---
title: "The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius"
author: "George Orwell"
languages: [en]
shelf: "Literature"
url: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-lion-and-unicorn-fp20180531/
cite: "George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius. Scriptura (scriptura.si), https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-lion-and-unicorn-fp20180531/"
---

# The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius

*George Orwell*

> =* A Distributed Proofreaders Canada eBook *=

> This ebook is made available at no cost and with very few restrictions.
These restrictions apply only if (1) you make a change in the ebook
(other than alteration for different display devices), or (2) you are
making commercial use of the ebook. If either of these conditions
applies, please contact a FP administrator before proceeding.

> This work is in the Canadian public domain, but may be under copyright
in some countries. If you live outside Canada, check your country's
copyright laws. IF THE BOOK IS UNDER COPYRIGHT IN YOUR COUNTRY, DO NOT
DOWNLOAD OR REDISTRIBUTE THIS FILE.

> _Title:_ The Lion and the Unicorn
_Date of first publication:_ 1941
_Author:_ George Orwell (1903-1950)
_Date first posted:_ May 29, 2018
_Date last updated:_ May 29, 2018
Faded Page eBook #20180531

> This ebook was produced by: Delphine Lettau, Al Haines, Howard Ross &
the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at
http://www.pgdpcanada.net

> GEORGE ORWELL

> _The Lion_
_and the Unicorn_

> Socialism and the English Genius

> Penguin Books

> Penguin Books Ltd, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England
First published in the Searchlight Books series by Seeker & Warburg 1941

> Published in Volume 2 of _The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters
of George Orwell_ by Seeker & Warburg 1968 and in Penguin Books 1970

> Published separately with a new Introduction in Penguin Books 1982
Reprinted 1984, 1986
Copyright George Orwell, 1941
All rights reserved
Made and printed in Great Britain by
Richard Clay (The Chaucer Press) Ltd,
Bungay, Suffolk
Set in Monophoto Ehrhardt

> Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the
condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's
prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which
it is published and without a similar condition including this condition
being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

> CONTENTS

> THE LION AND THE UNICORN      31

> PART ONE: England Your England      33

> PART TWO: Shopkeepers at War      71

> PART THREE: The English Revolution      93

> _The Lion
                            and the Unicorn_

> [The end of _The Lion and the Unicorn_ by George Orwell]

## Contents

1. [PART ONE: England Your England · I](https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-lion-and-unicorn-fp20180531/1.md)
2. [II](https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-lion-and-unicorn-fp20180531/2.md)
3. [III](https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-lion-and-unicorn-fp20180531/3.md)
4. [IV](https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-lion-and-unicorn-fp20180531/4.md)
5. [V](https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-lion-and-unicorn-fp20180531/5.md)
6. [VI](https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-lion-and-unicorn-fp20180531/6.md)
7. [PART TWO: Shopkeepers at War · I](https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-lion-and-unicorn-fp20180531/7.md)
8. [II](https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-lion-and-unicorn-fp20180531/8.md)
9. [III](https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-lion-and-unicorn-fp20180531/9.md)
10. [PART THREE: The English Revolution · I](https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-lion-and-unicorn-fp20180531/10.md)
11. [II](https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-lion-and-unicorn-fp20180531/11.md)
12. [III](https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-lion-and-unicorn-fp20180531/12.md)

## 1. PART ONE: England Your England · I

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-lion-and-unicorn-fp20180531/1/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-lion-and-unicorn-fp20180531/1/#p-N

[¶0] As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to
kill me.

[¶1] They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against
them. They are 'only doing their duty', as the saying goes. Most of
them, I have no doubt, are kind-hearted law-abiding men who would never
dream of committing murder in private life. On the other hand, if one of
them succeeds in blowing me to pieces with a well-placed bomb, he will
never sleep any the worse for it. He is serving his country, which has
the power to absolve him from evil.

[¶2] One cannot see the modern world as it is unless one recognizes the
overwhelming strength of patriotism, national loyalty. In certain
circumstances it can break down, at certain levels of civilization it
does not exist, but as a _positive_ force there is nothing to set beside
it. Christianity and international Socialism are as weak as straw in
comparison with it. Hitler and Mussolini rose to power in their own
countries very largely because they could grasp this fact and their
opponents could not.

[¶3] Also, one must admit that the divisions between nation and nation are
founded on real differences of outlook. Till recently it was thought
proper to pretend that all human beings are very much alike, but in fact
anyone able to use his eyes knows that the average of human behaviour
differs enormously from country to country. Things that could happen in
one country could not happen in another. Hitler's June purge, for
instance, could not have happened in England. And, as western peoples
go, the English are very highly differentiated. There is a sort of
back-handed admission of this in the dislike which nearly all foreigners
feel for our national way of life. Few Europeans can endure living in
England, and even Americans often feel more at home in Europe.

[¶4] When you come back to England from any foreign country, you have
immediately the sensation of breathing a different air. Even in the
first few minutes dozens of small things conspire to give you this
feeling. The beer is bitterer, the coins are heavier, the grass is
greener, the advertisements are more blatant. The crowds in the big
towns, with their mild knobby faces, their bad teeth and gentle manners,
are different from a European crowd. Then the vastness of England
swallows you up, and you lose for a while your feeling that the whole
nation has a single identifiable character. Are there really such things
as nations? Are we not forty-six million individuals, all different? And
the diversity of it, the chaos! The clatter of clogs in the Lancashire
mill towns, the to-and-fro of the lorries on the Great North Road, the
queues outside the Labour Exchanges, the rattle of pintables in the Soho
pubs, the old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of the
autumn morning—all these are not only fragments, but _characteristic_
fragments, of the English scene. How can one make a pattern out of this
muddle?

[¶5] But talk to foreigners, read foreign books or newspapers, and you are
brought back to the same thought. Yes, there _is_ something distinctive
and recognizable in English civilization. It is a culture as individual
as that of Spain. It is somehow bound up with solid breakfasts and
gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red
pillar-boxes. It has a flavour of its own. Moreover it is continuous, it
stretches into the future and the past, there is something in it that
persists, as in a living creature. What can the England of 1940 have in
common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you in common with
the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece?
Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person.

[¶6] And above all, it is _your_ civilization, it is _you_. However much you
hate it or laugh at it, you will never be happy away from it for any
length of time. The suet puddings and the red pillar-boxes have entered
into your soul. Good or evil, it is yours, you belong to it, and this
side the grave you will never get away from the marks that it has given
you.

[¶7] Meanwhile England, together with the rest of the world, is changing. And
like everything else it can change only in certain directions, which up
to a point can be foreseen. That is not to say that the future is fixed,
merely that certain alternatives are possible and others not. A seed may
grow or not grow, but at any rate a turnip seed never grows into a
parsnip. It is therefore of the deepest importance to try and determine
what England _is_, before guessing what part England _can play_ in the
huge events that are happening.

## 2. II

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-lion-and-unicorn-fp20180531/2/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-lion-and-unicorn-fp20180531/2/#p-N

[¶0] National characteristics are not easy to pin down, and when pinned down
they often turn out to be trivialities or seem to have no connexion with
one another. Spaniards are cruel to animals, Italians can do nothing
without making a deafening noise, the Chinese are addicted to gambling.
Obviously such things don't matter in themselves. Nevertheless, nothing
is causeless, and even the fact that Englishmen have bad teeth can tell
something about the realities of English life.

[¶1] Here are a couple of generalizations about England that would be
accepted by almost all observers. One is that the English are not gifted
artistically. They are not as musical as the Germans or Italians,
painting and sculpture have never flourished in England as they have in
France. Another is that, as Europeans go, the English are not
intellectual. They have a horror of abstract thought, they feel no need
for any philosophy or systematic 'world-view'. Nor is this because they
are 'practical', as they are so fond of claiming for themselves. One has
only to look at their methods of town planning and water supply, their
obstinate clinging to everything that is out of date and a nuisance, a
spelling system that defies analysis, and a system of weights and
measures that is intelligible only to the compilers of arithmetic books,
to see how little they care about mere efficiency. But they have a
certain power of acting without taking thought. Their world-famed
hypocrisy—their double-faced attitude towards the Empire, for
instance—is bound up with this. Also, in moments of supreme crisis the
whole nation can suddenly draw together and act upon a species of
instinct, really a code of conduct which is understood by almost
everyone, though never formulated. The phrase that Hitler coined for the
Germans, 'a sleep-walking people', would have been better applied to the
English. Not that there is anything to be proud of in being called a
sleep-walker.

[¶2] But here it is worth noting a minor English trait which is extremely
well marked though not often commented on, and that is a love of
flowers. This is one of the first things that one notices when one
reaches England from abroad, especially if one is coming from southern
Europe. Does it not contradict the English indifference to the arts? Not
really, because it is found in people who have no aesthetic feelings
whatever. What it does link up with, however, is another English
characteristic which is so much a part of us that we barely notice it,
and that is the addiction to hobbies and spare-time occupations, the
_privateness_ of English life. We are a nation of flower-lovers, but
also a nation of stamp-collectors, pigeon-fanciers, amateur carpenters,
coupon-snippers, darts-players, crossword-puzzle fans. All the culture
that is most truly native centres round things which even when they are
communal are not official—the pub, the football match, the back garden,
the fireside and the 'nice cup of tea'. The liberty of the individual is
still believed in, almost as in the nineteenth century.

[¶3] But this has nothing to do with economic liberty, the right to exploit
others for profit. It is the liberty to have a home of your own, to do
what you like in your spare time, to choose your own amusements instead
of having them chosen for you from above. The most hateful of all names
in an English ear is Nosey Parker. It is obvious, of course, that even
this purely private liberty is a lost cause. Like all other modern
people, the English are in process of being numbered, labelled,
conscripted, 'co-ordinated'. But the pull of their impulses is in the
other direction, and the kind of regimentation that can be imposed on
them will be modified in consequence. No party rallies, no Youth
Movements, no coloured shirts, no Jew-baiting or 'spontaneous'
demonstrations. No Gestapo either, in all probability.

[¶4] But in all societies the common people must live to some extent
_against_ the existing order. The genuinely popular culture of England
is something that goes on beneath the surface, unofficially and more or
less frowned on by the authorities. One thing one notices if one looks
directly at the common people, especially in the big towns, is that they
are not puritanical. They are inveterate gamblers, drink as much beer as
their wages will permit, are devoted to bawdy jokes, and use probably
the foulest language in the world. They have to satisfy these tastes in
the face of astonishing, hypocritical laws (licensing laws, lottery
acts, etc. etc.) which are designed to interfere with everybody but in
practice allow everything to happen. Also, the common people are without
definite religious belief, and have been so for centuries. The Anglican
Church never had a real hold on them, it was simply a preserve of the
landed gentry, and the Nonconformist sects only influenced minorities.
And yet they have retained a deep tinge of Christian feeling, while
almost forgetting the name of Christ. The power-worship which is the new
religion of Europe, and which has infected the English intelligentsia,
has never touched the common people. They have never caught up with
power politics. The 'realism' which is preached in Japanese and Italian
newspapers would horrify them. One can learn a good deal about the
spirit of England from the comic coloured postcards that you see in the
windows of cheap stationers' shops. These things are a sort of diary
upon which the English people have unconsciously recorded themselves.
Their old-fashioned outlook, their graded snobberies, their mixture of
bawdiness and hypocrisy, their extreme gentleness, their deeply moral
attitude to life, are all mirrored there.

[¶5] The gentleness of the English civilization is perhaps its most marked
characteristic. You notice it the instant you set foot on English soil.
It is a land where the bus conductors are good-tempered and the
policemen carry no revolvers. In no country inhabited by white men is it
easier to shove people off the pavement. And with this goes something
that is always written off by European observers as 'decadence' or
hypocrisy, the English hatred of war and militarism. It is rooted deep
in history, and it is strong in the lower-middle class as well as the
working class. Successive wars have shaken it but not destroyed it. Well
within living memory it was common for 'the redcoats' to be booed at in
the streets and for the landlords of respectable public houses to refuse
to allow soldiers on the premises. In peace time, even when there are
two million unemployed, it is difficult to fill the ranks of the tiny
standing army, which is officered by the county gentry and a specialized
stratum of the middle class, and manned by farm labourers and slum
proletarians. The mass of the people are without military knowledge or
tradition, and their attitude towards war is invariably defensive. No
politician could rise to power by promising them conquests or military
'glory', no Hymn of Hate has ever made any appeal to them. In the last
war the songs which the soldiers made up and sang of their own accord
were not vengeful but humorous and mock-defeatist.[1] The only enemy
they ever named was the sergeant-major.

[¶6] In England all the boasting and flag-wagging, the 'Rule Britannia'
stuff, is done by small minorities. The patriotism of the common people
is not vocal or even conscious. They do not retain among their
historical memories the name of a single military victory. English
literature, like other literatures, is full of battle-poems, but it is
worth noticing that the ones that have won for themselves a kind of
popularity are always a tale of disasters and retreats. There is no
popular poem about Trafalgar or Waterloo, for instance. Sir John Moore's
army at Corunna, fighting a desperate rearguard action before escaping
overseas (just like Dunkirk!) has more appeal than a brilliant victory.
The most stirring battle-poem in English is about a brigade of cavalry
which charged in the wrong direction. And of the last war, the four
names which have really engraved themselves on the popular memory are
Mons, Ypres, Gallipoli and Passchendaele, every time a disaster. The
names of the great battles that finally broke the German armies are
simply unknown to the general public.

[¶7] The reason why the English anti-militarism disgusts foreign observers is
that it ignores the existence of the British Empire. It looks like sheer
hypocrisy. After all, the English have absorbed a quarter of the earth
and held on to it by means of a huge navy. How dare they then turn round
and say that war is wicked?

