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PARTISAN REVIEW
Spanish civil war. The popular goodwill towards the USSR in this
country partly depends on the fact that few Englishmen have ever seen
a Russian. And one has only to look round the English-speaking world,
with its labyrinth of cultural hatreds, to see that speaking the same
language is no guarantee of friendship.
Whatever happens, Britain will not go the way that France went,
and the growing animosity between British and Americans may not have
any real importance till the war is over. But it might have a direct
influence on events if-as is now widely expected-Germany is defeated
some time
in
1943 or 1944 and it then takes about two more years to
settle Japan. In that case the war against Japan might quite easily
be
represented as "an American war," a more plausible variant of "a Jewish
war." The masses in Britain have it fixed in their minds that Hitler is
the
enemy, and it is quite common to hear soldiers say "I'm packing up
as soon as Germany is finished." That doesn't mean that they genuinely
intend or would be able to do this, and I think in practice majority
opinion would
be
for staying in the war, unless by that time Russia had
changed sides again. But the question "What are we fighting for?" is
bound to come up in a sharper form when Germany is knocked out, and
there are pro-Japanese elements in this country which might be clever
enough to make use of popular war-weariness. From the point of view
of the man in the street the war in the Far East is a war for the rubber
companies and the Americans, and in that context American unpopularity
might be important. The British ruling class has never stated its real
war aims, which happen to be unmentionable, and so long as things went
badly Britain was driven part of the way towards a revolutionary strategy.
There was always the possibility, therefore, of democratising the war
without losing it in the process. Now, however, the tide begins to
turn
and immediately the dreary world which the American millionaires and
their British hangers-on intend to impose upon us begins to take shape.
The British people, in the mass, don't want such a world, and might say
so fairly vigorously when the Nazis are out of the way. What they want,
so far as they formulate their thoughts at all, is some kind of United
States of Europe dominated by a close alliance between Britain and the
USSR. Sentimentally, the majority of people in this country would far
rather he in a tie-up with Russia than with America, and it is possible
to imagine situations in which the popular cause would become
the
anti-American cause. There were signs of this alignment in the reactions
to the Darlan business. Whether any leader or party capable of giving
a voice to these tendencies will arise even when Hitler is gone and Europe
is in turmoil, I do not know. None
is
visible at this moment, and
the
reactionaries are tightening their grip everywhere. But one can at least
foresee at what point a radical change will again become possible.
There is not much more news. Another Fascist party has started
up,
the British National Party. It is the usual stuff-anti-Bolshevik, anti-Big
Business
1
etc. These people have got hold of some money from soptewhere
