Читать книгу Darkness and the Light - Olaf Stapledon - Страница 8

OF THE detailed historical events of this age of fluctuation I cannot recover much. Of the war which is present to me as I write this book I remember almost nothing. A few shreds of recollection suggest that it resulted in a British victory of sorts, but I place no reliance on this surmise. If it is correct, the great opportunity afforded by this victory, the opportunity of a generous peace and a federal order in Europe, must have been missed; for rival imperialisms continued to exist after that war and real peace was not established. Subsequent wars and upheavals come rather more clearly into my mind. For instance, I seem to remember a defeat of the democratic peoples, led at first by the British, but later by the North Americans, against a totalitarian Europe. For a while the struggle was between Britain alone and the whole of Europe, martialled once more by Germany. Not till the remnant of the British forces had been driven into Scotland, and were desperately holding a line roughly equivalent to the Roman Wall, did the American power begin to make itself felt, and then only for a while; for in America, as elsewhere, the old order was failing, its leaders had neither the imagination nor the courage to adjust themselves to the new world-conditions. Consequently, when at last their turn carne they were quite incapable of organizing their haphazard capitalism for war. The American people began to realize that they were the victims of incompetence and treachery, and the population of the Atlantic seaboard demanded a new regime. In this state of affairs resistance became impossible. Britain was abandoned, and North America reverted to a precarious isolationism knowing that the struggle would very soon begin again.

This Euro-American war was certainly not the war which is being waged while I write this book, in spite of obvious similarities. At this time the Germans had recovered from that extravagant hooliganism which had turned the world against them in an earlier period. They had in a manner reverted from Nazism to the more respectable Prussianism. Other facts also show that this was not our present war. Both India and South Africa had left the British Empire and were already well- established independent states. Moreover, weapons were now of a much more lethal kind, and the American coast was frequently and extensively bombarded by fleets of European planes. In this war Scotland had evidently become the economic centre of gravity of Britain. The Lowlands were completely industrialized, and huge tidal electric generators crowded the western sounds. Tidal electricity had become the basis of Britain's power. But the British, under their effete financial oligarchy, had not developed this new asset efficiently before the German attack began.

After the defeat of the democracies it seemed that the cause of freedom had been lost for ever. The Russians, whose initial revolutionary passion had long since been corrupted by the constant danger of attack and a consequent reversion to nationalism, now sacrificed all their hard-won social achievements for a desperate defence against the attempt of the German ruling class to dominate the planet. China, after her victory over Japan, had split on the rock of class strife. Between the Communist North and the Capitalist South there was no harmony. North America became a swarm of 'independent' states which Germany controlled almost as easily as the Latin South. India, freed from British rule, maintained a precarious unity in face of the German danger.

But the Totalitarian world was not to be. The end of the German power came in an unexpected manner, and through a strange mixture of psychological and economic causes. Perhaps the main cause was the decline of German intelligence. Ever since the industrial revolution the average intelligence of the European and American peoples had been slowly decreasing. Contraception had produced not only a decline of population but also a tendency of the more intelligent strains in the population to breed less than the dullards and half-wits. For in the competition for the means of comfort and luxury the more intelligent tended in the long run to rise into the comfortable classes. There they were able to avail themselves of contraceptive methods which the poorer classes could less easily practise. And because they took more forethought than the dullards for their personal comfort and security, they were more reluctant to burden themselves with children. The upshot was that, while the population as a whole tended to decline, the more intelligent strains declined more rapidly than the less intelligent; and the European and American peoples, and later the Asiatics, began to suffer from a serious shortage of able leaders in politics, industry, science, and general culture.

In Germany the process had been intensified by the persecution of free intelligences by the former Hitlerian Third Reich, and by the subsequent Fourth Reich, which had defeated America not by superior intelligence but superior vitality and the resources of an empire which included all Europe and most of Africa.

The Fourth Reich had persecuted and destroyed the free intelligences in all its subject lands, save one, namely Norway, where it had been necessary to allow a large measure of autonomy.

The Norwegians, who many centuries earlier had been the terror of the European coastal peoples, had in recent times earned a reputation for peaceable common sense. Like several others of the former small democracies, they of had attained a higher level of social development than their mightier neighbours. In particular they had fostered intelligence. After their Conquest by the Fourth Reich their remarkable fund of superior minds had stood them in good stead. They had successfully forced their conquerors into allowing them a sort of 'dominion status'. In this condition they had been able to carry on much of their former social life while fulfilling the functions which the conquerors demanded of them. Two influences, however gradually combined to change their docility into energy and berserk fury. One was the cumulative effect of their experience of German domination. Contact with their foreign masters filled them with contempt and indignation. The other influence was the knowledge that under German exploitation their country had become the world's greatest generator of tidal power, and that this power was being used for imperial, not human, ends.

