. They were written while German bombs were falling on London. In this and in subsequent essays and letters, Orwell described the mentality of the leftist intelligentsia and its place in English society.

It was not a favorable depiction.

The Left’s Mentality

The “really important fact” about the intelligentsia was “their severance from the common culture of the country.” The “immediately striking thing” about all left-wing weekly and monthly papers was “their generally negative, querulous attitude, their complete lack at all times of any constructive suggestion.” Another characteristic was the “emotional shallowness of people who live in a world of ideas and have little contact with physical reality . . . ”

This disengagement from the common culture emerged in the 1920s and was a reflection of the intelligentsia’s education:

In the last twenty years western civilisation has given the intellectual security without responsibility, and in England, in particular, it has educated him in skepticism while anchoring him almost immovably in the privileged class. He has been in the position of a young man living on an allowance from a father he hates. The result is a deep feeling of guilt and resentment, not combined with any genuine desire to escape.

Having disengaged itself from the common culture, the intelligentsia, during a time of war, disparaged patriotism and the worth of venerable English institutions. Its members formed “a sort of island of dissident thought”:

England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution . . . 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 . . .

English intellectuals, especially the younger ones, “are markedly hostile to their own country.” In some circles, “to express pro-British sentiments needs considerable moral courage.” The people who should be “the guardians of freedom of thought” were anything but.

The Left and Fascism

The intelligentsia’s verbal assaults on patriotism and institutions were not without consequences. During the last years of peace, the English people suffered “a real weakening of morale.” This contributed to the fascists’ judgment that the English were decadent. The “intellectual sabotage from the Left was partly responsible” for the war.

During the war,

. . . the Nazi radio got more material from the British left-wing press than from that of the Right. And it could hardly be otherwise, for it is chiefly in the left-wing press that serious criticism of British institutions is to be found. Every revelation about slums or social inequality, every attack on the leaders of the Tory party, every denunciation of British imperialism, was a gift for Goebbels. And not necessarily a worthless gift, for German propaganda about “British plutocracy” had considerable effect in neutral countries, especially in the earlier part of the war.

The ideological cover for the Left was pacifism. In response to letters he received from D.S. Savage [4] and other pacifists, Orwell took off his gloves:

Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist . . . If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help that of the other . . . pacifist propaganda can only be effective against those countries where a certain amount of freedom of speech is still permitted; in other words it is helpful to totalitarianism.

Elsewhere in his response to Savage, Orwell averred that he was interested in how pacifists who began with an “alleged horror” of violence ended with “a marked tendency to be fascinated by the success and power of Nazism.” He went on to say that some pacifists “are beginning to claim that a Nazi victory is desirable in itself.”

He closed his reply by describing the “propaganda-tricks” used by people who hide their pro-fascist views using the formula “I am just as anti-Fascist as anyone, but—”:

In order to evade the quite obvious objections that can be raised to this, the following propaganda-tricks are used:
1. The Fascising processes occurring in Britain as a result of war are systematically exaggerated.
2. The actual record of Fascism, especially in its pre-war history, is ignored or pooh-poohed as “propaganda”. Discussion of what the world would be like if the Axis dominated it is evaded.
3. Those who want to struggle against Fascism are accused of being wholehearted defenders of capitalist “democracy” . . .
4. It is tacitly pretended that the war is only between Britain and Germany. Mention of Russia and China, and their fate if Fascism is permitted to win, is avoided . . .

Several months before his exchange of letters with Savage, Orwell predicted that sometime in the next year “a pro-Hitler reaction within the left-wing intelligentsia was likely and asserted that there were already “premonitory” signs of it:

Hitler’s positive achievement appeals to the emptiness of these people . . . One knows in advance more or less what they will say. They will start by refusing to admit that British capitalism is evolving into something different, or that the defeat of Hitler can mean any more than a victory for the British and American millionaires. And from that they will proceed to argue that, after all, democracy is “just the same as” or “just as bad as” totalitarianism. There is not much freedom of speech in England; therefore there is no more than exists in Germany.

He advised the Left that, “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.” Responding to the pacifist claim that “Britain is already a Fascist country,” Orwell observed that this claim was incompatible with “the very fact that they are allowed to write and agitate . . . ” He concluded that, for the Left, “political thought is a sort of masturbation fantasy in which the world of facts hardly matters.”

Five months before the Nazis were defeated, Orwell looked back at the reductionist attitudes of the British (and American) intelligentsia a year or two earlier:

1. The war is worth winning at any price, because nothing could be worse than a Fascist victory. We must support any regime which will oppose the Nazis.
2. The war is worth winning at any price, but in practice it cannot be won while capitalism survives. We must support the war, and at the same time endeavour to turn it into a revolutionary war.
3. The war cannot be won while capitalism survives, but even if it could, such a victory would be worse than useless. It would merely lead to the establishment of Fascism in our own countries. We must overthrow our own government before lending our support to the war.
4. If we fight against Fascism, under no matter what government, we shall inevitably go Fascist ourselves.
5. It is no use fighting, because the Germans and the Japanese are bound to win anyway.

