WAR AND PACIFISM
417
anarchists, Stalinists, Trotskyists, pacifists and New Statesman moderates.
Julian Huxley and Herbert Read, two of its hest·known contributors, can
hardly he accused of Fascism!
The reference to the article by Julian Symons is, in my opinion,
unjust. Orwell gives no idea of its subject and does not quote a single
sentence to prove his assertion that it is "vaguely Fascist"! No one in
England, except Orwell and possibly the Stalinists, would think of sug·
gesting that Julian Symons has any Fascist tendencies. On the contrary, he
has been consistently anti·Fascist, and the article mentioned, which attacks
Now's
former lack of a definite political line, is Marxist in tendency.
I do not propose to defend Hugh Ross Williamson or the Duke of
Bedford-although I would mention that neither of them belonged to the
B.U.F.
and that the People's Party, although it may have contained former
Fascists, was not a Fascist party and contained many honest pacifists and
socialists, like Ben Green, whose wrongful imprisonment and maltreatment
in gaol caused a major scandal. I would also point out that if we are to
expose antecedents, Orwell himself does not come off very well. Comrade
Orwell, the former police official of British Imperialism (from which the
Fascists learnt all they know) in those regions of the Far East where the
sun at last sets for ever on the bedraggled Union Jack! Comrade Orwell,
former fellow traveller of the pacifists and regular contributor to the
pacifist
Adelphi-which
he now attacks! Comrade Orwell, former extreme
Left·Winger, I.L.P. partisan and defender of anarchists (see
Homage to
Catalonia)
! And now Comrade Orwell who returns to his old imperialist
allegiances and works at the B.B.C., conducting British propaganda to fox
the Indian masses!
It
would seem that Orwell himself shows to a surpris·
ing degree the overlapping of left·wing, pacifist and reactionary tendencies
of which he accuses others!
Adverting to
Now,
I would mention that this review has abandoned
its position as an independent forum, and has now become the cultural
review of the British anarchist movement. Perhaps Mr. Orwell will regard
this as another proof of his mystic and hlimpish trinity.
Finally, I would point out two inaccuracies in Orwell's letter. The
anarchist pamphlet to which he refers is entitled "The Russian Myth,"
and the editor of the
Adelphi
during the earlier part of the war was not
John Middleton Murry, hut the late Max Plowman.
May 19, 1942
RICHMOND, ENGLAND
Alex Comfort:
I see that Mr. Orwell is intellectual-hunting again, in your pages this
time, and that he has made the discovery that almost every writer under
thirty in this country has his feet already on the slippery slope to Fascism,
or at least to compromise.
It
seems I am a "pure pacifist of the other–
cheek" variety, a piece of horticultural eulogy I'm glad I did not miss, and
that I deserve a spanking for associating with such disreputahles as the
