The recent article by Tribune’s Vienna correspondent[1] provoked a
spate of angry letters which, besides calling him a fool and a liar
and making other charges of what one might call a routine nature,
also carried the very serious implication that he ought to have kept
silent even if he knew that he was speaking the truth. He himself
made a brief answer in Tribune, but the question involved is so
important that it is worth discussing it at greater length.
Whenever A and B are in opposition to one another, anyone who attacks or
criticises A is accused of aiding and abetting B. And it is often
true, objectively and on a short-term analysis, that he is making
things easier for B. Therefore, say the supporters of A, shut up and
don’t criticise: or at least criticise “constructively”, which
in practice always means favourably. And from this it is only a short
step to arguing that the suppression and distortion of known facts is
the highest duty of a journalist.
Now, if one divides the world into A and B and assumes that A represents
progress and B reaction, it is just arguable that no fact detrimental
to A ought ever to be revealed. But before making this claim one
ought to realise where it leads. What do we mean by reaction? I
suppose it would be agreed that Nazi Germany represented reaction in
its worst form or one of its worst. Well, the people in this country
who gave most ammunition to the Nazi propagandists during the war are
exactly the ones who tell us that it is “objectively” pro-Fascist
to criticise the USSR. I am not referring to the Communists during
their anti-war phase: I am referring to the Left as a whole. By and
large, the Nazi radio got more material from the British left-wing
press than from that of the Right. And it could hardly be otherwise,
for it is chiefly in the left-wing press that serious criticism of
British institutions is to be found. Every revelation about slums or
social inequality, every attack on the leaders of the Tory Party,
every denunciation of British imperialism, was a gift for Goebbels.
And not necessarily a worthless gift, for German propaganda about
“British plutocracy” had considerable effect in neutral
countries, especially in the earlier part of the war.
Here are two examples of the kind of source from which the Axis
propagandists were liable to take their material. The Japanese, in
one of their English-speaking magazines in China, serialised
Briffault’s Decline and Fall of the British Empire. Briffault, if
not actually a Communist, was vehemently pro-Soviet, and the book
incidentally contained some cracks at the Japanese themselves; but
from the Japanese point of view this didn’t matter, since the main
tendency of the book was anti-British. About the same time the German
radio broadcast shortened versions of books which they considered
damaging to British prestige. Among others they broadcast E.M.
Forster’s A Passage to India. And so far as I know they didn’t
even have to resort to dishonest quotation. Just because the book was
essentially truthful, it could be made to serve the purposes of
Fascist propaganda. According to Blake,
A truth that’s told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent,
and anyone who has seen his own statements coming back at him on the Axis
radio will feel the force of this. Indeed, anyone who has ever
written in defence of unpopular causes or been the witness of events
which are likely to cause controversy, knows the fearful temptation
to distort or suppress the facts, simply because any honest statement
will contain revelations which can be made use of by unscrupulous
opponents. But what one has to consider are the long-term effects. In
the long run, can the cause of progress be served by lies, or can it
not? The readers who attacked Tribune’s Vienna correspondent so
violently accused him of untruthfulness, but they also seemed to
imply that the facts he brought forward ought not to be published
even if true. 100, 000 rape cases in Vienna are not a good
advertisement for the Soviet regime: therefore, even if they have
happened, don’t mention them. Anglo-Russian relations are more
likely to prosper if inconvenient facts are kept dark.
The trouble is that if you lie to people, their reaction is all the more
violent when the truth leaks out, as it is apt to do in the end. Here
is an example of untruthful propaganda coming home to roost. Many
English people of goodwill draw from the left-wing press an unduly
favourable picture of the Indian Congress Party. They not only
believe it to be in the right (as it is), but are also apt to imagine
that it is a sort of left-wing organisation with democratic and
internationalist aims. Such people, if they are suddenly confronted
with an actual, flesh-and-blood Indian Nationalist, are liable to
recoil into the attitudes of a Blimp. I have seen this happen a
number of times. And it is the same with pro-Soviet propaganda. Those
who have swallowed it whole are always in danger of a sudden
revulsion in which they may reject the whole idea of Socialism. In
this and other ways I should say that the net effect of Communist and
near-Communist propaganda has been simply to retard the cause of
Socialism, though it may have temporarily aided Russian foreign
policy.
There are always the most excellent, high-minded reasons for concealing the
truth, and these reasons are brought forward in almost the same words
by supporters of the most diverse causes. I have had writings of my
own kept out of print because it was feared that the Russians would
not like them, and I have had others kept out of print because they
attacked British imperialism and might be quoted by anti-British
Americans. We are told now that any frank criticism of the Stalin
regime will “increase Russian suspicions”, but it is only seven
years since we were being told (in some cases by the same newspapers)
that frank criticism of the Nazi regime would increase Hitler’s
suspicions. As late as 1941, some of the Catholic papers declared
that the presence of Labour Ministers in the British Government
increased Franco’s suspicions and made him incline more towards the
Axis. Looking back, it is possible to see that if only the British
and American peoples had grasped in 1933 or thereabouts what Hitler
stood for, war might have been averted. Similarly, the first step
towards decent Anglo-Russian relations is the dropping of illusions.
In principle most people would agree to this: but the dropping of
illusions means the publication of facts, and facts are apt to be
unpleasant.
The whole argument that one mustn’t speak plainly because it “plays
into the hands of” this or that sinister influence is dishonest, in
the sense that people only use it when it suits them. As I have
pointed out, those who are most concerned about playing into the
hands of the Tories were least concerned about playing into the hands
of the Nazis. The Catholics who said “Don’t offend Franco because
it helps Hitler” had been more or less consciously helping Hitler
for years beforehand. Beneath this argument there always lies the
intention to do propaganda for some single sectional interest, and to
browbeat critics into silence by telling them that they are
“objectively” reactionary. It is a tempting manœuvre, and I have
used it myself more than once, but it is dishonest. I think one is
less likely to use it if one remembers that the advantages of a lie
are always short-lived. So often it seems a positive duty to suppress
or colour the facts! And yet genuine progress can only happen through
increasing enlightenment, which means the continuous destruction of
myths.
Meanwhile, there is a curious backhanded tribute to the values of liberalism in
the fact that the opponents of free speech write letters to Tribune at all. “Don’t criticise,” such people are in effect saying: “don’t reveal inconvenient facts. Don’t play into the hands of the enemy!” Yet they themselves are attacking Tribune’s policy with all the violence at their command. Does it not occur to them that if the principles they advocate were put into practice, their letters would never get printed?
[footnote 1]: When Tribune's Vienna correspondent had reported the appalling conditions in the city and, quite truthfully, described the monstrous behaviour of some of the Russian occupying troops, several readers protested against what they called “this slander” on the Red army.