LONDON LETTER
79
of the war. It seems to me very important. to realize that we have been
wrong, and say so. Most people nowadays, when their predictions are
falsified, just impudently claim that they have been justified, and squeeze
the facts accordingly. Thus many people who took the line that I did
will in effect claim that the revolution has _already happened, that class
privilege and economic injustice can never return, etc., etc. Pacifists
claim with even greater confidence that Britain is already a Fascist coun–
try and indistinguishable from Nazi Germany, although the very fact
that they are allowed to write and agitate contradicts them. From all
sides there is a chorus of "I told you so," and complete shamelessness
about past mistakes.
Appea~ers,
Popular Front-ers, Communists, Trot–
skyists, Anarchists, Pacifists, all claim-and in almost exactly the same
tone of voice-that
their
prophecies and no others have been borne out
by events. Particularly on the Left, political thought is a sort of mastur–
bation fantasy in which the world of facts hardly matters.
But to return to my own mistakes. I am not here concerned with
correcting those mistakes, so much as with explaining why I made them.
When I suggested to you that Britain was on the edge of drastic political
changes, and had already made an advance from which there could be
no drawing back, I was not trying to put a good face on things for the
benefit of the American public. I expressed the same ideas, and much
more violently, in books and articles only published at home. Here are
a few samples:
"The choice is between Socialism and defeat. We must go forward,
or perish."
"Lai~sez-faire
capitalism is dead." "The English revolution
started several years ago, and it began to gather momentum when the
troops carne back from Dunkirk." "With its present social structure
England cannot survive." "This war, unless we are defeated, will wipe
out most of the existing class privileges." "Witl1in a year, perhaps even
' V,ithin six months, if we are still unconquered, we shall see the rise of
something that has never existed before, a specifically
English
Socialist
movement." "The last thing the British ruling class wants is to acquire
fresh territory." "The real quarrel of the Fascist powers with British
imperialism is that they know that it is disintegrating." "The war will
bankrupt the majority of the public schools if it co11tinues for another
year or two." "This war is a race between the consolidation of Hitler's
empire and the growth of democratic consciousness."
And so on and so on. How could I write such things? Well, there is
a clue in the fact that my predictions, especially about military events,
were by no means always wrong. Looking back through my diaries and
the news commentaries which I wrote for the BBC over a period of two
years, I see that I was often right as against the bulk of the leftwing
intelligentsia. I was right to the extent that I was not defeatist, and after
all the war has not been lost. The majority of leftwing intellectuals,
whatever they might say in print, were blackly defeatist in 1940 and
