LONDON LETTER
323
of responsibility, which always weighs heavily on the Labor Party,
will be particularly strong when the prospect ahead is of dragging an
exhausted country through another two years of war, and that there will
be some pulling of punches when the last-minute struggle begins. Of
course one doesn't know what piece of trickery the Conservatives have
in store this time. The election will be more or less
a.
straight fight be–
tween Labor and the Conservatives. Both Common Wealth and the
Communists are likely to increase their representation, but not to a
significant extent, and the come-back which the Liberal Party is at–
tempting
is
not likely to be much of a success. The Liberals have a
big
asset in Beveridge, but they no longer represent any definite block of
interests or opinions, and they advocate several different policies which
cancel out.
It
is thought that they may win another ten or twenty seats,
but that their main achievement will be to split the Labor vote in town
areas and the Conservative vote in rural ones.
I have only been home a week, and I cannot make up my mind
whether the Russian mythos is as powerful as it was before. A good
observer who has been
in
England throughout the past three months
gives me his
opinion
that pro-Russian feeling is cooling off rapidly and
that former sympathisers are much dismayed by Russian foreign policy
and by such episodes as the arrest of the 16 Polish delegates. Certainly
the press is less adulatory than
it
was before, but
this
does not necessarily
indicate a change in popular feeling. I have always held that pro-Rus–
sian sentiment in England during the past ten years has been due much
more to the need for an external paradise than to any real interest in the
Soviet regime, and that it cannot be countered by an appeal to the facts,
even when these are known. A thing that has much struck me in recent
years is that the most enormous crimes and disasters-purges, deporta–
tions, massacres, famines, imprisonment without trial, aggressive wars,
broken treaties-not only fail to excite the big public, but can actually
escape notice altogether, so long as they do not happen to fit in with
the political mood of the moment. Thus it is possible
now
to rouse a
certain amount of indignation about Dachau, Buchenwald etc., and yet
before the war
it
was impossible to get the average person to take the
faintest interest in such things, although the most horrible facts had
had abundant publicity.
If
you could have taken a Gallup poll in 1939
I imagine you would have found that a majority, 9r at least a very big
minority, of adult English people had not even heard of the existence
of the German concentration camps. The whole thing had slid off their
consciousness, since it was not what they then wanted to hear. So also
with the USSR.
If
it
could be proven tomorrow that the Russian con–
centration camps in the Arctic actually exist, and that they contain
eighteen million prisoners, as some observers claim, I doubt whether
this would make much impression on the Russophile section of the public.