[¶8] It is quite true that the English are hypocritical about their Empire.
In the working class this hypocrisy takes the form of not knowing that
the Empire exists. But their dislike of standing armies is a perfectly
sound instinct. A navy employs comparatively few people, and it is an
external weapon which cannot affect home politics directly. Military
dictatorships exist everywhere, but there is no such thing as a naval
dictatorship. What English people of nearly all classes loathe from the
bottom of their hearts is the swaggering officer type, the jingle of
spurs and the crash of boots. Decades before Hitler was ever heard of,
the word 'Prussian' had much the same significance in England as 'Nazi'
has today. So deep does this feeling go that for a hundred years past
the officers of the British army, in peace time, have always worn
civilian clothes when off duty.

[¶9] One rapid but fairly sure guide to the social atmosphere of a country is
the parade-step of its army. A military parade is really a kind of
ritual dance, something like a ballet, expressing a certain philosophy
of life. The goose-step, for instance, is one of the most horrible
sights in the world, far more terrifying than a dive-bomber. It is
simply an affirmation of naked power; contained in it, quite consciously
and intentionally, is the vision of a boot crashing down on a face. Its
ugliness is part of its essence, for what it is saying is 'Yes, I _am_
ugly, and you daren't laugh at me', like the bully who makes faces at
his victim. Why is the goose-step not used in England? There are, heaven
knows, plenty of army officers who would be only too glad to introduce
some such thing. It is not used because the people in the street would
laugh. Beyond a certain point, military display is only possible in
countries where the common people dare not laugh at the army. The
Italians adopted the goose-step at about the time when Italy passed
definitely under German control, and, as one would expect, they do it
less well than the Germans. The Vichy government, if it survives, is
bound to introduce a stiffer parade-ground discipline into what is left
of the French army. In the British army the drill is rigid and
complicated, full of memories of the eighteenth century, but without
definite swagger; the march is merely a formalized walk. It belongs to a
society which is ruled by the sword, no doubt, but a sword which must
never be taken out of the scabbard.

[¶10] And yet the gentleness of English civilization is mixed up with
barbarities and anachronisms. Our criminal law is as out-of-date as the
muskets in the Tower. Over against the Nazi Storm Trooper you have got
to set that typically English figure, the hanging judge, some gouty old
bully with his mind rooted in the nineteenth century, handing out savage
sentences. In England people are still hanged by the neck and flogged
with the cat o' nine tails. Both of these punishments are obscene as
well as cruel, but there has never been any genuinely popular outcry
against them. People accept them (and Dartmoor, and Borstal) almost as
they accept the weather. They are part of 'the law', which is assumed to
be unalterable.

[¶11] Here one comes upon an all-important English trait: the respect for
constitutionalism and legality, the belief in 'the law' as something
above the State and above the individual, something which is cruel and
stupid, of course, but at any rate _incorruptible_.

[¶12] It is not that anyone imagines the law to be just. Everyone knows that
there is one law for the rich and another for the poor. But no one
accepts the implications of this, everyone takes it for granted that the
law, such as it is, will be respected, and feels a sense of outrage when
it is not. Remarks like 'They can't run me in; I haven't done anything
wrong', or 'They can't do that; it's against the law', are part of the
atmosphere of England. The professed enemies of society have this
feeling as strongly as anyone else. One sees it in prison-books like
Wilfred Macartney's _Walls Have Mouths_ or Jim Phelan's _Jail Journey_,
in the solemn idiocies that take place at the trials of conscientious
objectors, in letters to the papers from eminent Marxist professors,
pointing out that this or that is a 'miscarriage of British justice'.
Everyone believes in his heart that the law can be, ought to be, and, on
the whole, will be impartially administered. The totalitarian idea that
there is no such thing as law, there is only power, has never taken
root. Even the intelligentsia have only accepted it in theory.

[¶13] An illusion can become a half-truth, a mask can alter the expression of
a face. The familiar arguments to the effect that democracy is 'just the
same as' or 'just as bad as' totalitarianism never take account of this
fact. All such arguments boil down to saying that half a loaf is the
same as no bread. In England such concepts as justice, liberty and
objective truth are still believed in. They may be illusions, but they
are very powerful illusions. The belief in them influences conduct,
national life is different because of them. In proof of which, look
about you. Where are the rubber truncheons, where is the castor oil? The
sword is still in the scabbard, and while it stays there corruption
cannot go beyond a certain point. The English electoral system, for
instance, is an all but open fraud. In a dozen obvious ways it is
gerrymandered in the interest of the moneyed class. But until some deep
change has occurred in the public mind, it cannot become _completely_
corrupt. You do not arrive at the polling booth to find men with
revolvers telling you which way to vote, nor are the votes miscounted,
nor is there any direct bribery. Even hypocrisy is a powerful safeguard.
The hanging judge, that evil old man in scarlet robe and horse-hair wig,
whom nothing short of dynamite will ever teach what century he is living
in, but who will at any rate interpret the law according to the books
and will in no circumstances take a money bribe, is one of the symbolic
figures of England. He is a symbol of the strange mixture of reality and
illusion, democracy and privilege, humbug and decency, the subtle
network of compromises, by which the nation keeps itself in its familiar
shape.

[¶14] -----

[¶15] [1] For example:

[¶16] 'I don't want to join the bloody Army,
                 I don't want to go unto the war;
                 I want no more to roam,
                 I'd rather stay at home,
                 Living on the earnings of a whore.'

[¶17] But it was not in that spirit that they fought. [Author's footnote.]

## 3. III

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-lion-and-unicorn-fp20180531/3/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-lion-and-unicorn-fp20180531/3/#p-N

[¶0] I have spoken all the while of 'the nation', 'England', 'Britain', as
though forty-five million souls could somehow be treated as a unit. But
is not England notoriously two nations, the rich and the poor? Dare one
pretend that there is anything in common between people with £100,000 a
year and people with £1 a week? And even Welsh and Scottish readers are
likely to have been offended because I have used the word 'England'
oftener than 'Britain', as though the whole population dwelt in London
and the Home Counties and neither north nor west possessed a culture of
its own.

[¶1] One gets a better view of this question if one considers the minor point
first. It is quite true that the so-called races of Britain feel
themselves to be very different from one another. A Scotsman, for
instance, does not thank you if you call him an Englishman. You can see
the hesitation we feel on this point by the fact that we call our
islands by no less than six different names, England, Britain, Great
Britain, the British Isles, the United Kingdom and, in very exalted
moments, Albion. Even the differences between north and south England
loom large in our own eyes. But somehow these differences fade away the
moment that any two Britons are confronted by a European. It is very
rare to meet a foreigner, other than an American, who can distinguish
between English and Scots or even English and Irish. To a Frenchman, the
Breton and the Auvergnat seem very different beings, and the accent of
Marseilles is a stock joke in Paris. Yet we speak of 'France' and 'the
French', recognizing France as an entity, a single civilization, which
in fact it is. So also with ourselves. Looked at from the outside, even
the cockney and the Yorkshireman have a strong family resemblance.

[¶2] And even the distinction between rich and poor dwindles somewhat when
one regards the nation from the outside. There is no question about the
inequality of wealth in England. It is grosser than in any European
country, and you have only to look down the nearest street to see it.
Economically, England is certainly two nations, if not three or four.
But at the same time the vast majority of the people _feel_ themselves
to be a single nation and are conscious of resembling one another more
than they resemble foreigners. Patriotism is usually stronger than
class-hatred, and always stronger than any kind of internationalism.
Except for a brief moment in 1920 (the 'Hands off Russia' movement) the
British working class have never thought or acted internationally. For
two and a half years they watched their comrades in Spain slowly
strangled, and never aided them by even a single strike.[2] But when
their own country (the country of Lord Nuffield and Mr Montagu Norman)
was in danger, their attitude was very different. At the moment when it
seemed likely that England might be invaded, Anthony Eden appealed over
the radio for Local Defence Volunteers. He got a quarter of a million
men in the first twenty-four hours, and another million in the
subsequent month. One has only to compare these figures with, for
instance, the number of conscientious objectors to see how vast is the
strength of traditional loyalties compared with new ones.

[¶3] In England patriotism takes different forms in different classes, but it
runs like a connecting thread through nearly all of them. Only the
Europeanized intelligentsia are really immune to it. As a positive
emotion it is stronger in the middle class than in the upper class—the
cheap public schools, for instance, are more given to patriotic
demonstrations than the expensive ones—but the number of definitely
treacherous rich men, the Laval-Quisling type is probably very small. In
the working class patriotism is profound, but it is unconscious. The
working man's heart does not leap when he sees a Union Jack. But the
famous 'insularity' and 'xenophobia' of the English is far stronger in
the working class than in the bourgeoisie. In all countries the poor are
more national than the rich, but the English working class are
outstanding in their abhorrence of foreign habits. Even when they are
obliged to live abroad for years they refuse either to accustom
themselves to foreign food or to learn foreign languages. Nearly every
Englishman of working-class origin considers it effeminate to pronounce
a foreign word correctly. During the war of 1914-18 the English working
class were in contact with foreigners to an extent that is rarely
possible. The sole result was that they brought back a hatred of all
Europeans, except the Germans, whose courage they admired. In four years
on French soil they did not even acquire a liking for wine. The
insularity of the English, their refusal to take foreigners seriously,
is a folly that has to be paid for very heavily from time to time. But
it plays its part in the English mystique, and the intellectuals who
have tried to break it down have generally done more harm than good. At
bottom it is the same quality in the English character that repels the
tourist and keeps out the invader.

[¶4] Here one comes back to two English characteristics that I pointed out,
seemingly at random, at the beginning of the last chapter. One is the
lack of artistic ability. This is perhaps another way of saying that the
English are outside the European culture. For there is one art in which
they have shown plenty of talent, namely literature. But this is also
the only art that cannot cross frontiers. Literature, especially poetry,
and lyric poetry most of all, is a kind of family joke, with little or
no value outside its own language-group. Except for Shakespeare, the
best English poets are barely known in Europe, even as names. The only
poets who are widely read are Byron, who is admired for the wrong
reasons, and Oscar Wilde, who is pitied as a victim of English
hypocrisy. And linked up with this, though not very obviously, is the
lack of philosophical faculty, the absence in nearly all Englishmen of
any need for an ordered system of thought or even for the use of logic.

[¶5] Up to a point, the sense of national unity is a substitute for a
'world-view'. Just because patriotism is all but universal and not even
the rich are uninfluenced by it, there can be moments when the whole
nation suddenly swings together and does the same thing, like a herd of
cattle facing a wolf. There was such a moment, unmistakably, at the time
of the disaster in France. After eight months of vaguely wondering what
the war was about, the people suddenly knew what they had got to do:
first to get the army away from Dunkirk, and secondly to prevent
invasion. It was like the awakening of a giant. Quick! Danger! The
Philistines be upon thee, Samson! And then the swift unanimous
action—and then, alas, the prompt relapse into sleep. In a divided
nation that would have been exactly the moment for a big peace movement
to arise. But does this mean that the instinct of the English will
always tell them to do the right thing? Not at all, merely that it will
tell them to do the same thing. In the 1931 General Election, for
instance, we all did the wrong thing in perfect unison. We were as
single-minded as the Gadarene swine. But I honestly doubt whether we can
say that we were shoved down the slope against our will.

[¶6] It follows that British democracy is less of a fraud than it sometimes
appears. A foreign observer sees only the huge inequality of wealth, the
unfair electoral system, the governing-class control over the press, the
radio and education, and concludes that democracy is simply a polite
name for dictatorship. But this ignores the considerable agreement that
does unfortunately exist between the leaders and the led. However much
one may hate to admit it, it is almost certain that between 1931 and
1940 the National Government represented the will of the mass of the
people. It tolerated slums, unemployment and a cowardly foreign policy.
Yes, but so did public opinion. It was a stagnant period, and its
natural leaders were mediocrities.

[¶7] In spite of the campaigns of a few thousand left-wingers, it is fairly
certain that the bulk of the English people were behind Chamberlain's
foreign policy. More, it is fairly certain that the same struggle was
going on in Chamberlain's mind as in the minds of ordinary people. His
opponents professed to see in him a dark and wily schemer, plotting to
sell England to Hitler, but it is far likelier that he was merely a
stupid old man doing his best according to his very dim lights. It is
difficult otherwise to explain the contradictions of his policy, his
failure to grasp any of the courses that were open to him. Like the mass
of the people, he did not want to pay the price either of peace or of
war. And public opinion was behind him all the while, in policies that
were completely incompatible with one another. It was behind him when he
went to Munich, when he tried to come to an understanding with Russia,
when he gave the guarantee to Poland, when he honoured it, and when he
prosecuted the war half-heartedly. Only when the results of his policy
became apparent did it turn against him; which is to say that it turned
against its own lethargy of the past seven years. Thereupon the people
picked a leader nearer to their mood, Churchill, who was at any rate
able to grasp that wars are not won without fighting. Later, perhaps,
they will pick another leader who can grasp that only Socialist nations
can fight effectively.

[¶8] Do I mean by all this that England is a genuine democracy? No, not even
a reader of the _Daily Telegraph_ could quite swallow that.

