LONDON LETTER
157
out, turn-the-other-cheek pacifists you come upon the much stranger
phenomenon of people who have started by renouncing violence ending
by championing Hitler. The antisemitic motif is very strong, though
usually soft-pedalled in print. But not many English pacifists have the
intellectual courage to think their thoughts down to the roots, and since
there is no real answer to the charge that pacifism is objectively pro–
Fascist, nearly all pacifist literature is forensic-i.e., specialises in avoid–
ing awkward questions. To take one example, during the earlier period of
the war the pacifist monthly the
Adelphi,
edited by Middleton Murry,
accepted at its face value the German claim to be a "socialist" state fight–
ing against "plutocratic" Britain, and more or less equated Germany with
Russia. Hitler's invasion of Russia made nonsense of this line of thought,
and in the five or six issues that have followed the
Adelphi
has performed
the surprising feat of not mentioning the Russo-German war. The
Adelphi
has once or twice engaged in Jew-baiting of a mild kind.
Peace News,
now also edited by Middleton Murry, follows its old tradition of opposing
war for different and incompatible reasons, at one moment because viol·
ence is wicked, at another because peace will "preserve the British
Empire," etc.
For some years past there has been a tendency for Fascists and cur–
rency reformers to write in the same papers, and it is only recently that
they have been joined by the pacifists. I have in front of me a copy of the
little anti-war paper
Now
which contains contributions from, among
others, the Duke of Bedford, Alexander Comfort, Julian Symons and Hugh
Ross Williamson. Alexander Comfort is a "pure" pacifist of the other–
cheek school. The Duke of Bedford has for years been one of the main
props of the Douglas Credit movement, and is also a devout Anglican, a
pacifist or near-pacifist, and a landowner upon an enormous scale. In the
early months of the war (then Marquis of Tavistock) he went to Dublin
on his own initiative and obtained or tried to obtain a draft of peace terms
from the German Embassy. Recently he has published pamphlets urging
the impossibility of winning the war and describing Hitler as a misunder–
ood man whose good faith has never really been tested. Julian Symons
writes in a vaguely Fascist strain but is also given to quoting Lenin. Hugh
oss Williamson has been mixed up in the Fascist movement for some
· e, but in the split-off section of it to which William Joyce ("Lord Haw
aw") also belongs. Just before the w.ar he and others formed a fresh
ascist party calling itself the People's Party, of which the Duke of Bed–
ord was a member. The People's Party apparently came to nothing, and
the first period of the war Williamson devoted himself to trying to
ring about a get-together between the Communists and Mosley's followers.
ou see here an example of what I mean by the overlap between Fascism
d pacifism.
What is interesting is that every section of anti-war opinion has one
ion of German radio propaganda, as it were, assigned to it. Since the