The final destination of this chain of logic was defeatism. In January 1943, Orwell—a man of the democratic left—proclaimed that “the Left are all of them defeatist” and, adding insult to injury, wrote that the “real moral” of the previous three years” was that “the Right has more guts and ability than the Left.” No one, he added “will face up to it.”

While pessimism may have been understandable during the early years of the war, the Left persisted in believing that all was lost after evidence to the contrary had started to mount: “In the summer of 1942, the turning-point of the war, most of them held it as an article of faith that Alexandria [Egypt] would fall and Stalingrad would not.” Six months after the Normandy invasion, he wrote that “right up to May of this year [1944], the more disaffected intellectuals refused to believe that a Second Front would be opened.” This was despite the fact that “in front of their faces, the endless convoys of guns and landing-craft rumbled through London on their way to the coast.”

Orwell made it perfectly clear that he had broken ranks with the intellectual left by saying that “I don’t share the average English intellectual’s hatred of his own country and am not dismayed by a British victory.”

The Left and Communism

On numerous occasions between January 1943 and January 1946, Orwell lambasted the Left for its pro-Soviet attitudes: “The average English intellectual is anti-British, and though chiefly worshipping the USSR . . . “; “the attitude of the Left towards the Russian regime has been distinctly similar to the attitude of the Tories towards Fascism”; “Russophile feeling is on the surface stronger than ever . . . all the appeasers . . . have switched their allegiance from Hitler to Stalin”; “pacifists almost never say anything anti-Russian . . . Their implied line is that it is wrong for us to defend ourselves by violence, but it is all right for the Russians”; “the people in this country who gave the most ammunition to the Nazi propagandists during the war are exactly the ones who tell us that it is ‘objectively’ pro-Fascist to criticise the USSR”.

In perhaps his best-known essay on the Left’s sympathy for Communism (“Notes on Nationalism“), written as the war in Europe was coming to a close, Orwell went even further, accusing some leftists of hating democracy and favoring totalitarianism:

. . . . . . there is a minority of intellectual pacifists whose real those [sic] unadmitted motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writings of the younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States. Moreover they do not as a rule condemn violence as such, but only violence used in defence of the western countries.

The Left’s selective outrage at the use of violence was a recurring theme for Orwell:

If one looks back over the last quarter of a century, one finds that there was hardly a single year when atrocity stories were not being reported from some part of the world; and yet in not one single case were these atrocities . . . believed in and disapproved by the English intelligentsia as a whole. Whether such deeds were reprehensible, or even whether they happened, was always decided according to political predilection.

Another example:

At present we are all but openly applying the double standard of morality. With one side of our mouths we cry out that mass deportations, concentration camps, forced labour and suppression of freedom of speech are appalling crimes, while with the other we proclaim that these things are perfectly all right if done by the USSR or its satellite states; and where necessary we make this plausible by doctoring the news and cutting out unpalatable facts.

The Left and the Third World

Among Orwell’s most interesting concepts is “transferred nationalism,” a means of escape from the guilt and resentment felt by the Left. This remarkable paragraph was written in September 1943, twenty or so years before the Left adopted Third Worldism as its cause celebre:

During the nineteen-thirties the normal transference was to Soviet Russia, but there are other alternatives, and it is noticeable that pacifism and anarchism, rather than Stalinism, are now gaining ground among the young. These creeds have the advantage that they aim at the impossible and therefore in effect demand very little . . . By merely transferring your allegiance from England to India (it used to be Russia), you can indulge to the full in all the chauvinistic sentiments which would be totally impossible if you recognized them for what they were. In the name of pacifism you can compromise with Hitler, and in the name of “spirituality” you can keep your money. It is no accident that those who wish for an inconclusive ending to the war tend to extol the East as against the West. The actual facts don’t matter very much. The fact that the eastern nations have shown themselves at least as warlike and bloodthirsty as the western ones, that so far from rejecting industrialism, the East is adopting it as swiftly as it can – this is irrelevant, since what is wanted is the mythos of the peaceful, religious and patriarchal East to set against the greedy and materialistic West. As soon as you have “rejected” industrialism, and hence Socialism, you are in that strange no man’s land where the Fascist and the pacifist join hands . . . We shall be hearing a lot about the superiority of eastern civilization in the next few years.

