London Letter
DEAR
EDITORS,
It
is
close on four years since I first wrote to you, and I have told
you several times that I would like to write one letter which should be
a sort of commentary on the previous ones. This seems to be a suitable
moment.
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 comment-
~~
'
I
I have tried to tell the truth in these letters, and I believe your
readers have got 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 generalizations based on little or no evidence, and also, from time
to time, spiteful or rn,isleading 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 k,ind 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 con–
troversies 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 win the war without democratizing it. In 1940 I had
written, "Either we turn this into a revolutionary war, or we lose it,"
