Читать книгу The Common Sense of War and Peace - H.G. Wells - Страница 5

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THE question of what we and our Allies are fighting for is a difficult one. If we are not fighting against some new, strange and evil way of life, but only against gangster violence on a monstrous scale, then it seems that our war must be primarily a defensive one. But is it altogether a defensive one?

Official sources seem uncertain about that. Even Lord Halifax in his more exalted moments talks vaguely of a new and better order that is to emerge from this war. In that case we are not primarily on the defensive at all; we are fighting for a new order in the world. But is this merely what is called an "inspiriting" utterance? Useful in war time but of no subsequent value? I am reminded of Mr. Lloyd George's "Land fit for Heroes" in-was it 1917 or 1919? Let us probe a little deeper into this question. Because plainly it is a quite fundamental question for us and our allies and our adversaries and the neutral States of the world. Are we fighting to save an old order, the stately homes of England, the huntin', the fishin', or are we honestly fighting to make a new world? Sooner or later our rulers and representatives must come clear upon this point. They do not do that now. Their propaganda has a bafflng flavour of insincerity. Our Foreign Office has to speak out and tell the world its War Aims, and so far it has failed to speak out and do that. Until their Governments do that, the Allies remain ambiguous and perplexing even to those who would be their associates and friends. The present Churchill government is manifestly a provisional government, torn internally by this conflict between the ideas of a defensive and of a creative war. Are we fighting to keep or to make?

Many of us still hope to see still more creative governments than exist at present, both in Britain and France. Meanwhile let us go on clearing up our minds. Let us ask therefore, What is the reality on our side, we who are fighting against these gangs and groups of individuals who, with such manifest insincerity, are professing to be new social systems? Are we so very different? What is our reality? What is this Western Civilisation of ours for which we are asked to take every conceivable risk, for which we are asked to make every possible sacrifice? There again we find people all giving the most completely contradictory accounts of what we stand for. Surely we have to clear these contradictions out of the way? One account must be right and the rest wrong. If you will read a booklet called The British Case (a ninepenny Government publication I commend to your most earnest study) you will learn that our present Minister for Foreign Affairs lends his name to the assertion that we are fighting not simply for the Birtish Empire throughout the world, but for the Christian religion. We are fighting a religious war for Catholicism. Inspired utterances in high quarters echo this assertion. It is a "Crusade." But do many Christians really believe this is a war of religion? Did our boys who went to be exposed to overwhelming numbers in Belgium, ill-equipped and betrayed by that Belgian King who must have been educated so badly at Eton, did they really march to the tune of Onward Christian Soldiers? Were they really fighting to make the world safe for Bishops and Eton boys? From this appalling document you will be able to Judge how much Lord Halifax (i.e. the British Foreign Office) cares for the hardships of the Jews in the concentration camps or the restoration of slavery in Central Europe. . His mind is largely early-Kipling, Stalky and Co., With a strong dash of Eric, or Little by Little. The greater part of the British Empire, you will realise, is still, from the point of view of Lord Halifax and his associates, no more than "the lesser breeds within the law." "Asiatics," for example, like the Aga Khan, are put in their places in this great missionary enterprise upon which we are engaged. What our Turkish Allies think of this war for the Church of England I cannot imagine. Do we English as a main objective in this war really want to shove our religion and our gentry down the throats of all man kind? This canting stuff is far below the liberal British Imperialism of the nineteenth century.

Yet our people fight, and we fight with a sense of rightness. The diffused, unorganised popular mentality of the British people is far higher than that of the governing and political ciasses. What is it we fight for? I think most of our soldiers and common people will be in agreement that we are fighting for something very much greater than any Empire. Something far beyond the cramped ideas of that dismal pamphlet, something we may all agree in speaking of as democratic civilisation. We feel that we have a reality in that, a reality that justifies our appeal to world opinion, against our antagonists.

Nowadays you will encounter the most diverse statements about this "democratic civilisation" of ours. And the curious thing is that all these diverse ideas have a certain plausibility. They involve no irreconcilable contradictions. One man will say that democratic civilisation is an expansion of medieval Christendom; another will present it as a natural development of the GraecoRoman culture; Marxists, perhaps rather nearer actuality, will declare we are living in the last stages of the Capitalist System; and others will talk of the peculiar geographical advantages of Britain or of Europe, and the peculiar energy of the northern peoples, which gave our Western Civilisation the leadership of the world. I suggest to you that all these ideas have factors of truth in them, but that none of them is the whole truth; that the reality of our Western Civilisation is a vast complex of traditions, usages, rules, laws, dominations and devices; which at the opening of the present century did in effect dominate the whole world. It was, I suggest, a vast growth, a happy concatenation of accidents, containing no guarantee of its permanence.

And now, because the forces that assembled it have ebbed, and new unanticipated forces have come into destructive activity, it has ceased to dominate the world.

One aspect of this dominant Western Civilisation of the nineteenth century was the universal validity of the gold sovereign. I would call your particular attention to that. When the history of our times comes to be written, I think historians will be disposed to call it the Gold Standard Age, or the Age of Investments.

It produced a definite way of life and a way of thinking of its own. I shall try presently to define the characteristics of that distinctive culture in a brief section on the Blue Swastika and the downward class war of the Rentier type.

Prosperous people, during that phase of monetary domination, distributed their savings, and felt sure of their dividends, levied their tribute in fact, from China to Peru. With a passport and a letter of credit they could go in comparative freedom and safety all over the world. Throughout that phase, in spite of much social injustice and oppression, slums, sweating, exploitation there was a working order in the world, that gave a fortunate minority at least, but, be it noted, a considerable and increasing minority, security and a fairly hopeful life. There was real progress and ample justification for optimism.

I won't attempt to analyse the forces that created this transient world domination, this Golden Age of the investor. I don't think historians have ever attempted to make any proper estimate of those forces. The repeated discovery of new gold deposits had a lot to do with it. But towards the end of the Victorian era, something happened. That phase passed its climax. What was it happened?

I suggest that what happened was that this huge complex of Westernised Civilisation began to fall to pieces, through the operation of novel and entirely unforeseen forces which I will examine a little later, and also I suggest that nothing has yet appeared to restore or replace that complex. If so, then we are not faced with a conflict of two types of State or anything of that sort-we are in the presence of one single world system which is breaking down, this wild German belligerence aiming at power and power only, is part of the breakdown, and nothing whatever has appeared yet to replace this collapsing order. Which will therefore go on collapsing.

We are fighting confusedly and we may fight unsucc:ssfully because our minds are divided. We all fight against the blind conquest drive of Nazidom. But that is merely fighting a symptom. Some of us are scrabbling to preserve the collapsing order at any cost; while on the other hand an increasing number are only too anxious to get rid of the old order and lay the foundations of a new one. The two conceptions are incompatible. We cannot have it both ways. We have to make our choice. Is this a war to salvage a world manifestly far gone in decay, or is it a vast tragic clearance for a new order? The only answer with hope in it is the latter alternative. Let me now do my best to make this half-instinctive, creative war aim, definite and acceptable.