[¶9] England is the most class-ridden country under the sun. It is a land of
snobbery and privilege, ruled largely by the old and silly. But in any
calculation about it one has got to take into account its emotional
unity, the tendency of nearly all its inhabitants to feel alike and act
together in moments of supreme crisis. It is the only great country in
Europe that is not obliged to drive hundreds of thousands of its
nationals into exile or the concentration camp. At this moment, after a
year of war, newspapers and pamphlets abusing the Government, praising
the enemy and clamouring for surrender are being sold on the streets,
almost without interference. And this is less from a respect for freedom
of speech than from a simple perception that these things don't matter.
It is safe to let a paper like _Peace News_ be sold, because it is
certain that ninety-five per cent of the population will never want to
read it. The nation is bound together by an invisible chain. At any
normal time the ruling class will rob, mismanage, sabotage, lead us into
the muck; but let popular opinion really make itself heard, let them get
a tug from below that they cannot avoid feeling, and it is difficult for
them not to respond. The left-wing writers who denounce the whole of the
ruling class as 'pro-Fascist' are grossly over-simplifying. Even among
the inner clique of politicians who brought us to our present pass, it
is doubtful whether there were any _conscious_ traitors. The corruption
that happens in England is seldom of that kind. Nearly always it is more
in the nature of self-deception, of the right hand not knowing what the
left hand doeth. And being unconscious, it is limited. One sees this at
its most obvious in the English press. Is the English press honest or
dishonest? At normal times it is deeply dishonest. All the papers that
matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an
indirect censorship over news. Yet I do not suppose there is one paper
in England that can be straightforwardly bribed with hard cash. In the
France of the Third Republic all but a very few of the newspapers could
notoriously be bought over the counter like so many pounds of cheese.
Public life in England has never been _openly_ scandalous. It has not
reached the pitch of disintegration at which humbug can be dropped.

[¶10] England is not the jewelled isle of Shakespeare's much-quoted message,
nor is it the inferno depicted by Dr Goebbels. More than either it
resembles a family, a rather stuffy Victorian family, with not many
black sheep in it but with all its cupboards bursting with skeletons. It
has rich relations who have to be kow-towed to and poor relations who
are horribly sat upon, and there is a deep conspiracy of silence about
the source of the family income. It is a family in which the young are
generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of
irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts. Still, it is a family. It has
its private language and its common memories, and at the approach of an
enemy it closes its ranks. A family with the wrong members in
control—that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England
in a phrase.

[¶11] -----

[¶12] [2] It is true that they aided them to a certain extent with money.
Still the sums raised for the various aid-Spain funds would not equal
five per cent of the turnover of the football pools during the same
period. [Author's footnote.]

## 4. IV

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-lion-and-unicorn-fp20180531/4/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-lion-and-unicorn-fp20180531/4/#p-N

[¶0] Probably the battle of Waterloo _was_ won on the playing-fields of Eton,
but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there. One
of the dominant facts in English life during the past three quarters of
a century has been the decay of ability in the ruling class.

[¶1] In the years between 1920 and 1940 it was happening with the speed of a
chemical reaction. Yet at the moment of writing it is still possible to
speak of a ruling class. Like the knife which has two new blades and
three new handles, the upper fringe of English society is still almost
what it was in the mid nineteenth century. After 1832 the old
land-owning aristocracy steadily lost power, but instead of disappearing
or becoming a fossil they simply intermarried with the merchants,
manufacturers and financiers who had replaced them, and soon turned them
into accurate copies of themselves. The wealthy shipowner or
cotton-miller set up for himself an alibi as a country gentleman, while
his sons learned the right mannerisms at public schools which had been
designed for just that purpose. England was ruled by an aristocracy
constantly recruited from parvenus. And considering what energy the
self-made men possessed, and considering that they were buying their way
into a class which at any rate had a tradition of public service, one
might have expected that able rulers could be produced in some such way.

[¶2] And yet somehow the ruling class decayed, lost its ability, its daring,
finally even its ruthlessness, until a time came when stuffed shirts
like Eden or Halifax could stand out as men of exceptional talent. As
for Baldwin, one could not even dignify him with the name of stuffed
shirt. He was simply a hole in the air. The mishandling of England's
domestic problems during the nineteen-twenties had been bad enough, but
British foreign policy between 1931 and 1939 is one of the wonders of
the world. Why? What had happened? What was it that at every decisive
moment made every British statesman do the wrong thing with so unerring
an instinct?

[¶3] The underlying fact was that the whole position of the moneyed class had
long ceased to be justifiable. There they sat, at the centre of a vast
empire and a world-wide financial network, drawing interest and profits
and spending them—on what? It was fair to say that life within the
British Empire was in many ways better than life outside it. Still, the
Empire was under-developed, India slept in the Middle Ages, the
Dominions lay empty, with foreigners jealously barred out, and even
England was full of slums and unemployment. Only half a million people,
the people in the country houses, definitely benefited from the existing
system. Moreover, the tendency of small businesses to merge together
into large ones robbed more and more of the moneyed class of their
function and turned them into mere _owners_, their work being done for
them by salaried managers and technicians. For long past there had been
in England an entirely functionless class, living on money that was
invested they hardly knew where, the 'idle rich', the people whose
photographs you can look at in the _Tatler_ and the _Bystander_, always
supposing that you want to. The existence of these people was by any
standard unjustifiable. They were simply parasites, less useful to
society than his fleas are to a dog.

[¶4] By 1920 there were many people who were aware of all this. By 1930
millions were aware of it. But the British ruling class obviously could
not admit to themselves that their usefulness was at an end. Had they
done that they would have had to abdicate. For it was not possible for
them to turn themselves into mere bandits, like the American
millionaires, consciously clinging to unjust privileges and beating down
opposition by bribery and tear-gas bombs. After all, they belonged to a
class with a certain tradition, they had been to public schools where
the duty of dying for your country, if necessary, is laid down as the
first and greatest of the Commandments. They had to _feel_ themselves
true patriots, even while they plundered their countrymen. Clearly there
was only one escape for them—into stupidity. They could keep society in
its existing shape only by being _unable_ to grasp that any improvement
was possible. Difficult though this was, they achieved it, largely by
fixing their eyes on the past and refusing to notice the changes that
were going on round them.

[¶5] There is much in England that this explains. It explains the decay of
country life, due to the keeping-up of a sham feudalism which drives the
more spirited workers off the land. It explains the immobility of the
public schools, which have barely altered since the eighties of the last
century. It explains the military incompetence which has again and again
startled the world. Since the fifties every war in which England has
engaged has started off with a series of disasters, after which the
situation has been saved by people comparatively low in the social
scale. The higher commanders, drawn from the aristocracy, could never
prepare for modern war, because in order to do so they would have had to
admit to themselves that the world was changing. They have always clung
to obsolete methods and weapons, because they inevitably saw each war as
a repetition of the last. Before the Boer War they prepared for the Zulu
War, before the 1914 for the Boer War, and before the present war for
1914. Even at this moment hundreds of thousands of men in England are
being trained with the bayonet, a weapon entirely useless except for
opening tins. It is worth noticing that the navy and, latterly, the air
force, have always been more efficient than the regular army. But the
navy is only partially, and the air force hardly at all, within the
ruling-class orbit.

[¶6] It must be admitted that so long as things were peaceful the methods of
the British ruling class served them well enough. Their own people
manifestly tolerated them. However unjustly England might be organized,
it was at any rate not torn by class warfare or haunted by secret
police. The Empire was peaceful as no area of comparable size has ever
been. Throughout its vast extent, nearly a quarter of the earth, there
were fewer armed men than would be found necessary by a minor Balkan
state. As people to live under, and looking at them merely from a
liberal, _negative_ standpoint, the British ruling class had their
points. They were preferable to the truly modern men, the Nazis and
Fascists. But it had long been obvious that they would be helpless
against any serious attack from the outside.

[¶7] They could not struggle against Nazism or Fascism, because they could
not understand them. Neither could they have struggled against
Communism, if Communism had been a serious force in western Europe. To
understand Fascism they would have had to study the theory of Socialism,
which would have forced them to realize that the economic system by
which they lived was unjust, inefficient and out-of-date. But it was
exactly this fact that they had trained themselves never to face. They
dealt with Fascism as the cavalry generals of 1914 dealt with the
machine-guns—by ignoring it. After years of aggression and massacres,
they had grasped only one fact, that Hitler and Mussolini were hostile
to Communism. Therefore, it was argued, they _must_ be friendly to the
British dividend-drawer. Hence the truly frightening spectacle of
Conservative M.P.s wildly cheering the news that British ships, bringing
food to the Spanish Republican government, had been bombed by Italian
aeroplanes. Even when they had begun to grasp that Fascism was
dangerous, its essentially revolutionary nature, the huge military
effort it was capable of making, the sort of tactics it would use, were
quite beyond their comprehension. At the time of the Spanish Civil War,
anyone with as much political knowledge as can be acquired from a
sixpenny pamphlet on Socialism knew that, if Franco won, the result
would be strategically disastrous for England, and yet generals and
admirals who had given their lives to the study of war were unable to
grasp this fact. This vein of political ignorance runs right through
English official life, through Cabinet ministers, ambassadors, consuls,
judges, magistrates, policemen. The policeman who arrests the 'red' does
not understand the theories the 'red' is preaching; if he did his own
position as bodyguard of the moneyed class might seem less pleasant to
him. There is reason to think that even military espionage is hopelessly
hampered by ignorance of the new economic doctrines and the
ramifications of the underground parties.

[¶8] The British ruling class were not altogether wrong in thinking that
Fascism was on their side. It is a fact that any rich man, unless he is
a Jew, has less to fear from Fascism than from either Communism or
democratic Socialism. One ought never to forget this, for nearly the
whole of German and Italian propaganda is designed to cover it up. The
natural instinct of men like Simon, Hoare, Chamberlain etc. was to come
to an agreement with Hitler. But—and here the peculiar feature of
English life that I have spoken of, the deep sense of national
solidarity, comes in—they could only do so by breaking up the Empire
and selling their own people into semi-slavery. A truly corrupt class
would have done this without hesitation, as in France. But things had
not gone that distance in England. Politicians who would make cringing
speeches about 'the duty of loyalty to our conquerors' are hardly to be
found in English public life. Tossed to and fro between their incomes
and their principles, it was impossible that men like Chamberlain should
do anything but make the worst of both worlds.

[¶9] One thing that has always shown that the English ruling class are
_morally_ fairly sound, is that in time of war they are ready enough to
get themselves killed. Several dukes, earls and what nots were killed in
the recent campaign in Flanders. That could not happen if these people
were the cynical scoundrels that they are sometimes declared to be. It
is important not to misunderstand their motives, or one cannot predict
their actions. What is to be expected of them is not treachery, or
physical cowardice, but stupidity, unconscious sabotage, an infallible
instinct for doing the wrong thing. They are not wicked, or not
altogether wicked; they are merely unteachable. Only when their money
and power are gone will the younger among them begin to grasp what
century they are living in.

## 5. V

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-lion-and-unicorn-fp20180531/5/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-lion-and-unicorn-fp20180531/5/#p-N

[¶0] The stagnation of the Empire in the between-war years affected everyone
in England, but it had an especially direct effect upon two important
sub-sections of the middle class. One was the military and imperialist
middle class, generally nicknamed the Blimps, and the other the
left-wing intelligentsia. These two seemingly hostile types, symbolic
opposites—the half-pay colonel with his bull neck and diminutive brain,
like a dinosaur, the highbrow with his domed forehead and stalk-like
neck—are mentally linked together and constantly interact upon one
another; in any case they are born to a considerable extent into the
same families.

[¶1] Thirty years ago the Blimp class was already losing its vitality. The
middle-class families celebrated by Kipling, the prolific lowbrow
families whose sons officered the army and navy and swarmed over all the
waste places of the earth from the Yukon to the Irrawaddy, were
dwindling before 1914. The thing that had killed them was the telegraph.
In a narrowing world, more and more governed from Whitehall, there was
every year less room for individual initiative. Men like Clive, Nelson,
Nicholson, Gordon would find no place for themselves in the modern
British Empire. By 1920 nearly every inch of the colonial empire was in
the grip of Whitehall. Well-meaning, over-civilized men, in dark suits
and black felt hats, with neatly rolled umbrellas crooked over the left
forearm, were imposing their constipated view of life on Malaya and
Nigeria, Mombasa and Mandalay. The one-time empire builders were reduced
to the status of clerks, buried deeper and deeper under mounds of paper
and red tape. In the early twenties one could see, all over the Empire,
the older officials, who had known more spacious days, writhing
impotently under the changes that were happening. From that time onwards
it has been next door to impossible to induce young men of spirit to
take any part in imperial administration. And what was true of the
official world was true also of the commercial. The great monopoly
companies swallowed up hosts of petty traders. Instead of going out to
trade adventurously in the Indies one went to an office stool in Bombay
or Singapore. And life in Bombay or Singapore was actually duller and
safer than life in London. Imperialist sentiment remained strong in the
middle class, chiefly owing to family tradition, but the job of
administering the Empire had ceased to appeal. Few able men went east of
Suez if there was any way of avoiding it.

[¶2] But the general weakening of imperialism, and to some extent of the
whole British morale, that took place during the nineteen-thirties, was
partly the work of the left-wing intelligentsia, itself a kind of growth
that had sprouted from the stagnation of the Empire.

[¶3] It should be noted that there is now no intelligentsia that is not in
some sense 'left'. Perhaps the last right-wing intellectual was T. E.
Lawrence. Since about 1930 everyone describable as an 'intellectual' has
lived in a state of chronic discontent with the existing order.
Necessarily so, because society as it was constituted had no room for
him. In an Empire that was simply stagnant, neither being developed nor
falling to pieces, and in an England ruled by people whose chief asset
was their stupidity, to be 'clever' was to be suspect. If you had the
kind of brain that could understand the poems of T. S. Eliot or the
theories of Karl Marx, the higher-ups would see to it that you were kept
out of any important job. The intellectuals could find a function for
themselves only in the literary reviews and the left-wing political
parties.