Orwell returned to this theme two years later:

Among the intelligentsia, colour feeling only occurs in the transposed form, that is, as a belief in the innate superiority of the coloured races. This is now increasingly common among English intellectuals . . . Almost any English intellectual would be scandalized by the claim that the white races are superior to the coloured, whereas the opposite claim would seem to him unexceptionable even if he disagreed with it.

Today’s Orwell

Most criticisms of the post-9/11 Left are polemics written by right-of-center pundits. Far more incisive and important are those penned by democratic socialists. Michael Walzer is a prominent social democrat. In the Spring 2002 issue of Dissent (the leading journal of the American democratic left), Walzer asked: “Can There Be a Decent Left?“. As implied by the title of his article, he was sharply critical of the Left’s response to 9/11 and to America’s use of military force in Afghanistan. He believed the Left’s response was indecent.

The indecent response of the Left to 9/11 was shown by its failure “to register the horror of the attack or to acknowledge the human pain it caused,” “the schadenfreude” of so many of its initial reactions, and the “barely concealed glee that the imperial state had finally gotten what it deserved.”

The Afghanistan war, said Walzer, “was never really accepted, in wide sections of the left, as either just or necessary.” The Left argued that the U.S. should have turned to the UN; al-Qaeda’s and the Taliban’s guilt had to be proven; international trials had to be organized; and the war, if it were fought, had to avoid inflicting civilian casualties. The last of these points “was intended to make fighting impossible.”

Walzer summarized the Left’s stance—its pacifist stance—this way:

. . . among last fall’s antiwar demonstrators, “Stop the bombing” wasn’t a slogan that summarized a coherent view of the bombing-or of the alternatives to it. The truth is that most leftists were not committed to having a coherent view about things like that; they were committed to opposing the war, and they were prepared to oppose it without regard to its causes or character and without any visible concern about preventing future terrorist attacks.

He concluded that the Left had “lost its bearings” and suggested that there are four reasons for it—ideology, powerlessness and alienation, the moral purism of blaming America first, and the sense of not being entitled to criticize anyone else:

(1) The Left is still captive to the Marxist theory of imperialism and the “third worldist” doctrines of the 1960s and 1970s. It follows from this mental template that “[a]ny group that attacks the imperial power must be a representative of the oppressed, and its agenda must be the agenda of the left.”

(2) The explanation for the Left’s lack of emotion in responding to the 9/11 attacks and its failure to join in the expressions of solidarity that followed is that “[m]any left intellectuals live in America like internal aliens.” After the attacks, the Left

talked and wrote as if they could not imagine themselves responsible for the lives of their fellow citizens. That was someone else’s business; the business of the left was . . . what? To oppose the authorities, whatever they did. The good result of this opposition was a spirited defense of civil liberties. But even this defense displayed a certain willful irresponsibility and ineffectiveness, because so many leftists rushed to the defense of civil liberties while refusing to acknowledge that the country faced real dangers—as if there were no need at all to balance security and freedom.

(3) By blaming America first, the Left “sets itself apart. Whatever America is doing in the world isn’t our doing.” The favorite posture of many American leftists is to stand “as a righteous minority, brave and determined, among the timid, the corrupt, and the wicked.”

(4) Living in the richest, most powerful country in the world, we are not entitled to say anything critical about people who are poorer and weaker than we are. Says Walzer: “There is no deeper impulse in left politics that this enlistment; solidarity with people in trouble [is] the most profound commitment that leftists make.” He then adds:

Even the oppressed have obligations, and surely the first among these is not to murder innocent people, not to make terrorism their politics. Leftists who cannot insist upon this point, even to people poorer and weaker than they are, have abandoned both politics and morality for something else. They are radical only in their abjection. That was Sartre’s radicalism, face-to-face with FLN terror, and it has been imitated by thousands since, excusing and apologizing for acts that any decent left would begin by condemning.

[1] Orwell’s Essays and Letters quoted in this essay:

“The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius” (February 1941)
“A Controversy” (May-September 1942)
Letter from England to Partisan Review (January 1943)
London Letter to Partisan Review (May 1943)
Review of “Beggar My Neighbour” by Lionel Fielden (September 1943)
“Who Are the War Criminals?” (October 1943)
London Letter to Partisan Review (April 1944)
“The English People” (May 1944)
London Letter to Partisan Review (December 1944)
“Notes on Nationalism” (May 1945)
Unpublished Letter to the Editor of Tribune (June 1945)
“Catastrophic Gradualism” (November 1945)
“Through a Glass, Rosily” (November 1945)
“The Prevention of Literature” (January 1946)
Orwell’s Preface to the Ukrainian Edition of “Animal Farm” (March 1947)
“In Defence of Comrade Zilliacus” (November 1947)

[2] Examples of the Left’s reaction to 9/11 in The Nation:

Katha Pollitt (October 8, 2001)

My daughter . . . thinks we should fly an American flag out our window. Definitely not, I say: The flag stands for jingoism and vengeance and war.