The German dictatorship had, indeed, treated the Norwegians in a very special manner. Other conquered peoples had been simply enslaved or actually exterminated. The British, for instance, had been reduced to serfdom under a German landed aristocracy. The Poles and Czechs and most of the French had been persecuted, prevented from mating and procreating, and finally even sterilized, until their stock had been completely destroyed. But the Scandinavian peoples were in a class apart. The Nordic myth had a strong hold on the German people. It was impossible to pretend that the Norwegians were not Nordic, more Nordic than the Germans, who were in fact of very mixed stock. Moreover Norwegian maritime prowess was necessary to the German rulers; and many Norwegian sailors were given responsible positions for the training of Germans and even the control of German ships. Finally, the exploitation of tidal power in the fjords had produced a large class of Norwegian technicians with highly specialized skill. Thus little by little the small Norwegian people attained for itself a privileged positionin the German Empire. Prosperity and relative immunity from German tyranny had not brought acceptance of foreign domination. The Norwegians had preserved their independent spirit while other subject peoples had been utterly cowed by torture.

The initial fervour of the old Hitlerian faith had long since spent itself. Gone was the crazy zeal which had led millions of carefully indoctrinated young Germans to welcome death for the fatherland to drive their tanks not only over the fleeing refugees but over their own wounded, and to support a cruel tyranny throughout Europe. The German ruling minority was by now merely a highly organized, mechanically efficient, ruthless, but rather dull-witted and rather tired and cynical bureaucracy. The German people, who claimed to have taken over from the British the coveted 'white man's' burden, were in fact the docile serfs of a harsh and uninspired tyranny.

There came a time when the Reich was seriously divided over the question of succession to the semi-divine post of Fuhrer. (The original Fuhrer, of course, was by now a mythical figure in the past, and the empire was sprinkled with gigantic monuments to his memory.) Suddenly the Norwegians, seizing the opportunity afforded by dissension in the German aristocracy, set in action a long-prepared system of conspiracy. They seized the tidal generators and military centres, and declared Norway's independence. They also issued a call to all freedom-loving peoples to rise against their tyrants. The Norwegians themselves were in a very strong position. Not only did they control the Reich's main source of power, but also a large part of the mercantile marine and Imperial Navy. The huge sea-plane force was also mainly on their side. Though at first the rebellion seemed a forlorn hope, it soon spread to Britain and Northern France. Insurrection then broke out in Switzerland, Austria, and southern Germany. The decisive factors were the revived passion for freedom and for human kindness, and also the new, extremely efficient and marvellously light accumulator, which enabled not only ships but planes to be driven electrically. The new accumulator had been secretly invented in Norway and secretly manufactured in large quantities in Spitsbergen. Even before the insurrection many ships and planes had been secretly fitted with it. After the outbreak of war a great fleet of electric planes, far more agile than the old petrol planes, soon broke the nerve of the imperial force. Within a few weeks the rebels were completely victorious.

With the fall of the German Reich the human race was once more given an opportunity to turn the corner from barbarism to real civilization. Once more the opportunity was lost. The free Federation of Europe, which was expected to bring lasting peace, was in fact no free federation at all. Germany was divided into the old minor states, and these were disarmed. This would have been reasonable enough if the victorious Norwegians, realizing the precariousness of the new order, had not insisted on retaining control of their own tidal generators and their air fleet, which, though disarmed, could very easily be turned into bombers. Thus, they hoped, they would be able to control and guide the Federation during its delicate infancy. Inevitably the demand for 'the disarmament of Norway' was used by the secret enemies of the light in their effort to dominate the Federation. After a period of uncertain peace, full of suspicion and intrigue, came the great European Civil War between the Scandinavian peoples and the rest of the European Federation. When the federated peoples had reduced one another to exhaustion, Russia intervened, and presently the Russian Empire stretched from the Behring Straits to the Blasket Islands.

During the first, confused phase of my post-mortal experience I failed to gain any clear vision of events in Russia. I have an impression of alternating periods of light and darkness. Sometimes the truly socialistic and democratic forces dominated, sometimes the totalitarian and despotic. In spite of the grave perversion of the original generous revolutionary impulse, so much of solid worth had been achieved that the Soviet system of states was never in serious danger of disintegration. During the long peril from the German Fourth Reich the Russian dictator, who was now known as the 'Chief Comrade', enforced a very strict military discipline on the whole people. When Germany had fallen, a wave of militant communist imperialism swept over the vast Russian territories. Hosts of 'Young Communists' demanded that 'the spirit of Lenin' should now be spread by tank and aeroplane throughout the world. The conquest of Europe was the first great expression of this mood. But other forces were also at work in Russia. After the destruction of German power, true socialistic, liberal, and even reformed Christian tendencies once more appeared throughout European Russia and in Western Europe. The Western peoples had by now begun to sicken of the sham religion of ruthless power. Christian sects, experimental religious movements, liberal-socialist and 'reformed communist' conspiracies were everywhere leading a vigorous underground life. It seemed to me that I must be witnessing the turning-point of human history, that the species had at last learnt its lesson. But in this I was mistaken. What I was observing was but one of the many abortive upward fluctuations in the long age of inconclusive struggle between the will for the light and the will for darkness. For, though men utterly loathed the hardships of war, their moral energy remained slight. Their loyalty to the common human enterprise, to the spiritual task of the race, had not been strengthened.

Thus it was that the movement which had seemed to promise a regeneration of Russia succeeded only in creating an under-current of more lucid feeling and action. The power of the dictatorship remained intact and harsh; and was able, moreover, to inspire the majority, and particularly the young, with superb energy and devotion in the spreading of the Marxian ideals which the regime still claimed to embody, but had in fact sadly perverted.