[¶4] The mentality of the English left-wing intelligentsia can be studied in
half a dozen weekly and monthly papers. The immediately striking thing
about all these papers is their generally negative, querulous attitude,
their complete lack at all times of any constructive suggestion. There
is little in them except the irresponsible carping of people who have
never been and never expect to be in a position of power. Another marked
characteristic is the emotional shallowness of people who live in a
world of ideas and have little contact with physical reality. Many
intellectuals of the Left were flabbily pacifist up to 1935, shrieked
for war against Germany in the years 1935-9, and then promptly cooled
off when the war started. It is broadly though not precisely true that
the people who were most 'anti-Fascist' during the Spanish Civil War are
most defeatist now. And underlying this is the really important fact
about so many of the English intelligentsia—their severance from the
common culture of the country.

[¶5] In intention, at any rate, the English intelligentsia are Europeanized.
They take their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow. In
the general patriotism of the country they form 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, from horse racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact,
but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would
feel more ashamed of standing to attention during 'God save the King'
than of stealing from a poor box. All through the critical years many
left-wingers were chipping away at English morale, trying to spread an
outlook that was sometimes squashily pacifist, sometimes violently
pro-Russian, but always anti-British. It is questionable how much effect
this had, but it certainly had some. If the English people suffered for
several years a real weakening of morale, so that the Fascist nations
judged that they were 'decadent' and that it was safe to plunge into
war, the intellectual sabotage from the Left was partly responsible.
Both the _New Statesman_ and the _News Chronicle_ cried out against the
Munich settlement, but even they had done something to make it possible.
Ten years of systematic Blimp-baiting affected even the Blimps
themselves and made it harder than it had been before to get intelligent
young men to enter the armed forces. Given the stagnation of the Empire
the military middle class must have decayed in any case, but the spread
of a shallow Leftism hastened the process.

[¶6] It is clear that the special position of the English intellectuals
during the past ten years, as purely _negative_ creatures, mere
anti-Blimps, was a by-product of ruling-class stupidity. Society could
not use them, and they had not got it in them to see that devotion to
one's country implies 'for better, for worse'. Both Blimps and highbrows
took for granted, as though it were a law of nature, the divorce between
patriotism and intelligence. If you were a patriot you read _Blackwood's
Magazine_ and publicly thanked God that you were 'not brainy'. If you
were an intellectual you sniggered at the Union Jack and regarded
physical courage as barbarous. It is obvious that this preposterous
convention cannot continue. The Bloomsbury highbrow, with his mechanical
snigger, is as out-of-date as the cavalry colonel. A modern nation
cannot afford either of them. Patriotism and intelligence will have to
come together again. It is the fact that we are fighting a war, and a
very peculiar kind of war, that may make this possible.

## 6. VI

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-lion-and-unicorn-fp20180531/6/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-lion-and-unicorn-fp20180531/6/#p-N

[¶0] One of the most important developments in England during the past twenty
years has been the upward and downward extension of the middle class. It
has happened on such a scale as to make the old classification of
society into capitalists, proletarians and petit bourgeois (small
property-owners) almost obsolete.

[¶1] England is a country in which property and financial power are
concentrated in very few hands. Few people in modern England _own_
anything at all, except clothes, furniture and possibly a house. The
peasantry have long since disappeared, the independent shopkeeper is
being destroyed, the small businessman is diminishing in numbers. But at
the same time modern industry is so complicated that it cannot get along
without great numbers of managers, salesmen, engineers, chemists and
technicians of all kinds, drawing fairly large salaries. And these in
turn call into being a professional class of doctors, lawyers, teachers,
artists, etc. etc. The tendency of advanced capitalism has therefore
been to enlarge the middle class and not to wipe it out as it once
seemed likely to do.

[¶2] But much more important than this is the spread of middle-class ideas
and habits among the working class. The British working class are now
better off in almost all ways than they were thirty years ago. This is
partly due to the efforts of the trade unions, but partly to the mere
advance of physical science. It is not always realized that within
rather narrow limits the standard of life of a country can rise without
a corresponding rise in real wages. Up to a point, civilization can lift
itself up by its boot-tags. However unjustly society is organized,
certain technical advances are bound to benefit the whole community,
because certain kinds of goods are necessarily held in common. A
millionaire cannot, for example, light the streets for himself while
darkening them for other people. Nearly all citizens of civilized
countries now enjoy the use of good roads, germ-free water, police
protection, free libraries and probably free education of a kind. Public
education in England has been meanly starved of money, but it has
nevertheless improved, largely owing to the devoted efforts of the
teachers, and the habit of reading has become enormously more
widespread. To an increasing extent the rich and the poor read the same
books, and they also see the same films and listen to the same radio
programmes. And the differences in their way of life have been
diminished by the mass-production of cheap clothes and improvements in
housing. So far as outward appearance goes, the clothes of rich and
poor, especially in the case of women, differ far less than they did
thirty or even fifteen years ago. As to housing, England still has slums
which are a blot on civilization, but much building has been done during
the past ten years, largely by the local authorities. The modern council
house, with its bathroom and electric light, is smaller than the
stockbroker's villa, but it is recognizably the same kind of house,
which the farm labourer's cottage is not. A person who has grown up in a
council housing estate is likely to be—indeed, visibly _is_—more
middle class in outlook than a person who has grown up in a slum.

[¶3] The effect of all this is a general softening of manners. It is enhanced
by the fact that modern industrial methods tend always to demand less
muscular effort and therefore to leave people with more energy when
their day's work is done. Many workers in the light industries are less
truly manual labourers than is a doctor or a grocer. In tastes, habits,
manners and outlook the working class and the middle class are drawing
together. The unjust distinctions remain, but the real differences
diminish. The old-style 'proletarian'—collarless, unshaven and with
muscles warped by heavy labour—still exists, but he is constantly
decreasing in numbers; he only predominates in the heavy-industry areas
of the north of England.

[¶4] After 1918 there began to appear something that had never existed in
England before: people of indeterminate social class. In 1910 every
human being in these islands could be 'placed' in an instant by his
clothes, manners and accent. That is no longer the case. Above all, it
is not the case in the new townships that have developed as a result of
cheap motor cars and the southward shift of industry. The place to look
for the germs of the future England is in light-industry areas and along
the arterial roads. In Slough, Dagenham, Barnet, Letchworth,
Hayes—everywhere, indeed, on the outskirts of great towns—the old
pattern is gradually changing into something new. In those vast new
wildernesses of glass and brick the sharp distinctions of the older kind
of town, with its slums and mansions, or of the country, with its
manor-houses and squalid cottages, no longer exist. There are wide
gradations of income, but it is the same kind of life that is being
lived at different levels, in labour-saving flats or council houses,
along the concrete roads and in the naked democracy of the
swimming-pools. It is a rather restless, cultureless life, centring
round tinned food, _Picture Post_, the radio and the internal combustion
engine. It is a civilization in which children grow up with an intimate
knowledge of magnetoes and in complete ignorance of the Bible. To that
civilization belong the people who are most at home in and most
definitely _of_ the modern world, the technicians and the higher-paid
skilled workers, the airmen and their mechanics, the radio experts, film
producers, popular journalists and industrial chemists. They are the
indeterminate stratum at which the older class distinctions are
beginning to break down.

[¶5] This war, unless we are defeated, will wipe out most of the existing
class privileges. There are every day fewer people who wish them to
continue. Nor need we fear that as the pattern changes life in England
will lose its peculiar flavour. The new red cities of Greater London are
crude enough, but these things are only the rash that accompanies a
change. In whatever shape England emerges from the war it will be deeply
tinged with the characteristics that I have spoken of earlier. The
intellectuals who hope to see it Russianized or Germanized will be
disappointed. The gentleness, the hypocrisy, the thoughtlessness, the
reverence for law and the hatred of uniforms will remain, along with the
suet puddings and the misty skies. It needs some very great disaster,
such as prolonged subjugation by a foreign enemy, to destroy a national
culture. The Stock Exchange will be pulled down, the horse plough will
give way to the tractor, the country houses will be turned into
children's holiday camps, the Eton and Harrow match will be forgotten,
but England will still be England, an everlasting animal stretching into
the future and the past, and, like all living things, having the power
to change out of recognition and yet remain the same.

## 7. PART TWO: Shopkeepers at War · I

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-lion-and-unicorn-fp20180531/7/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-lion-and-unicorn-fp20180531/7/#p-N

[¶0] I began this book to the tune of German bombs, and I begin this second
chapter in the added racket of the barrage. The yellow gun-flashes are
lighting the sky, the splinters are rattling on the housetops, and
London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down. Anyone able
to read a map knows that we are in deadly danger. I do not mean that we
are beaten or need be beaten. Almost certainly the outcome depends on
our own will. But at this moment we are in the soup, full fathom five,
and we have been brought there by follies which we are still committing
and which will drown us altogether if we do not mend our ways quickly.

[¶1] What this war has demonstrated is that private capitalism—that is, an
economic system in which land, factories, mines and transport are owned
privately and operated solely for profit—_does not work_. It cannot
deliver the goods. This fact had been known to millions of people for
years past, but nothing ever came of it, because there was no real urge
from below to alter the system, and those at the top had trained
themselves to be impenetrably stupid on just this point. Argument and
propaganda got one nowhere. The lords of property simply sat on their
bottoms and proclaimed that all was for the best. Hitler's conquest of
Europe, however, was a _physical_ debunking of capitalism. War, for all
its evil, is at any rate an unanswerable test of strength, like a
try-your-grip machine. Great strength returns the penny, and there is no
way of faking the result.

[¶2] When the nautical screw was first invented, there was a controversy that
lasted for years as to whether screw-steamers or paddle-steamers were
better. The paddle-steamers, like all obsolete things, had their
champions, who supported them by ingenious arguments. Finally, however,
a distinguished admiral tied a screw-steamer and a paddle-steamer of
equal horsepower stern to stern and set their engines running. That
settled the question once and for all. And it was something similar that
happened on the fields of Norway and of Flanders. Once and for all it
was proved that a planned economy is stronger than a planless one. But
it is necessary here to give some kind of definition to those
much-abused words, Socialism and Fascism.

[¶3] Socialism is usually defined as 'common ownership of the means of
production'. Crudely: the State, representing the whole nation, owns
everything, and everyone is a State employee. This does _not_ mean that
people are stripped of private possessions such as clothes and
furniture, but it _does_ mean that all productive goods, such as land,
mines, ships and machinery, are the property of the State. The State is
the sole large-scale producer. It is not certain that Socialism is in
all ways superior to capitalism, but it is certain that, unlike
capitalism, it can solve the problems of production and consumption. At
normal times a capitalist economy can never consume all that it
produces, so that there is always a wasted surplus (wheat burned in
furnaces, herrings dumped back into the sea etc. etc.) and always
unemployment. In time of war, on the other hand, it has difficulty in
producing all that it needs, because nothing is produced unless someone
sees his way to making a profit out of it.

[¶4] In a Socialist economy these problems do not exist. The State simply
calculates what goods will be needed and does its best to produce them.
Production is only limited by the amount of labour and raw materials.
Money, for internal purposes, ceases to be a mysterious all-powerful
thing and becomes a sort of coupon or ration-ticket, issued in
sufficient quantities to buy up such consumption goods as may be
available at the moment.

[¶5] However, it has become clear in the last few years that 'common
ownership of the means of production' is not in itself a sufficient
definition of Socialism. One must also add the following: approximate
equality of incomes (it need be no more than approximate), political
democracy, and abolition of all hereditary privilege, especially in
education. These are simply the necessary safeguards against the
reappearance of a class-system. Centralized ownership has very little
meaning unless the mass of the people are living roughly upon an equal
level, and have some kind of control over the government. 'The State'
may come to mean no more than a self-elected political party, and
oligarchy and privilege can return, based on power rather than on money.

[¶6] But what then is Fascism?

[¶7] Fascism, at any rate the German version, is a form of capitalism that
borrows from Socialism just such features as will make it efficient for
war purposes. Internally, Germany has a good deal in common with a
Socialist state. Ownership has never been abolished, there are still
capitalists and workers, and—this is the important point, and the real
reason why rich men all over the world tend to sympathize with
Fascism—generally speaking the same people are capitalists and the same
people workers as before the Nazi revolution. But at the same time the
State, which is simply the Nazi Party, is in control of everything. It
controls investment, raw materials, rates of interest, working hours,
wages. The factory owner still owns his factory, but he is for practical
purposes reduced to the status of a manager. Everyone is in effect a
State employee, though the salaries vary very greatly. The mere
_efficiency_ of such a system, the elimination of waste and obstruction,
is obvious. In seven years it has built up the most powerful war machine
the world has ever seen.

[¶8] But the idea underlying Fascism is irreconcilably different from that
which underlies Socialism. Socialism aims, ultimately, at a world-state
of free and equal human beings. It takes the equality of human rights
for granted. Nazism assumes just the opposite. The driving force behind
the Nazi movement is the belief in human _inequality_, the superiority
of Germans to all other races, the right of Germany to rule the world.
Outside the German Reich it does not recognize any obligations. Eminent
Nazi professors have 'proved' over and over again that only nordic man
is fully human, have even mooted the idea that non-nordic peoples (such
as ourselves) can interbreed with gorillas! Therefore, while a species
of war-Socialism exists within the German state, its attitude towards
conquered nations is frankly that of an exploiter. The function of the
Czechs, Poles, French, etc. is simply to produce such goods as Germany
may need, and get in return just as little as will keep them from open
rebellion. If we are conquered, our job will probably be to manufacture
weapons for Hitler's forthcoming wars with Russia and America. The Nazis
aim, in effect, at setting up a kind of caste system, with four main
castes corresponding rather closely to those of the Hindu religion. At
the top comes the Nazi party, second come the mass of the German people,
third come the conquered European populations. Fourth and last are to
come the coloured peoples, the 'semi-apes' as Hitler calls them, who are
to be reduced quite openly to slavery.