Chalmers Johnson (October 15, 2001)

The suicidal assassins . . . did not “attack America” . . . they attacked American foreign policy . . . Osama bin Laden . . . is no more (or less) “evil” than his fellow creations of our CIA: [Panama’s] Manuel Noreiga . . . or Iraq’s Saddam Hussein . . .


Alexander Cockburn (November 12, 2001)

What is this war about? On Bush’s side it’s about the defense of the American Empire; on the other, an attempt to challenge that in the name of theocratic fundamentalist Islam. On that issue the left is against both sides.


Robert Scheer (Online, November 13, 2001)

What kind of conscience prevented the United States from being the only nation in history to use nuclear weapons, killing at least 115,000 civilians in an assault that makes the World Trade Center attack pale in comparison?

Harvey Cox (December 24, 2001)

Someday, sooner or later, the movements against which the US coalition is fighting will fall. Maybe then it will become clear not only that we are not the Great Satan of the terrorists’ rhetoric but that they are not the incarnation of evil pictured in ours.

[3] Examples of the Left’s reaction to 9/11 in Britain’s New Statesman:

Editorial (September 17, 2001)

. . . ask yourself how often in the past (particularly in Vietnam and more recently in Iraq) you have seen people running in terror from American firepower . . . Americans, unlike Iraqis and many others in poor countries, at least have the privileges of democracy and freedom that allow them to vote and speak in favour of a different order. If the United States often seems a greedy and overweening power, that is partly because the people have willed it.

John Pilger (September 17, 2001)

Far from being the terrorists of the world, the Islamic peoples have been its victims – that is, the victims of American fundamentalism, whose power, in all its forms, military, strategic and economic, is the greatest source of terrorism on earth.

Andrew Stephen (September 24, 2001)

Americans have it drilled into them by their schools and churches since infancy that theirs is the land of the free and home of the brave. And doesn’t that make America both uniquely different and superior to all other countries? . . . to Americans, any terrorists attacking their country must be evil crackpots consumed by envy and jealousy of US lifestyles . . . The innate goodness of America is such that any outbreak of anti-American violence must just be a weird aberration.

Pankaj Mishra (September 24, 2001)

. . . this is what now strikes hard at all of us who have been half in love with the country, and who, half turning away from, even while deploring, the always visible corruptions of empire, had secretly poured our shy, bumbling affection on its mass illusions: of an unselfconscious vitality that now reveals itself as ignorance, quickly combusted into a xenophobic fury, and on a dreamy innocence that was not of this world, could not live long, and, it seems increasingly, had no right to exist.

Editorial (October 15, 2001)

The real objection to the assault on Afghanistan is that it is a mug’s game, an overly blunt instrument that needs to be fought largely with brains and cunning. As so often before, it puts the Americans on the wrong side of the moral argument, firing missiles and dropping explosives from a safe distance, risking civilian lives . . . rather than their own professional soldiers on the ground.

[4] D.S. Savage’s letter:

Fascism is not a force confined to any one nation. [After listing the “characteristic markings of fascism” he says:] These are all tendencies of present-day Britain. The pacifist opposes every one of these [characteristics], and might therefore be called the only genuine opponent of Fascism.

Don’t be misled by names. Fascism is quite capable of calling itself democracy or even Socialism . . . War demands totalitarian organisation of society. Germany organised herself on that basis prior to embarking on war. Britain now finds herself compelled to take the same measures . . . Germans call it National Socialism. We call it democracy. The result is the same.

. . . we regard the war as a disaster to humanity. Who is to say that a British victory will be less disastrous than a German one?

Not only will we not fight, nor lend a hand with the war, but the “intellectuals” among us would scorn to mentally compromise themselves with the Government. Orwell dismisses the French intellectuals licking up Hitler’s crumbs, but what’s the difference between them and our intellectuals who are licking up Churchill’s? . . . surely the “defense of democracy” is best served by defending one’s own concrete liberties, not by equating democracy with Britain, and allowing all democracy to be destroyed in order that we may fight better – “for Britain” . . .

I am not greatly taken in by Britain’s “democracy” . . . Certainly I would never fight and kill for such a phantasm. I do not greatly admire the part “my country” has played in world events. I consider that spiritually Britain has lost all meaning . . . who can pretend that the idea of Britain now counts for anything in the world? . . . The pacifists’ “championing” of Hitler referred to by Orwell is simply a recognition by us that Hitler and Germany contain a real historical dynamic, whereas we do not . . . Hitler requires, not condemnation, but understanding . . . there would be a profound justice, I feel, however terrible, in a German victory.