342
PARTISAN REVIEW
late to PR readers the reasons for the certitude that, if Russia succeeded
in driving a wedge between England and America, our civilization would
be
lost. Nor that the last, faint, flickering hope of avoiding war within
the next fifteen years lies in collective security against the only potential
aggressor. But the English Laborist's outlook is necessarily different. Some
of my oldest friends in this country happen to
be
among the rebel MPs
of the Keep Left group; and after some night-long discussions with them
I began to wonder whether, if I were in their shoes, my outlook wouldn't
be different too. I shall try to list here some of the reasons which make
the dilemma almost insoluble for the Englishman-and which drive the
British Left to their wild goose chase after a "thiro way," the chimera
of an independent, neutral British policy maneuvering between the two
hemispheres.
(a)
The geographical factor.
If
the British Isles could be cut loose of
their continental moorings and ferried, say, into the Caribbean Sea, the
choice would be easy. As it is, the memories of the Blitz, of V-1 and V-2
don't make the prospect of becoming America's aircraft-carrier or atom–
bomb absorber particularly enticing. As
Th e New Statesman
put it with
its inimitable naivete: "Our only hope is that by atomic neutrality we
should avoid provoking either side to destroy us as an arsenal or as a
base." Logically, this hope is of course moonshine, as the reward of
Belgian neutrality
in
two wars, the example of Holland and Norway, of
Finland, the Baltic and Balkan countries, prove. But if you happen to be
an Englishman with a family and a house and a garden, you will
naturally cling, against logic and reason, to the hope of getting some–
how out of the necessity of taking sides. You will remember that England
as a target is twenty miles from the Continent but three thousand miles
from America. Your cunning subconscious may even whisper to you
that in the case of your benevolent neutrality toward Russia, the Amer–
icans would hesitate to let loose atom bombs or radio-active clouds
against these islands, whereas in the opposite case the Russians would
not hesitate to do so. And finally, people here have been told for six
years what nice chaps the Russians are, and that Eastern democracy
is only just a shade different from ours ; so what's it all about anyway,
and why get mixed up in other people's quarrels?
I think that if one argues against ap,peasement one has to take
account of these realities. The psychological relation between England
and America today is not unlike the relation of France to England
be–
tween the two wars. The French remembered and resented the fact that
in the First World War their country had been devastated while Britain
had remained practically untouched. The most effective argument of
the French Fifth Column in 1939 was "the British want to fight this
war to the last Frenchman." Feeling in this country toward the USA
is today much the same.
