Fariha’s Reviews > Essays > Status Update

Broadly speaking, Communist propaganda depends upon terrifying people with the (quite real) horrors of Fascism. It also involves pretending—not in so many words, but by implication—that Fascism has nothing to do with capitalism. Fascism is just a kind of meaningless wickedness, an aberration, "mass sadism", the sort of thing that would happen if you suddenly let loose an asylumful of homicidal maniacs.

In the first half of this article I suggested that the real struggle in.Spain, on the Government side, has been between revolution and counter-revolution; that the Government, though anxious enough to avoid being beaten by Franco, has been even more anxious to undo the revolutionary changes with which the outbreak of war was accompanied.

The peasant and the worker hate feudalism and clericalism ; but so does the "liberal" bourgeois, who is not in the least opposed to a more modem version of Fascism, at least so long as it isn't called Fascism. The "liberal" bourgeois is genuinely liberal up to the point where his own interests stop. He stands for the degree of progress implied in the phrase "la carriere ouverte aux talents".

It is unfortunate that so few people in England have yet caught up with the fact that Communism is now a counter-revolutionary force ; that Communists everywhere are in alliance with bourgeois reformism and using the whole of their powerful machinery to crush or discredit any party that shows signs of revolutionary tendencies.

The basic trouble with all orthodox Marxists is that, possessing a system which appears to explain everything, they never bother to discover what is going on inside other people's heads. That is why in every western country, during the last dozen years, they have played straight into the hands of their adversaries.

Hence the frightful intellectual dishonesty which can be observed in nearly all propagandist critics. They are employing a double set of values and dodging from one to the other according as it suits them. They praise or dispraise a book because its tendency is Communist, Catholic, Fascist or what-not ; but at the same time, they pretend to be judging it on purely aesthetic grounds.

At that time, even more than now, art for art's sake was going strong, though the phrase itself had been discarded as ninety-ish ; "art has nothing to do with morality" was the favourite slogan. The artist was conceived as leaping to and fro in a moral, political and economic void, usually in pursuit of something called "Beauty", which was always one jump ahead.

The truth is that ours is not an age for mysterious romances about lunatics in ruined chateaux, because it is not an age in which one can be unaware of contemporary reality. You can't ignore Hitler, Mussolini, unemployment, aeroplanes and the radio ; you can only pretend to do so, which means lopping off a large chunk of your consciousness.

This is not an inherent fault of the sociological novel—in fact probably a majority of the novels worth reading are novels-with-a-purpose. Compare Zola, for instance. The scenes of violence Zola describes in Germinal and La Debacle are supposed to symbolise capitalist corruption, but they are also scenes. At his best, Zola is not synthetic. He works under a sense of compulsion, and not like an amateur cook...

By far the best thing in the book is a memory from the author's youth, an incident-imaginary, but typical of real facts—in the Dutch colonial war of 1900-12. It describes the torture of a villager who knew, or was supposed to know, where a rebel chieftain was hiding. Apart from the depth of imagination with which the scene is pictured, it brings home as a thousand political pamphlets could not do...