Читать книгу The Common Sense of War and Peace - H.G. Wells - Страница 4

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THIS present warfare differs from all previous warfare in many respects. To others of these I will call your attention later, but here I would concentrate upon the difficulty created by the absolute unreliability of these Totalitarian States.

The world is full of warfare. We in this country are spending seven or eight million pounds a day, I gather, on the war. It is not only costing us seven or eight million pounds a day. In spite of everything that sincere supporter of the present monetary system, Mr. Maynard Keynes, may say or do, this war plainly means bankruptcy and inflation within quite a reasonable time. In quite a little while we may find money in our pockets that will practically buy nothing. So far as I can see, all the gold in the world is gravitating now to the vaults of the United States of America. When it is all safely interred there, America may be considered to have won the Gold Standard game. I presume that then the rest of the world will have to work out a new system for exchanging labour and commodities. We shall still have our hands, our heads, our land and our raw materials, and we are not likely to starve quietly because all these things are mortgaged to a remote creditor.

But how to re-animate those lands and that material is likely to be a difficult and contentious process. It is a matter that our experts in business management should be doing now, most urgently. They should be making schemes for barter and a new and independent exchange system now. It may not be necessary, but it is highly advisable to have it ready and thought out. So far as I know, nothing of the sort is being done, and in our careless British fashion we are likely to be caught by this problem unawares, and undergo all the stress and suffering that unpreparedness entails. Not only here but all over Europe a progressive social disorganisation is plainly apparent; day by day we can see things getting worse, education being disorganised and demoralised, the standard of living sinking, freedom dwindling. The first question, therefore, we have to put to ourselves is: Is it possible to get any peace now? What sort of peace can we possibly have at the present time? We have read speeches and articles by Mr. Lloyd George advocating a peace settlement as soon as possible. Mr. C. R. Buxton issued a booklet, The Case for an Early Peace. Lord Beaverbrook, before his change of heart, urged it in his papers. But ask these people: "Is it a peace that would allow us to disarm?"

"No," they will say: "we must keep armed to the teeth." Is it a peace that would lift in any way that apprehension of sudden attack which broods upon all the world to-day? No such peace is conceivable at present. Anything you could call a peace would be so insecure that it would still cost almost as many millions pound a day and do nothing material to arrest the progressive dislocation of. our lives. The balloon barrages would still have to keep in the sky and the troops under arms. Such a peace would be a mere technical change of no practical importance at all. Instead of being technically at war as we are now, we should be technically at peace, as China and Japan are at peace now. When England and France declared war last September, they started something that it is going to be excessively difficult to stop. Even Mr. Chamberlain has observed that it is a new sort of war altogether. I believe we are all in practical agreement about that.

Let us ask then: what is the real nature of this strange, new-fashioned war which we are so incapable of ending in any etfettive way? We must exert our minds to answer that. Obviously, we cannot make any hopeful plans for restoring order to the world until we know the real nature of its disorder. Do we know?--are we clear on this matter?

I suggest we are not. Weare all ridiculously at sixes and sevens, because so many people, who set up to be leaders of thought, prefer to be eloquent and demonstrative when they ought to think. At present one can hear of a fantastic variety of views about what is hapPening. Only one set of them can be right. Shall we try to find out what that right set of answers is? What, in the broadest terms, is happening to the world?

I want to ask J Are we fighting against anything definite at all? You will hear it constantly repeated that this is "a war of ideologies." You will hear about the Totalitarian State, National-Socialism, Bolshevism; and you will hear it stated and implied that these are new and more complicated methods of State organisation that are coming into existence, that the "individual" is to be subordinated to these new elaborate State systems, and that the present struggle is a struggle to preserve our individual freedom and self-respect from envelopment in this serpent of the Totalitarian State.

Either this is true or it is not true-I submit that it is not true.

I am going to ask a very simple question indeed: Do any of these States really exist at all? Is there such a thing as a Totalitarian State in being? Is there a National-Socialist State? Is there now anything in the nature of a responsible working system that you can call Bolshevism? Is there any sort of definite working social organisation anywhere corresponding to any of these words?