[¶9] However horrible this system may seem to us, _it works_. It works
because it is a planned system geared to a definite purpose,
world-conquest, and not allowing any private interest, either of
capitalist or worker, to stand in its way. British capitalism does not
work, because it is a competitive system in which private profit is and
must be the main objective. It is a system in which all the forces are
pulling in opposite directions and the interests of the individual are
as often as not totally opposed to those of the State.

[¶10] All through the critical years British capitalism, with its immense
industrial plant and its unrivalled supply of skilled labour, was
unequal to the strain of preparing for war. To prepare for war on the
modern scale you have got to divert the greater part of your national
income to armaments, which means cutting down on consumption goods. A
bombing plane, for instance, is equivalent in price to fifty small motor
cars, or eight thousand pairs of silk stockings, or a million loaves of
bread. Clearly you can't have _many_ bombing planes without lowering the
national standard of life. It is guns or butter, as Marshal Goering
remarked. But in Chamberlain's England the transition could not be made.
The rich would not face the necessary taxation, and while the rich are
still visibly rich it is not possible to tax the poor very heavily
either. Moreover, so long as _profit_ was the main object the
manufacturer had no incentive to change over from consumption goods to
armaments. A businessman's first duty is to his shareholders. Perhaps
England needs tanks, but perhaps it pays better to manufacture motor
cars. To prevent war material from reaching the enemy is common sense,
but to sell in the highest market is a business duty. Right at the end
of August 1939 the British dealers were tumbling over one another in
their eagerness to sell Germany tin, rubber, copper and shellac—and
this in the clear, certain knowledge that war was going to break out in
a week or two. It was about as sensible as selling somebody a razor to
cut your throat with. But it was 'good business'.

[¶11] And now look at the results. After 1934 it was known that Germany was
rearming. After 1936 everyone with eyes in his head knew that war was
coming. After Munich it was merely a question of how soon the war would
begin. In September 1939 war broke out. _Eight months later_ it was
discovered that, so far as equipment went, the British army was barely
beyond the standard of 1918. We saw our soldiers fighting their way
desperately to the coast, with one aeroplane against three, with rifles
against tanks, with bayonets against tommy-guns. There were not even
enough revolvers to supply all the officers. After a year of war the
regular army was still short of 300,000 tin hats. There had even,
previously, been a shortage of uniforms—this in one of the greatest
woollen-goods producing countries in the world!

[¶12] What had happened was that the whole moneyed class, unwilling to face a
change in their way of life, had shut their eyes to the nature of
Fascism and modern war. And false optimism was fed to the general public
by the gutter press, which lives on its advertisements and is therefore
interested in keeping trade conditions normal. Year after year the
Beaverbrook press assured us in huge headlines that THERE WILL BE NO
WAR, and as late as the beginning of 1939 Lord Rothermere was describing
Hitler as 'a great gentleman'. And while England in the moment of
disaster proved to be short of every war material except ships, it is
not recorded that there was any shortage of motor cars, fur coats,
gramophones, lipstick, chocolates or silk stockings. And dare anyone
pretend that the same tug-of-war between private profit and public
necessity is not still continuing? England fights for her life, but
business must fight for profits. You can hardly open a newspaper without
seeing the two contradictory processes happening side by side. On the
very same page you will find the Government urging you to save and the
seller of some useless luxury urging you to spend. Lend to Defence, but
Guinness is Good for You. Buy a Spitfire, but also buy Haig and Haig,
Pond's Face Cream and Black Magic Chocolates.

[¶13] But one thing gives hope—the visible swing in public opinion. If we can
survive this war, the defeat in Flanders will turn out to have been one
of the great turning-points in English history. In that spectacular
disaster the working class, the middle class and even a section of the
business community could see the utter rottenness of private capitalism.
Before that the case against capitalism had never been _proved_. Russia,
the only definitely Socialist country, was backward and far away. All
criticism broke itself against the rat-trap faces of bankers and the
brassy laughter of stockbrokers. Socialism? Ha! ha! ha! Where's the
money to come from? Ha! ha! ha! The lords of property were firm in their
seats, and they knew it. But after the French collapse there came
something that could not be laughed away, something that neither
cheque-books nor policemen were any use against—the bombing.
Zweee—BOOM! What's that? Oh, only a bomb on the Stock Exchange.
Zweee—BOOM! Another acre of somebody's valuable slum-property gone
west. Hitler will at any rate go down in history as the man who made the
City of London laugh on the wrong side of its face. For the first time
in their lives the comfortable were uncomfortable, the professional
optimists had to admit that there was something wrong. It was a great
step forward. From that time onwards the ghastly job of trying to
convince artificially stupefied people that a planned economy might be
better than a free-for-all in which the worst man wins—that job will
never be quite so ghastly again.

## 8. II

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-lion-and-unicorn-fp20180531/8/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-lion-and-unicorn-fp20180531/8/#p-N

[¶0] The difference between Socialism and capitalism is not primarily a
difference of technique. One cannot simply change from one system to the
other as one might install a new piece of machinery in a factory, and
then carry on as before, with the same people in positions of control.
Obviously there is also needed a complete shift of power. New blood, new
men, new ideas—in the true sense of the word, a revolution.

[¶1] I have spoken earlier of the soundness and homogeneity of England, the
patriotism that runs like a connecting thread through almost all
classes. After Dunkirk anyone who had eyes in his head could see this.
But it is absurd to pretend that the promise of that moment has been
fulfilled. Almost certainly the mass of the people are now ready for the
vast changes that are necessary; but those changes have not even begun
to happen.

[¶2] England is a family with the wrong members in control. Almost entirely
we are governed by the rich, and by people who step into positions of
command by right of birth. Few if any of these people are consciously
treacherous, some of them are not even fools, but as a class they are
quite incapable of leading us to victory. They could not do it, even if
their material interests did not constantly trip them up. As I pointed
out earlier, they have been artificially stupefied. Quite apart from
anything else, the rule of money sees to it that we shall be governed
largely by the old—that is, by people utterly unable to grasp what age
they are living in or what enemy they are fighting. Nothing was more
desolating at the beginning of this war than the way in which the whole
of the older generation conspired to pretend that it was the war of
1914-18 over again. All the old duds were back on the job, twenty years
older, with the skull plainer in their faces. Ian Hay was cheering up
the troops, Belloc was writing articles on strategy, Maurois doing
broadcasts, Bairnsfather drawing cartoons. It was like a tea-party of
ghosts. And that state of affairs has barely altered. The shock of
disaster brought a few able men like Bevin to the front, but in general
we are still commanded by people who managed to live through the years
1931-9 without even discovering that Hitler was dangerous. A generation
of the unteachable is hanging upon us like a necklace of corpses.

[¶3] As soon as one considers any problem of this war—and it does not matter
whether it is the widest aspect of strategy or the tiniest detail of
home organization—one sees that the necessary moves cannot be made
while the social structure of England remains what it is. Inevitably,
because of their position and upbringing, the ruling class are fighting
for their own privileges, which cannot possibly be reconciled with the
public interest. It is a mistake to imagine that war aims, strategy,
propaganda and industrial organization exist in watertight compartments.
All are interconnected. Every strategic plan, every tactical method,
even every weapon will bear the stamp of the social system that produced
it. The British ruling class are fighting against Hitler, whom they have
always regarded and whom some of them still regard as their protector
against Bolshevism. That does not mean that they will deliberately sell
out; but it does mean that at every decisive moment they are likely to
falter, pull their punches, do the wrong thing.

[¶4] Until the Churchill Government called some sort of halt to the process,
they have done the wrong thing with an unerring instinct ever since
1931. They helped Franco to overthrow the Spanish Government, although
anyone not an imbecile could have told them that a Fascist Spain would
be hostile to England. They fed Italy with war materials all through the
winter of 1939-40, although it was obvious to the whole world that the
Italians were going to attack us in the spring. For the sake of a few
hundred thousand dividend-drawers they are turning India from an ally
into an enemy. Moreover, so long as the moneyed classes remain in
control, we cannot develop any but a _defensive_ strategy. Every victory
means a change in the _status quo_. How can we drive the Italians out of
Abyssinia without rousing echoes among the coloured peoples of our own
Empire? How can we even smash Hitler without the risk of bringing the
German Socialists and Communists into power? The left-wingers who wail
that 'this is a capitalist war' and that 'British Imperialism' is
fighting for loot have got their heads screwed on backwards. The last
thing the British moneyed class wish for is to acquire fresh territory.
It would simply be an embarrassment. Their war aim (both unattainable
and unmentionable) is simply to hang on to what they have got.

[¶5] Internally, England is still the rich man's Paradise. All talk of
'equality of sacrifice' is nonsense. At the same time as factory-workers
are asked to put up with longer hours, advertisements for 'Butler. One
in family, eight in staff' are appearing in the press. The bombed-out
populations of the East End go hungry and homeless while wealthier
victims simply step into their cars and flee to comfortable country
houses. The Home Guard swells to a million men in a few weeks, and is
deliberately organized from above in such a way that only people with
private incomes can hold positions of command. Even the rationing system
is so arranged that it hits the poor all the time, while people with
over £2,000 a year are practically unaffected by it. Everywhere
privilege is squandering good will. In such circumstances even
propaganda becomes almost impossible. As attempts to stir up patriotic
feeling, the red posters issued by the Chamberlain Government at the
beginning of the war broke all depth-records. Yet they could not have
been much other than they were, for how could Chamberlain and his
followers take the risk of rousing strong popular feeling _against
Fascism_? Anyone who was genuinely hostile to Fascism must also be
opposed to Chamberlain himself and to all the others who had helped
Hitler into power. So also with external propaganda. In all Lord
Halifax's speeches there is not one concrete proposal for which a single
inhabitant of Europe would risk the top joint of his little finger. For
what war aim can Halifax, or anyone like him, conceivably have, except
to put the clock back to 1933?

[¶6] It is only by revolution that the native genius of the English people
can be set free. Revolution does not mean red flags and street fighting,
it means a fundamental shift of power. Whether it happens with or
without bloodshed is largely an accident of time and place. Nor does it
mean the dictatorship of a single class. The people in England who grasp
what changes are needed and are capable of carrying them through are not
confined to any one class, though it is true that very few people with
over £2,000 a year are among them. What is wanted is a conscious open
revolt by ordinary people against inefficiency, class privilege and the
rule of the old. It is not primarily a question of change of government.
British governments do, broadly speaking, represent the will of the
people, and if we alter our structure from below we shall get the
government we need. Ambassadors, generals, officials and colonial
administrators who are senile or pro-Fascist are more dangerous than
Cabinet ministers whose follies have to be committed in public. Right
through our national life we have got to fight against privilege,
against the notion that a half-witted public-schoolboy is better for
command than an intelligent mechanic. Although there are gifted and
honest _individuals_ among them, we have got to break the grip of the
moneyed class as a whole. England has got to assume its real shape. The
England that is only just beneath the surface, in the factories and the
newspaper offices, in the aeroplanes and the submarines, has got to take
charge of its own destiny.

[¶7] In the short run, equality of sacrifice, 'war-Communism', is even more
important than radical economic changes. It is very necessary that
industry should be nationalized, but it is more urgently necessary that
such monstrosities as butlers and 'private incomes' should disappear
forthwith. Almost certainly the main reason why the Spanish Republic
could keep up the fight for two and a half years against impossible odds
was that there were no gross contrasts of wealth. The people suffered
horribly, but they all suffered alike. When the private soldier had not
a cigarette, the general had not one either. Given equality of
sacrifice, the morale of a country like England would probably be
unbreakable. But at present we have nothing to appeal to except
traditional patriotism, which is deeper here than elsewhere, but is not
necessarily bottomless. At some point or another you have got to deal
with the man who says 'I should be no worse off under Hitler'. But what
answer can you give him—that is, what answer that you can expect him to
listen to—while common soldiers risk their lives for two and sixpence a
day, and fat women ride about in Rolls-Royce cars, nursing pekineses?

[¶8] It is quite likely that this war will last three years. It will mean
cruel overwork, cold dull winters, uninteresting food, lack of
amusements, prolonged bombing. It cannot but lower the general standard
of living, because the essential act of war is to manufacture armaments
instead of consumable goods. The working class will have to suffer
terrible things. And they _will_ suffer them, almost indefinitely,
provided that they know what they are fighting for. They are not
cowards, and they are not even internationally minded. They can stand
all that the Spanish workers stood, and more. But they will want some
kind of proof that a better life is ahead for themselves and their
children. The one sure earnest of that is that when they are taxed and
overworked they shall see that the rich are being hit even harder. And
if the rich squeal audibly, so much the better.

[¶9] We can bring these things about, if we really want to. It is not true
that public opinion has no power in England. It never makes itself heard
without achieving something; it has been responsible for most of the
changes for the better during the past six months. But we have moved
with glacier-like slowness, and we have learned only from disasters. It
took the fall of Paris to get rid of Chamberlain and the unnecessary
suffering of scores of thousands of people in the East End to get rid or
partially rid of Sir John Anderson. It is not worth losing a battle in
order to bury a corpse. For we are fighting against swift evil
intelligences, and time presses, and

[¶10] _history to the defeated_
                        _May say Alas! but cannot alter or pardon._

## 9. III

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-lion-and-unicorn-fp20180531/9/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-lion-and-unicorn-fp20180531/9/#p-N

[¶0] During the last six months there has been much talk of 'the Fifth
Column'. From time to time obscure lunatics have been jailed for making
speeches in favour of Hitler, and large numbers of German refugees have
been interned, a thing which has almost certainly done us great harm in
Europe. It is of course obvious that the idea of a large, organized army
of Fifth Columnists suddenly appearing on the streets with weapons in
their hands, as in Holland and Belgium, is ridiculous. Nevertheless a
Fifth Column danger does exist. One can only consider it if one also
considers in what way England might be defeated.

