LONDON LETTER
343
(b)
The economic factor.
Rightly or wrongly, the average man in
this country feels that with the dollar loan the Americans have been
pulling a fast one on him. I don't want to go into the merits of the
case; the fact is that that is what people feel. "The Americans are guz-
r
zling, we are starving; we took the brunt of the Blitz, they are reaping
the benefits." This conviction of the man in the street is strengthened by
the pro-American Conservative press, all out to prove that capitalism
means a world of plenty, Labor rule the opposite. The political projec–
tion of this attitude is the fear that an Anglo-American alliance would
mean Britain's complete economic dependence on America. Some social–
ists suspect that Wall Street might put pressure on this country to change
its regime; industrialists, frightened by the Red Scare, are possibly even
more frightened by the dollar-enslavement; and I have heard intelligent
politicians, who are fully aware of the danger of Russian expansion,
argue against the standardization of Anglo-American armaments because
it might increase British industrial dependence on you.
This leads us to the third point: (c)
the psychological factor-i.e.,
that tenacious family ambivalence of feeling between the two nations.
It crops up in every review of American films and books; in the painful
memories which the conduct of certain sections of the American troops
left in this country; in the resentment against American support of the
Zionist case, and against the Americans' "butting in" in the Middle
East. Memories
o[
gratitude for 1940 are mixed with envy because your
continent is rich and this island is poor; reluctant admiration is com–
bined with the highbrow's contempt for your lack of traditions, and the
socialist's almost mystical horror of American Big Business-compared
to which GPU rule appears to be a paternally benevolent regime.
So far I have only spoken of the average Englishman without
particular sympathies for Russia. Obviously the factors I have mentioned
form a solid psychological foundation on which Communists and fellow–
travelers can build. As the psychology of the fellow-traveler has been
repeatedly discussed in these columns I don't intend to go once more
over familiar ground; merely to point out some more recent, additional
symptoms in the European variant of this mental epidemic:
( 1)
The soul-searching attitude.
This is particularly frequent among
the left intelligentsia here and in France, and may be summed up as
follows:
"You say the Russians deport people, censor their newspapers and
are not quite up to ideal humanitarian standards. This may or may not
be so--it is so difficult to get at undistorted facts-but even granted that
some of these things happen, who am I to get indignant about them
while my own country condones the persecution of Greek socialists,
throws tear-gas at the survivors of Belsen, fraternizes with Franco, etc.,