If these things are in existence, if these alleged new and more elaborate State organisations are living realities in our world, then they must consist almost entirely of people who have definite places in them; people who have specific jobs; people who know they are safe if they do their jobs properly; people as sure in their actions as cog-wheels in a watch, knowing clearly how they stand to one another, knowing clearly how this wonderful new organised State, in which they live and move and have their being, stands towards all the rest of the world. We must in fact be face to face with a higher, more complicated order, with a shape and a character and a mind of its own with which we can deal. It will have a character with which we can negotiate and upon which we can rely.

Well, where is there such a living "ideology" in operation? Where is that higher organisation? Our politicians and journalists reach out in search of such a system, and do they find anything of the sort? I suggest that nowhere on earth do these things, Totalitarianism, National-Socialism, Bolshevism, exist, and that when distinguished writers and radio talkers call this "a war of ideologies," they are talking nonsense. They are talking about intellectual fantasies and phantoms infinitely remote from the grim realities which crowd upon us.

Bolshevism, I admit, did at one time seem to contain the promise of a system of constructive ideas. Twenty years ago, when I had the privilege of talking to Lenin, I found that fine, valiant and subtle intelligence entangled in the beard of Karl Marx, and doing its best to struggle out of that huge fuzz to real constructiveness. But he was learning the job from the ground up! He was reading Chiozza Money's Electrification of Holland, of all books! and he was full of a scheme for the electrification of Russia-which rather overlooked the relative difference in the distances between centres in the two countries and the consequent cost in copner cables. I have described the talk I had with him in Russia in the Shadows, and in that book you will find I foretold clearly the devastating danger of Marxist planlessness-pIanlessness and dogmatism.

"Come again," said Lenin, "in ten years' time." Six years ago I did go again to see what was happening in Russia, and then I had the privilege of talking to Stalin. That talk also is on record.* I wanted to know the structure of the new society he was producing to work Bolshevism. What was its character, its spirit, its working organisation?

* Published as a pamphlet by The New Statesman.

I had just come from America. The New Deal was being crippled in America for want of a competent Civil Service. What was Russia doing? I hoped rather than expected to find Russia one vast Civil Service falling into order. I found nothing of the sort. I found in Russia no development of any securely ordered society whatever, no system in which a man could do his job without fear, in which he knew where he stood, in which one man could trust another and speak fearlessly to him, no society in which there was any real developing social structure. In certain material particulars Russia had progressed with the rest of the world, but not nearly so fast as the rest of the world, and chiefly by importing American notions, tractors and so forth. The only organisation that had developed was the secret police and personal espionage. Russia was no more a new social order in 1934 than it had been in 1920. It was less so. It was plainly relapsing into autocracy.

In a recent publication, Sir Nevile Henderson has told how he went to Germany to find a Germany with which this country could deal. And what report has he brought back? Nothing but gossip about personalities, nothing but talk about individuals, how, like the present British Foreign Minister, Lord Halifax, he shot with Goering and gossiped with Goebbels, and what fine fellows they all were together; gossip and nothing else-and why?

Because manifestly there was no National-Socialist State there for him to deal with, nothing but forceful groups and individuals, incalculable because there was neither law nor ideas to control them. So far from any State, new order, or National Socialism having triumphed over the individual, the truth manifest in his revelations is that groups and individuals had triumphed over any system whatever, and that National-Socialism, like the Totalitarian State, and like, I am afraid, Bolshevism at the present time, was just theoretical eyewash for a purely individualistic control.

The truth is not that the State has suppressed the individual in Germany, but that forcible and entirely irresponsible individuals have captured the State. Trotsky, in his published denunciation of Stalin, witnesses to the same thing in Russia. He presents the Government of Russia as Henderson presents the Government of Germany, as entirely a handful of individuals, running amok in a steadily disintegrating commumty.

That, I suggest, is the essential difficulty of our situation. There is nothing there to make peace with. You cannot make peace with disorder. Disorder, gang tyrannies, a collapse into a brigand world; that is what we fight against! And now let us ask ourselves what we are fighting for.