[¶1] It does not seem probable that air bombing can settle a major war.
England might well be invaded and conquered, but the invasion would be a
dangerous gamble, and if it happened and failed it would probably leave
us more united and less Blimp-ridden than before. Moreover, if England
were overrun by foreign troops the English people would know that they
had been beaten and would continue the struggle. It is doubtful whether
they could be held down permanently, or whether Hitler wishes to keep an
army of a million men stationed in these islands. A government of ——,
—— and —— (you can fill in the names) would suit him better. The
English can probably not be bullied into surrender, but they might quite
easily be bored, cajoled or cheated into it, provided that, as at
Munich, they did not know that they were surrendering. It could happen
most easily when the war seemed to be going well rather than badly. The
threatening tone of so much of the German and Italian propaganda is a
psychological mistake. It only gets home on intellectuals. With the
general public the proper approach would be 'Let's call it a draw'. It
is when a peace-offer along _those_ lines is made that the pro-Fascists
will raise their voices.

[¶2] But who are the pro-Fascists? The idea of a Hitler victory appeals to
the very rich, to the Communists, to Mosley's followers, to the
pacifists, and to certain sections among the Catholics. Also, if things
went badly enough on the Home Front, the whole of the poorer section of
the working class might swing round to a position that was defeatist
though not actively pro-Hitler.

[¶3] In this motley list one can see the daring of German propaganda, its
willingness to offer everything to everybody. But the various
pro-Fascist forces are not consciously acting together, and they operate
in different ways.

[¶4] The Communists must certainly be regarded as pro-Hitler, and are bound
to remain so unless Russian policy changes, but they have not very much
influence. Mosley's Blackshirts, though now lying very low, are a more
serious danger, because of the footing they probably possess in the
armed forces. Still, even in its palmiest days Mosley's following can
hardly have numbered 50,000. Pacifism is a psychological curiosity
rather than a political movement. Some of the extremer pacifists,
starting out with a complete renunciation of violence, have ended by
warmly championing Hitler and even toying with antisemitism. This is
interesting, but it is not important. 'Pure' pacifism, which is a
by-product of naval power, can only appeal to people in very sheltered
positions. Moreover, being negative and irresponsible, it does not
inspire much devotion. Of the membership of the Peace Pledge Union, less
than fifteen per cent even pay their annual subscriptions. None of these
bodies of people, pacifists, Communists or Blackshirts, could bring a
large-scale stop-the-war movement into being by their own efforts. But
they might help to make things very much easier for a treacherous
government negotiating surrender. Like the French Communists, they might
become the half-conscious agents of millionaires.

[¶5] The real danger is from above. One ought not to pay any attention to
Hitler's recent line of talk about being the friend of the poor man, the
enemy of plutocracy, etc. etc. Hitler's real self is in _Mein Kampf_,
and in his actions. He has never persecuted the rich, except when they
were Jews or when they tried actively to oppose him. He stands for a
centralized economy which robs the capitalist of most of his power but
leaves the structure of society much as before. The State controls
industry, but there are still rich and poor, masters and men. Therefore,
as against genuine Socialism, the moneyed class have always been on his
side. This was crystal clear at the time of the Spanish Civil War, and
clear again at the time when France surrendered. Hitler's puppet
government are not working men, but a gang of bankers, gaga generals and
corrupt right-wing politicians.

[¶6] That kind of spectacular, _conscious_ treachery is less likely to
succeed in England, indeed is far less likely even to be tried.
Nevertheless, to many payers of supertax this war is simply an insane
family squabble which ought to be stopped at all costs. One need not
doubt that a 'peace' movement is on foot somewhere in high places;
probably a shadow Cabinet has already been formed. These people will get
their chance not in the moment of defeat but in some stagnant period
when boredom is reinforced by discontent. They will not talk about
surrender, only about peace; and doubtless they will persuade
themselves, and perhaps other people, that they are acting for the best.
An army of unemployed led by millionaires quoting the Sermon on the
Mount—that is our danger. But it cannot arise when we have once
introduced a reasonable degree of social justice. The lady in the
Rolls-Royce car is more damaging to morale than a fleet of Goering's
bombing planes.

## 10. PART THREE: The English Revolution · I

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-lion-and-unicorn-fp20180531/10/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-lion-and-unicorn-fp20180531/10/#p-N

[¶0] The English revolution started several years ago, and it began to gather
momentum when the troops came back from Dunkirk. Like all else in
England, it happens in a sleepy, unwilling way, but it is happening. The
war has speeded it up, but it has also increased, and desperately, the
necessity for speed.

[¶1] Progress and reaction are ceasing to have anything to do with party
labels. If one wishes to name a particular moment, one can say that the
old distinction between Right and Left broke down when _Picture Post_
was first published. What are the politics of _Picture Post_? Or of
_Cavalcade_, or Priestley's broadcasts, or the leading articles in the
_Evening Standard_? None of the old classifications will fit them. They
merely point to the existence of multitudes of unlabelled people who
have grasped within the last year or two that something is wrong. But
since a classless, ownerless society is generally spoken of as
'Socialism', we can give that name to the society towards which we are
now moving. The war and the revolution are inseparable. We cannot
establish anything that a western nation would regard as Socialism
without defeating Hitler; on the other hand we cannot defeat Hitler
while we remain economically and socially in the nineteenth century. The
past is fighting the future and we have two years, a year, possibly only
a few months, to see to it that the future wins.

[¶2] We cannot look to this or to any similar government to put through the
necessary changes of its own accord. The initiative will have to come
from below. That means that there will have to arise something that has
never existed in England, a Socialist movement that actually has the
mass of the people behind it. But one must start by recognizing why it
is that English Socialism has failed.

[¶3] In England there is only one Socialist party that has ever seriously
mattered, the Labour Party. It has never been able to achieve any major
change, because except in purely domestic matters it has never possessed
a genuinely independent policy. It was and is primarily a party of the
trade unions, devoted to raising wages and improving working conditions.
This meant that all through the critical years it was directly
interested in the prosperity of British capitalism. In particular it was
interested in the maintenance of the British Empire, for the wealth of
England was drawn largely from Asia and Africa. The standard of living
of the trade-union workers, whom the Labour Party represented, depended
indirectly on the sweating of Indian coolies. At the same time the
Labour Party was a Socialist party, using Socialist phraseology,
thinking in terms of an old-fashioned anti-imperialism and more or less
pledged to make restitution to the coloured races. It had to stand for
the 'independence' of India, just as it had to stand for disarmament and
'progress' generally. Nevertheless everyone was aware that this was
nonsense. In the age of the tank and the bombing plane, backward
agricultural countries like India and the African colonies can no more
be independent than can a cat or a dog. Had any Labour government come
into office with a clear majority and then proceeded to grant India
anything that could truly be called independence, India would simply
have been absorbed by Japan, or divided between Japan and Russia.

[¶4] To a Labour government in power, three imperial policies would have been
open. One was to continue administering the Empire exactly as before,
which meant dropping all pretensions to Socialism. Another was to set
the subject peoples 'free', which meant in practice handing them over to
Japan, Italy and other predatory powers, and incidentally causing a
catastrophic drop in the British standard of living. The third was to
develop a _positive_ imperial policy, and aim at transforming the Empire
into a federation of Socialist states, like a looser and freer version
of the Union of Soviet Republics. But the Labour Party's history and
background made this impossible. It was a party of the trade unions,
hopelessly parochial in outlook, with little interest in imperial
affairs and no contacts among the men who actually held the Empire
together. It would have had to hand the administration of India and
Africa and the whole job of imperial defence to men drawn from a
different class and traditionally hostile to Socialism. Overshadowing
everything was the doubt whether a Labour government which meant
business could make itself obeyed. For all the size of its following,
the Labour Party had no footing in the navy, little or none in the army
or air force, none whatever in the Colonial Services, and not even a
sure footing in the Home Civil Service. In England its position was
strong but not unchallengeable, and outside England all the points were
in the hands of its enemies. Once in power, the same dilemma would
always have faced it: carry out your promise, and risk revolt, or
continue with the same policy as the Conservatives, and stop talking
about Socialism. The Labour leaders never found a solution, and from
1935 onwards it was very doubtful whether they had any wish to take
office. They had degenerated into a Permanent Opposition.

[¶5] Outside the Labour Party there existed several extremist parties, of
whom the Communists were the strongest. The Communists had considerable
influence in the Labour Party in the years 1920-26 and 1935-9. Their
chief importance, and that of the whole left wing of the Labour
movement, was the part they played in alienating the middle classes from
Socialism.

[¶6] The history of the past seven years has made it perfectly clear that
Communism has no chance in western Europe. The appeal of Fascism is
enormously greater. In one country after another the Communists have
been rooted out by their more up-to-date enemies, the Nazis. In the
English-speaking countries they never had a serious footing. The creed
they were spreading could appeal only to a rather rare type of person,
found chiefly in the middle-class intelligentsia, the type who has
ceased to love his own country but still feels the need of patriotism,
and therefore develops patriotic sentiments towards Russia. By 1940,
after working for twenty years and spending a great deal of money, the
British Communists had barely 20,000 members, actually a smaller number
than they had started out with in 1920. The other Marxist parties were
of even less importance. They had not the Russian money and prestige
behind them, and even more than the Communists they were tied to the
nineteenth-century doctrine of the class war. They continued year after
year to preach this out-of-date gospel, and never drew any inference
from the fact that it got them no followers.

[¶7] Nor did any strong native Fascist movement grow up. Material conditions
were not bad enough, and no leader who could be taken seriously was
forthcoming. One would have had to look a long time to find a man more
barren of ideas than Sir Oswald Mosley. He was as hollow as a jug. Even
the elementary fact that Fascism must not offend national sentiment had
escaped him. His entire movement was imitated slavishly from abroad, the
uniform and the party programme from Italy and the salute from Germany,
with the Jew-baiting tacked on as an afterthought, Mosley having
actually started his movement with Jews among his most prominent
followers. A man of the stamp of Bottomley or Lloyd George could perhaps
have brought a real British Fascist movement into existence. But such
leaders only appear when the psychological need for them exists.

[¶8] After twenty years of stagnation and unemployment, the entire English
Socialist movement was unable to produce a version of Socialism which
the mass of the people could even find desirable. The Labour Party stood
for a timid reformism, the Marxists were looking at the modern world
through nineteenth-century spectacles. Both ignored agriculture and
imperial problems, and both antagonized the middle classes. The
suffocating stupidity of left-wing propaganda had frightened away whole
classes of necessary people, factory managers, airmen, naval officers,
farmers, white-collar workers, shopkeepers, policemen. All of these
people had been taught to think of Socialism as something which menaced
their livelihood, or as something seditious, alien, 'anti-British' as
they would have called it. Only the intellectuals, the least useful
section of the middle class, gravitated towards the movement.

[¶9] A Socialist Party which genuinely wished to achieve anything would have
started by facing several facts which to this day are considered
unmentionable in left-wing circles. It would have recognized that
England is more united than most countries, that the British workers
have a great deal to lose besides their chains, and that the differences
in outlook and habits between class and class are rapidly diminishing.
In general, it would have recognized that the old-fashioned 'proletarian
revolution' is an impossibility. But all through the between-war years
no Socialist programme that was both revolutionary and workable ever
appeared; basically, no doubt, because no one genuinely wanted any major
change to happen. The Labour leaders wanted to go on and on, drawing
their salaries and periodically swapping jobs with the Conservatives.
The Communists wanted to go on and on, suffering a comfortable
martyrdom, meeting with endless defeats and afterwards putting the blame
on other people. The left-wing intelligentsia wanted to go on and on,
sniggering at the Blimps, sapping away at middle-class morale, but still
keeping their favoured position as hangers-on of the dividend-drawers.
Labour Party politics had become a variant of Conservatism,
'revolutionary' politics had become a game of make-believe.

[¶10] Now, however, the circumstances have changed, the drowsy years have
ended. Being a Socialist no longer means kicking theoretically against a
system which in practice you are fairly well satisfied with. This time
our predicament is real. It is 'the Philistines be upon thee, Samson'.
We have got to make our words take physical shape, or perish. We know
very well that with its present social structure England cannot survive,
and we have got to make other people see that fact and act upon it. We
cannot win the war without introducing Socialism, nor establish
Socialism without winning the war. At such a time it is possible, as it
was not in the peaceful years, to be both revolutionary and realistic. A
Socialist movement which can swing the mass of the people behind it,
drive the pro-Fascists out of positions of control, wipe out the grosser
injustices and let the working class see that they have something to
fight for, win over the middle classes instead of antagonizing them,
produce a workable imperial policy instead of a mixture of humbug and
Utopianism, bring patriotism and intelligence into partnership—for the
first time, a movement of such a kind becomes possible.

## 11. II

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-lion-and-unicorn-fp20180531/11/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-lion-and-unicorn-fp20180531/11/#p-N

[¶0] The fact that we are at war has turned Socialism from a text-book word
into a realizable policy.

[¶1] The inefficiency of private capitalism has been proved all over Europe.
Its injustice has been proved in the East End of London. Patriotism,
against which the Socialists fought so long, has become a tremendous
lever in their hands. People who at any other time would cling like glue
to their miserable scraps of privilege, will surrender them fast enough
when their country is in danger. War is the greatest of all agents of
change. It speeds up all processes, wipes out minor distinctions, bring
realities to the surface. Above all, war brings it home to the
individual that he is _not_ altogether an individual. It is only because
they are aware of this that men will die on the field of battle. At this
moment it is not so much a question of surrendering life as of
surrendering leisure, comfort, economic liberty, social prestige. There
are very few people in England who really want to see their country
conquered by Germany. If it can be made clear that defeating Hitler
means wiping out class privilege, the great mass of middling people, the
£6 a week to £2,000 a year class, will probably be on our side. These
people are quite indispensable, because they include most of the
technical experts. Obviously the snobbishness and political ignorance of
people like airmen and naval officers will be a very great difficulty.
But without those airmen, destroyer commanders, etc. etc. we could not
survive for a week. The only approach to them is through their
patriotism. An intelligent Socialist movement will _use_ their
patriotism, instead of merely insulting it, as hitherto.

