The lunatic atmosphere of war
M J Carley
paragraphs 2--4.
Now that we have seemingly won the war and lost the peace, it is
possible to see earlier events in a certain perspective, and the first
thing I have to admit is that up to at any rate the end of 1942 I was
grossly wrong in my analysis of the situation. It is because, so far
as I can see, everyone else was wrong too that my own mistakes are
worth commenting on.
I have tried to tell the truth in these letters, and I believe your
readers have from them a not too distorted picture of what was
happening at any given moment. Of course there are many mistaken
predictions (e.g. in 1941 I prophesied that Russia and Germany would
go on collaborating and in 1942 that Churchill would fall from power),
many generalisations based on little or no evidence, and also, from
time to time, spiteful or misleading remarks about individuals. For
instance, I particularly regret having said in one letter that Julian
Symons ``writes in a vaguely Fascist strain''---a quite unjustified
statement based on a single article which I probably
misunderstood. But this kind of thing results largely from the lunatic
atmosphere of war, the fog of lies and misinformation in which one has
to work and the endless sordid controversies in which a political
journalist is involved. By the low standards now prevailing I think I
have been fairly accurate about facts. Where I have gone wrong is in
assessing the relative importance of different *trends*. And most of
my mistakes spring from a political analysis which I had made in the
desperate period of 1940 and continued to cling to long after it
should have been clear that it was untenable.
The essential error is contained in my very first letter, written at
the end of 1940, in which I stated that the political reaction which
was already visibly under weigh ``is not going to make very much
ultimate difference''. For about eighteen months I repeated this in
various forms again and again. I not only assumed (what is probably
true) that the drift of popular feeling was towards the Left, but that
it would be quite impossible to wing the war without democratising
it. In 1940 I had written, ``Either we turn this war into a
revolutionary war, or we lose it'', and I find myself repeating this
word for word as late as the middle of 1942. This probably coloured my
judgement of actual events and made me exaggerate the depth of the
political crisis in 1942, the possibilities of Cripps as a popular
leader and of Common Wealth as a revolutionary party, and also the
socially levelling process occurring in Britain as a result of the
war. But what really matters is that I fell into the trap of assuming
that ``the war and the revolution are inseparable''. There were
excuses for this belief, but still it was a very great error. For
after all we have not lost the war, unless appearances are very
deceiving, and we have not introduced Socialism. Britain is moving
towards a planned economy, and class distinctions tend to dwindle, but
there has been no real shift of power and no increase in genuine
democracy. The same people still own all the property and usurp all
the best jobs. In the United States the development appears to be
*away* from Socialism. The United States is indeed the most powerful
country in the world, and the most capitalistic. When we look back at
our judgements of a year or two ago, whether we ``opposed'' the war or
whether we ``supported'' it, I think the first admission we ought to
make is that *we were all wrong*.
--
`Al vero filosofo ogni terreno e' patria.'
BHaLC #6
No MS attachments: http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html
Home page: http://staff.bath.ac.uk/ensmjc/
Oliver Kamm
Carley obviously must assume that members of this ng are too stupid to
remember the question; speaking for myself, this is not so. I am
perfectly well aware of this article, written in December 1944, for I
have already posted the relevant passage about 'the lunatic atmosphere
of war' to the ng, with the appropriate reference: it appears in The
Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Volume III
- As I Please, page 293. My point was not that the phrase 'lunatic
atmosphere of war' appears nowhere in Orwell's writings, but that the
letter-writer to The Guardian who so impressed Carley claimed that it
was employed in a retraction by Orwell of his Partisan Review article
of 1942. That assertion is utterly false; no such remark appears
anywhere in the passage Carley has quoted. Orwell is here referring to
a specific personal criticism of an individual writer, Julian Symons,
and making neither allusion nor reference to his 1942 article in
Partisan Review. Carley made the appalling mistake of citing against
me, of all people, a letter-writer to The Guardian rather than check
her claims against what Orwell had actually written. He has thereby
committed a pratfall from a great height, and appears intent on
repeating it. Let me give the ng, and more particularly me, the
pleasure of watching him.
The letter-writer whom Carley laughably took to be a serious source
claimed that Orwell had retracted his 1942 article, blaming 'the
lunatic atmosphere of war'. I have asked Carley on numerous occasions
to back this up, and he has failed to do so. I now invite him yet
again to do so. Alternatively, he might just learn to consult sources
before confidently declaiming upon what they say. Heaven knows what
Bath University would make of one of its number who failed to do so.
M J Carley
>Carley obviously must assume that members of this ng are too stupid to
>remember the question; speaking for myself, this is not so. I am
>perfectly well aware of this article, written in December 1944, for I
>have already posted the relevant passage about 'the lunatic atmosphere
>of war' to the ng, with the appropriate reference: it appears in The
>Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Volume III
>- As I Please, page 293. My point was not that the phrase 'lunatic
>atmosphere of war' appears nowhere in Orwell's writings, but that the
>letter-writer to The Guardian who so impressed Carley claimed that it
>was employed in a retraction by Orwell of his Partisan Review article
>of 1942. That assertion is utterly false; no such remark appears
>anywhere in the passage Carley has quoted.
He is using the phrase `lunatic atmosphere war' to refer to his
being `grossly wrong in my analysis of the situation' up to the
end of 1942.