[¶2] But do I mean that there will be no opposition? Of course not. It would
be childish to expect anything of the kind.

[¶3] There will be a bitter political struggle, and there will be unconscious
and half-conscious sabotage everywhere. At some point or other it may be
necessary to use violence. It is easy to imagine a pro-Fascist rebellion
breaking out in, for instance, India. We shall have to fight against
bribery, ignorance and snobbery. The bankers and the larger businessmen,
the landowners and dividend-drawers, the officials with their prehensile
bottoms, will obstruct for all they are worth. Even the middle classes
will writhe when their accustomed way of life is menaced. But just
because the English sense of national unity has never disintegrated,
because patriotism is finally stronger than class-hatred, the chances
are that the will of the majority will prevail. It is no use imagining
that one can make fundamental changes without causing a split in the
nation; but the treacherous minority will be far smaller in time of war
than it would be at any other time.

[¶4] The swing of opinion is visibly happening, but it cannot be counted on
to happen fast enough of its own accord. This war is a race between the
consolidation of Hitler's empire and the growth of democratic
consciousness. Everywhere in England you can see a ding-dong battle
raging to and fro—in Parliament and in the Government, in the factories
and the armed forces, in the pubs and air-raid shelters, in the
newspapers and on the radio. Every day there are tiny defeats, tiny
victories. Morrison for Home Secretary—a few yards forward. Priestley
shoved off the air—a few yards back. It is a struggle between the
groping and the unteachable, between the young and the old, between the
living and the dead. But it is very necessary that the discontent which
undoubtedly exists should take a purposeful and not merely obstructive
form. It is time for _the people_ to define their war aims. What is
wanted is a simple, concrete programme of action, which can be given all
possible publicity, and round which public opinion can group itself.

[¶5] I suggest that the following six-point programme is the kind of thing we
need. The first three points deal with England's internal policy, the
other three with the Empire and the world:

[¶6] 1. Nationalization of land, mines, railways, banks and major industries.

[¶7] 2. Limitation of incomes, on such a scale that the highest tax-free
income in Britain does not exceed the lowest by more than ten to one.

[¶8] 3. Reform of the educational system along democratic lines.

[¶9] 4. Immediate Dominion status for India, with power to secede when the
war is over.

[¶10] 5. Formation of an Imperial General Council, in which the coloured
peoples are to be represented.

[¶11] 6. Declaration of formal alliance with China, Abyssinia and all other
victims of the Fascist powers.

[¶12] The general tendency of this programme is unmistakable. It aims quite
frankly at turning this war into a revolutionary war and England into a
Socialist democracy. I have deliberately included in it nothing that the
simplest person could not understand and see the reason for. In the form
in which I have put it, it could be printed on the front page of the
_Daily Mirror_. But for the purposes of this book a certain amount of
amplification is needed.

[¶13] 1. _Nationalization._ One can 'nationalize' industry by the stroke of a
pen, but the actual process is slow and complicated. What is needed is
that the ownership of all major industry shall be formally vested in the
State, representing the common people. Once that is done it becomes
possible to eliminate the class of mere _owners_ who live not by virtue
of anything they produce but by the possession of title-deeds and share
certificates. State-ownership implies, therefore, that nobody shall live
without working. How sudden a change in the conduct of industry it
implies is less certain. In a country like England we cannot rip down
the whole structure and build again from the bottom, least of all in
time of war. Inevitably the majority of industrial concerns will
continue with much the same personnel as before, the one-time owners or
managing directors carrying on with their jobs as State employees. There
is reason to think that many of the smaller capitalists would actually
welcome some such arrangement. The resistance will come from the big
capitalists, the bankers, the landlords and the idle rich, roughly
speaking the class with over £2,000 a year—and even if one counts in
all their dependants there are not more than half a million of these
people in England. Nationalization of agricultural land implies cutting
out the landlord and the tithe drawer, but not necessarily interfering
with the farmer. It is difficult to imagine any reorganization of
English agriculture that would not retain most of the existing farms as
units, at any rate at the beginning. The farmer, when he is competent,
will continue as a salaried manager. He is virtually that already, with
the added disadvantage of having to make a profit and being permanently
in debt to the bank. With certain kinds of petty trading, and even the
small-scale ownership of land, the State will probably not interfere at
all. It would be a great mistake to start by victimizing the smallholder
class, for instance. These people are necessary, on the whole they are
competent, and the amount of work they do depends on the feeling that
they are 'their own masters'. But the State will certainly impose an
upward limit to the ownership of land (probably fifteen acres at the
very most), and will never permit any ownership of land in town areas.

[¶14] From the moment that all productive goods have been declared the
property of the State, the common people will feel, as they cannot feel
now, that the State _is themselves_. They will be ready then to endure
the sacrifices that are ahead of us, war or no war. And even if the face
of England hardly seems to change, on the day that our main industries
are formally nationalized the dominance of a single class will have been
broken. From then onwards the emphasis will be shifted from ownership to
management, from privilege to competence. It is quite possible that
State-ownership will in itself bring about less social change than will
be forced upon us by the common hardships of war. But it is the
necessary first step without which any _real_ reconstruction is
impossible.

[¶15] 2. _Incomes._ Limitation of incomes implies the fixing of a minimum
wage, which implies a managed internal currency based simply on the
amount of consumption goods available. And this again implies a stricter
rationing scheme than is now in operation. It is no use at this stage of
the world's history to suggest that all human beings should have
_exactly_ equal incomes. It has been shown over and over again that
without some kind of money reward there is no incentive to undertake
certain jobs. On the other hand the money reward need not be very large.
In practice it is impossible that earnings should be limited quite as
rigidly as I have suggested. There will always be anomalies and
evasions. But there is no reason why ten to one should not be the
maximum normal variation. And within those limits some sense of equality
is possible. A man with £3 a week and a man with £1,500 a year can feel
themselves fellow creatures, which the Duke of Westminster and the
sleepers on the Embankment benches cannot.

[¶16] 3. _Education._ In wartime, educational reform must necessarily be
promise rather than performance. At the moment we are not in a position
to raise the school-leaving age or increase the teaching staffs of the
elementary schools. But there are certain immediate steps that we could
take towards a democratic educational system. We could start by
abolishing the autonomy of the public schools and the older universities
and flooding them with State-aided pupils chosen simply on grounds of
ability. At present, public-school education is partly a training in
class prejudice and partly a sort of tax that the middle classes pay to
the upper class in return for the right to enter certain professions. It
is true that that state of affairs is altering. The middle classes have
begun to rebel against the expensiveness of education, and the war will
bankrupt the majority of the public schools if it continues for another
year or two. The evacuation is also producing certain minor changes. But
there is a danger that some of the older schools, which will be able to
weather the financial storm longest, will survive in some form or
another as festering centres of snobbery. As for the 10,000 'private'
schools that England possesses, the vast majority of them deserve
nothing except suppression. They are simply commercial undertakings, and
in many cases their educational level is actually lower than that of the
elementary schools. They merely exist because of a widespread idea that
there is something disgraceful in being educated by the public
authorities. The State could quell this idea by declaring itself
responsible for _all_ education, even if at the start this were no more
than a gesture. We need gestures as well as actions. It is all too
obvious that our talk of 'defending democracy' is nonsense while it is a
mere accident of birth that decides whether a gifted child shall or
shall not get the education it deserves.

[¶17] 4. _India._ What we must offer India is not 'freedom', which, as I have
said earlier, is impossible, but alliance, partnership—in a word,
equality. But we must also tell the Indians that they are free to
secede, if they want to. Without that there can be no equality of
partnership, and our claim to be defending the coloured peoples against
Fascism will never be believed. But it is a mistake to imagine that if
the Indians were free to cut themselves adrift they would immediately do
so. When a British government _offers_ them unconditional independence,
they will refuse it. For as soon as they have the power to secede the
chief reasons for doing so will have disappeared.

[¶18] A complete severance of the two countries would be a disaster for India
no less than for England. Intelligent Indians know this. As things are
at present, India not only cannot defend itself, it is hardly even
capable of feeding itself. The whole administration of the country
depends on a framework of experts (engineers, forest officers,
railwaymen, soldiers, doctors) who are predominantly English and could
not be replaced within five or ten years. Moreover, English is the chief
lingua franca and nearly the whole of the Indian intelligentsia is
deeply anglicized. Any transference to foreign rule—for if the British
marched out of India the Japanese and other powers would immediately
march in—would mean an immense dislocation. Neither the Japanese, the
Russians, the Germans nor the Italians would be capable of administering
India even at the low level of efficiency that is attained by the
British. They do not possess the necessary supplies of technical experts
or the knowledge of languages and local conditions and they probably
could not win the confidence of indispensable go-betweens such as the
Eurasians. If India were simply 'liberated', i.e. deprived of British
military protection, the first result would be a fresh foreign conquest,
and the second a series of enormous famines which would kill millions of
people within a few years.

[¶19] What India needs is the power to work out its own constitution without
British interference, but in some kind of partnership that ensures its
military protection and technical advice. This is unthinkable until
there is a Socialist government in England. For at least eighty years
England has artificially prevented the development of India, partly from
fear of trade competition if Indian industries were too highly
developed, partly because backward peoples are more easily governed than
civilized ones. It is a commonplace that the average Indian suffers far
more from his own countrymen than from the British. The petty Indian
capitalist exploits the town worker with the utmost ruthlessness, the
peasant lives from birth to death in the grip of the money-lender. But
all this is an indirect result of the British rule, which aims
half-consciously at keeping India as backward as possible. The classes
most loyal to Britain are the princes, the landowners and the business
community—in general, the reactionary classes who are doing fairly well
out of the _status quo_. The moment that England ceased to stand towards
India in the relation of an exploiter, the balance of forces would be
altered. No need then for the British to flatter the ridiculous Indian
princes, with their gilded elephants and cardboard armies, to prevent
the growth of the Indian trade unions, to play off Moslem against Hindu,
to protect the worthless life of the money-lender, to receive the
salaams of toadying minor officials, to prefer the half-barbarous Gurkha
to the educated Bengali. Once check that stream of dividends that flows
from the bodies of Indian coolies to the banking accounts of old ladies
in Cheltenham, and the whole sahib-native nexus, with its haughty
ignorance on one side and envy and servility on the other, can come to
an end. Englishmen and Indians can work side by side for the development
of India, and for the training of Indians in all the arts which, so far,
they have been systematically prevented from learning. How many of the
existing British personnel in India, commercial or official, would fall
in with such an arrangement—which would mean ceasing once and for all
to be 'sahibs'—is a different question. But, broadly speaking, more is
to be hoped from the younger men and from those officials (civil
engineers, forestry and agriculture experts, doctors, educationists) who
have been scientifically educated. The higher officials, the provincial
governors, commissioners, judges, etc. are hopeless; but they are also
the most easily replaceable.

[¶20] That, roughly, is what would be meant by Dominion status if it were
offered to India by a Socialist government. It is an offer of
partnership on equal terms until such time as the world has ceased to be
ruled by bombing planes. But we must add to it the unconditional right
to secede. It is the only way of proving that we mean what we say. And
what applies to India applies, _mutatis mutandis_, to Burma, Malaya and
most of our African possessions.

[¶21] 5 and 6 explain themselves. They are the necessary preliminary to any
claim that we are fighting this war for the protection of peaceful
peoples against Fascist aggression.

[¶22] Is it impossibly hopeful to think that such a policy as this could get a
following in England? A year ago, even six months ago, it would have
been, but not now. Moreover—and this is the peculiar opportunity of
this moment—it could be given the necessary publicity. There is now a
considerable weekly press, with a circulation of millions, which would
be ready to popularize—if not _exactly_ the programme I have sketched
above, at any rate _some_ policy along those lines. There are even three
or four daily papers which would be prepared to give it a sympathetic
hearing. That is the distance we have travelled in the last six months.

[¶23] But is such a policy realizable? That depends entirely on ourselves.

[¶24] Some of the points I have suggested are of the kind that could be
carried out immediately, others would take years or decades and even
then would not be perfectly achieved. No political programme is ever
carried out in its entirety. But what matters is that that or something
like it should be our declared policy. It is always the _direction_ that
counts. It is of course quite hopeless to expect the present Government
to pledge itself to any policy that implies turning this war into a
revolutionary war. It is at best a government of compromise, with
Churchill riding two horses like a circus acrobat. Before such measures
as limitation of incomes become even thinkable, there will have to be a
complete shift of power away from the old ruling class. If during this
winter the war settles into another stagnant period, we ought in my
opinion to agitate for a General Election, a thing which the Tory Party
machine will make frantic efforts to prevent. But even without an
election we can get the government we want, provided that we want it
urgently enough. A real shove from below will accomplish it. As to who
will be in that government when it comes, I make no guess. I only know
that the right men will be there when the people really want them, for
it is movements that make leaders and not leaders movements.

[¶25] Within a year, perhaps even within six months, if we are still
unconquered, we shall see the rise of something that has never existed
before, a specifically _English_ Socialist movement. Hitherto there has
been only the Labour Party, which was the creation of the working class
but did not aim at any fundamental change, and Marxism, which was a
German theory interpreted by Russians and unsuccessfully transplanted to
England. There was nothing that really touched the heart of the English
people. Throughout its entire history the English Socialist movement has
never produced a song with a catchy tune—nothing like _La Marseillaise_
or _La Cucuracha_, for instance. When a Socialist movement native to
England appears, the Marxists, like all others with a vested interest in
the past, will be its bitter enemies. Inevitably they will denounce it
as 'Fascism'. Already it is customary among the more soft-boiled
intellectuals of the Left to declare that if we fight against the Nazis
we shall 'go Nazi' ourselves. They might almost equally well say that if
we fight Negroes we shall turn black. To 'go Nazi' we should have to
have the history of Germany behind us. Nations do not escape from their
past merely by making a revolution. An English Socialist government will
transform the nation from top to bottom, but it will still bear all over
it the unmistakable marks of our own civilization, the peculiar
civilization which I discussed earlier in this book.

[¶26] It will not be doctrinaire, nor even logical. It will abolish the House
of Lords, but quite probably will not abolish the Monarchy. It will
leave anachronisms and loose ends everywhere, the judge in his
ridiculous horsehair wig and the lion and the unicorn on the soldier's
cap-buttons. It will not set up any explicit class dictatorship. It will
group itself round the old Labour Party and its mass following will be
in the trade unions, but it will draw into it most of the middle class
and many of the younger sons of the bourgeoisie. Most of its directing
brains will come from the new indeterminate class of skilled workers,
technical experts, airmen, scientists, architects and journalists, the
people who feel at home in the radio and ferro-concrete age. But it will
never lose touch with the tradition of compromise and the belief in a
law that is above the State. It will shoot traitors, but it will give
them a solemn trial beforehand and occasionally it will acquit them. It
will crush any open revolt promptly and cruelly, but it will interfere
very little with the spoken and written word. Political parties with
different names will still exist, revolutionary sects will still be
publishing their newspapers and making as little impression as ever. It
will disestablish the Church, but will not persecute religion. It will
retain a vague reverence for the Christian moral code, and from time to
time will refer to England as 'a Christian country'. The Catholic Church
will war against it, but the Nonconformist sects and the bulk of the
Anglican Church will be able to come to terms with it. It will show a
power of assimilating the past which will shock foreign observers and
sometimes make them doubt whether any revolution has happened.

[¶27] But all the same it will have done the essential thing. It will have
nationalized industry, scaled down incomes, set up a classless
educational system. Its real nature will be apparent from the hatred
which the surviving rich men of the world will feel for it. It will aim
not at disintegrating the Empire but at turning it into a federation of
Socialist states, freed not so much from the British flag as from the
money-lender, the dividend-drawer and the wooden-headed British
official. Its war strategy will be totally different from that of any
property-ruled state, because it will not be afraid of the revolutionary
after-effects when any existing régime is brought down. It will not have
the smallest scruple about attacking hostile neutrals or stirring up
native rebellion in enemy colonies. It will fight in such a way that
even if it is beaten its memory will be dangerous to the victor, as the
memory of the French Revolution was dangerous to Metternich's Europe.
The dictators will fear it as they could not fear the existing British
régime, even if its military strength were ten times what it is.

[¶28] But at this moment, when the drowsy life of England has barely altered,
and the offensive contrast of wealth and poverty still exists
everywhere, even amid the bombs, why do I dare to say that all these
things 'will' happen?

[¶29] Because the time has come when one can predict the future in terms of an
'either—or'. Either we turn this war into a revolutionary war (I do not
say that our policy will be _exactly_ what I have indicated
above—merely that it will be along those general lines) or we lose it,
and much more besides. Quite soon it will be possible to say definitely
that our feet are set upon one path or the other. But at any rate it is
certain that with our present social structure we cannot win. Our real
forces, physical, moral or intellectual, cannot be mobilized.

## 12. III

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-lion-and-unicorn-fp20180531/12/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-lion-and-unicorn-fp20180531/12/#p-N

[¶0] Patriotism has nothing to do with Conservatism. It is actually the
opposite of Conservatism, since it is a devotion to something that is
always changing and yet is felt to be mystically the same. It is the
bridge between the future and the past. No real revolutionary has ever
been an internationalist.

[¶1] 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. English
Socialists of nearly all colours wanted to make a stand against Fascism,
but at the same time they have aimed at making their own countrymen
unwarlike. They have failed, because in England traditional loyalties
are stronger than new ones. But in spite of all the 'anti-Fascist'
heroics of the left-wing press, what chance should we have stood when
the real struggle with Fascism came, if the average Englishman had been
the kind of creature that the _New Statesman_, the _Daily Worker_ or
even the _News Chronicle_ wished to make him?

[¶2] Up to 1935 virtually all English left-wingers were vaguely pacifist.
After 1935 the more vocal of them flung themselves eagerly into the
Popular Front movement, which was simply an evasion of the whole problem
posed by Fascism. It set out to be 'anti-Fascist' in a purely negative
way—'against' Fascism without being 'for' any discoverable policy—and
underneath it lay the flabby idea that when the time came the Russians
would do our fighting for us. It is astonishing how this illusion fails
to die. Every week sees its spate of letters to the press, pointing out
that if we had a government with no Tories in it the Russians could
hardly avoid coming round to our side. Or we are to publish
high-sounding war aims (_vide_ books like _Unser Kampf_, _A Hundred
Million Allies—If We Chose_, etc.), whereupon the European populations
will infallibly rise on our behalf. It is the same idea all the
time—look abroad for your inspiration, get someone else to do your
fighting for you. Underneath it lies the frightful inferiority complex
of the English intellectual, the belief that the English are no longer a
martial race, no longer capable of enduring.

[¶3] In truth there is no reason to think that anyone will do our fighting
for us yet awhile, except the Chinese, who have been doing it for three
years already.[3] The Russians may be driven to fight on our side by the
fact of a direct attack, but they have made it clear enough that they
will not stand up to the German army if there is any way of avoiding it.
In any case they are not likely to be attracted by the spectacle of a
left-wing government in England. The present Russian régime must almost
certainly be hostile to any revolution in the West. The subject peoples
of Europe will rebel when Hitler begins to totter, but not earlier. Our
potential allies are not the Europeans but on the one hand the
Americans, who will need a year to mobilize their resources even if Big
Business can be brought to heel, and on the other hand the coloured
peoples, who cannot be even sentimentally on our side till our own
revolution has started. For a long time, a year, two years, possibly
three years, England has got to be the shock-absorber of the world. We
have got to face bombing, hunger, overwork, influenza, boredom and
treacherous peace offers. Manifestly it is a time to stiffen morale, not
to weaken it. 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. For it is
childish to suppose that the other English-speaking countries, even the
U.S.A., will be unaffected if Britain is conquered.

[¶4] Lord Halifax, and all his tribe, believe that when the war is over
things will be exactly as they were before. Back to the crazy pavement
of Versailles, back to 'democracy', i.e. capitalism, back to dole queues
and the Rolls-Royce cars, back to the grey top hats and the sponge-bag
trousers, _in saecula saeculorum_. It is of course obvious that nothing
of the kind is going to happen. A feeble imitation of it might just
possibly happen in the case of a negotiated peace, but only for a short
while. _Laissez-faire_ capitalism is dead.[4] The choice lies between
the kind of collective society that Hitler will set up and the kind that
can arise if he is defeated.

[¶5] If Hitler wins this war he will consolidate his rule over Europe, Africa
and the Middle East, and if his armies have not been too greatly
exhausted beforehand, he will wrench vast territories from Soviet
Russia. He will set up a graded caste-society in which the German
_Herrenvolk_ ('master race' or 'aristocratic race') will rule over Slavs
and other lesser peoples whose job it will be to produce low-priced
agricultural products. He will reduce the coloured peoples once and for
all to outright slavery. The real quarrel of the Fascist powers with
British imperialism is that they know that it is disintegrating. Another
twenty years along the present line of development, and India will be a
peasant republic linked with England only by voluntary alliance. The
'semi-apes' of whom Hitler speaks with such loathing will be flying
aeroplanes and manufacturing machine-guns. The Fascist dream of a slave
empire will be at an end. On the other hand, if we are defeated we
simply hand over our own victims to new masters who come fresh to the
job and have not developed any scruples.

[¶6] But more is involved than the fate of the coloured peoples. Two
incompatible visions of life are fighting one another. '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.

[¶7] 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. 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.
To be on the dole is a horrible experience; therefore it is _no worse_
to be in the torture-chambers of the Gestapo. In general, two blacks
make a white, half a loaf is the same as no bread.

[¶8] But in reality, whatever may be true about democracy and
totalitarianism, it is not true that they are the same. It would not be
true, even if British democracy were incapable of evolving beyond its
present stage. The whole conception of the militarized continental
state, with its secret police, its censored literature and its conscript
labour, is utterly different from that of the loose maritime democracy,
with its slums and unemployment, its strikes and party politics. It is
the difference between land power and sea power, between cruelty and
inefficiency, between lying and self-deception, between the S.S. man and
the rent-collector. And in choosing between them one chooses not so much
on the strength of what they now are as of what they are capable of
becoming. But in a sense it is irrelevant whether democracy, at its
highest or at its lowest, is 'better' than totalitarianism. To decide
that one would have to have access to absolute standards. The only
question that matters is where one's real sympathies will lie when the
pinch comes. The intellectuals who are so fond of balancing democracy
against totalitarianism and 'proving' that one is as bad as the other
are simply frivolous people who have never been shoved up against
realities. They show the same shallow misunderstanding of Fascism now,
when they are beginning to flirt with it, as a year or two ago, when
they were squealing against it. The question is not, 'Can you make out a
debating-society "case" in favour of Hitler?' The question is, 'Do you
genuinely accept that case? Are you willing to submit to Hitler's rule?
Do you want to see England conquered, or don't you?' It would be better
to be sure on that point before frivolously siding with the enemy. For
there is no such thing as neutrality in war; in practice one must help
one side or the other.

[¶9] When the pinch comes, no one bred in the western tradition can accept
the Fascist vision of life. It is important to realize that _now_, and
to grasp what it entails. With all its sloth, hypocrisy and injustice,
the English-speaking civilization is the only large obstacle in Hitler's
path. It is a living contradiction of all the 'infallible' dogmas of
Fascism. That is why all Fascist writers for years past have agreed that
England's power must be destroyed. England must be 'exterminated', must
be 'annihilated', must 'cease to exist'. Strategically it would be
possible for this war to end with Hitler in secure possession of Europe,
and with the British Empire intact and British sea-power barely
affected. But ideologically it is not possible; were Hitler to make an
offer along those lines, it could only be treacherously, with a view to
conquering England indirectly or renewing the attack at some more
favourable moment. England cannot possibly be allowed to remain as a
sort of funnel through which deadly ideas from beyond the Atlantic flow
into the police states of Europe. And turning it round to our point of
view, we see the vastness of the issue before us, the all-importance of
preserving our democracy more or less as we have known it. But to
_preserve_ is always to _extend_. The choice before us is not so much
between victory and defeat as between revolution and apathy. If the
thing we are fighting for is altogether destroyed, it will have been
destroyed partly by our own act.

[¶10] It could happen that England could introduce the beginnings of
Socialism, turn this war into a revolutionary war, and still be
defeated. That is at any rate thinkable. But, terrible as it would be
for anyone who is now adult, it would be far less deadly than the
'compromise peace' which a few rich men and their hired liars are hoping
for. The final ruin of England could only be accomplished by an English
government acting under orders from Berlin. But that cannot happen if
England has awakened beforehand. For in that case the defeat would be
unmistakable, the struggle would continue, the _idea_ would survive. The
difference between going down fighting, and surrendering without a
fight, is by no means a question of 'honour' and schoolboy heroics.
Hitler said once that to _accept_ defeat destroys the soul of a nation.
This sounds like a piece of claptrap, but it is strictly true. The
defeat of 1870 did not lessen the world-influence of France. The Third
Republic had more influence, intellectually, than the France of Napoleon
III. But the sort of peace that Pétain, Laval and Co. have accepted can
only be purchased by deliberately wiping out the national culture. The
Vichy Government will enjoy a spurious independence only on condition
that it destroys the distinctive marks of French culture: republicanism,
secularism, respect for the intellect, absence of colour prejudice. We
cannot be _utterly_ defeated if we have made our revolution beforehand.
We may see German troops marching down Whitehall, but another process,
ultimately deadly to the German power-dream, will have been, started.
The Spanish people were defeated, but the things they learned during
those two and a half memorable years will one day come back upon the
Spanish Fascists like a boomerang.

[¶11] A piece of Shakespearean bombast was much quoted at the beginning of the
war. Even Mr Chamberlain quoted it once, if my memory does not deceive
me:

[¶12] _Come the four corners of the world in arms_
          _And we shall shock them: naught shall make us rue_
          _If England to herself do rest but true._

[¶13] It is right enough, if you interpret it rightly. But England has got to
be true to herself. She is not being true to herself while the refugees
who have sought our shores are penned up in concentration camps, and
company directors work out subtle schemes to dodge their Excess Profits
Tax. It is goodbye to the _Tatler_ and the _Bystander_, and farewell to
the lady in the Rolls-Royce car. The heirs of Nelson and of Cromwell are
not in the House of Lords. They are in the fields and the streets, in
the factories and the armed forces, in the four-ale bar and the suburban
back garden; and at present they are still kept under by a generation of
ghosts. Compared with the task of bringing the real England to the
surface, even the winning of the war, necessary though it is, is
secondary. By revolution we become more ourselves, not less. There is no
question of stopping short, striking a compromise, salvaging
'democracy', standing still. Nothing ever stands still. We must add to
our heritage or lose it, we must grow greater or grow less, we must go
forward or backward. I believe in England, and I believe that we shall
go forward.

[¶14] -----

[¶15] [3] Written before the outbreak of the war in Greece. [Author's
footnote.]

[¶16] [4] It is interesting to notice that Mr Kennedy, U.S.A. Ambassador in
London, remarked on his return to New York in October 1940 that as a
result of the war 'democracy is finished'. By 'democracy', of course, he
meant private capitalism. [Author's footnote.]