conventional warfare going â seems to belong to a very remote past. We all feared the Bomb once: it was our daily nightmare. Look at the literature that came out of the late forties and the fifties. Take Aldous Huxleyâs
Ape and Essence
with its picture of post-Bomb Southern California reverted to savagery, with mutated freaks killed at birth, seasonal sex, the Lord of the Flies, Bomb-bringer, appeased with prayers and sacrifice. Take L. P. Hartleyâs
Facial Justice
, with a guilt-ridden post-atomic world in which everybody is named after a murderer and all human enterprise is blocked, because all we do is evil. Take
Dr Strangelove
, as late as the early sixties. Take novels like
Fail-Safe.
Orwell failed to see that the terror would come about before a nuclear war could get started. So did everybody else.
He failed to see, also, that mere atomic bombs would be quickly followed by thermonuclear devices of far ghastlier potential. I suppose you could sum up the nuclear age like this â the big powers scared to act except vicariously, or in minor acts of punition in their own spheres of influence; the little nations warring around the immobile feet of the giants. The giants aware of the ease with which the ultimate blast could be triggered, aware too of the consequences â not millions of dead people but a macrotonnage of ruined electronic equipment on both, or all, sides; the pygmies innocent in their belligerence
.
Not innocent so much as shrewdly aware of how far they can go. And how far their economies will permit them to go. Itâs interesting to note, by the way, that the Orwell war rationale hasnât worked in the nuclear age. I mean the using-up of the products of the industrial machine inwasteful war, in order to keep the standard of living low. That notion came from Nazi Germany â guns not butter. The American economy has been marked by colossal expenditure on armaments accompanied by an ever-growing consumption of pacific commodities. Itâs as though the intercontinental missile and the colour television set reside in the same area of economic expansion. In the modern age you canât keep the two kinds of ingenuity apart â the lethal and the allegedly life-enhancing. Indeed, itâs possible to sum up part of the age in terms of a synthesis of the two â you know what I mean, the cosy television evening with the Vietnam war as part of the chromatic entertainment. The American war adventures have been tied up with teaching the world the merits of consumption. Nothing Orwellian there.
But something Orwellian in American imperialism â the building of a kind of Oceania with the centres of power, as with Ingsoc, curiously hidden, dispersed and anonymous. The CIA a kind of Thought Police. The doublethink of democracy, self-determination, freedom of speech and action reconciled with bullying and brutality. A free Francophone Canada? Unthinkable, shoot the dissidents. Too much American capital invested in Our Lady of the Snows. A communist government in Italy? Not to be thought of. I, a harmless British apolitical writer living in Rome, was well aware that the CIA was tapping my telephone. Doing their job, in the name of global freedom, the travelling men of the Thought Police
.
Letâs be sensible. Thereâs nothing in the traditions of the United States which predisposes them to authoritarianism on the European model. The hysterical anti-communism of the fifties can be seen as a symptom, though an unpleasant and dangerous one, of an ingrained hatred of centralized authority. You canât deny that America did a great deal to promote democratic self-determination in western Europe. Truman, Acheson, Marshall Aid. There was a kind of arrogant assumption on Americaâs part that she knew best, that God had endowed her with a moral superiority that was the reward of an enlightened democratic tradition, but thatâs very different from collectivist
Ape and Essence
with its picture of post-Bomb Southern California reverted to savagery, with mutated freaks killed at birth, seasonal sex, the Lord of the Flies, Bomb-bringer, appeased with prayers and sacrifice. Take L. P. Hartleyâs
Facial Justice
, with a guilt-ridden post-atomic world in which everybody is named after a murderer and all human enterprise is blocked, because all we do is evil. Take
Dr Strangelove
, as late as the early sixties. Take novels like
Fail-Safe.
Orwell failed to see that the terror would come about before a nuclear war could get started. So did everybody else.
He failed to see, also, that mere atomic bombs would be quickly followed by thermonuclear devices of far ghastlier potential. I suppose you could sum up the nuclear age like this â the big powers scared to act except vicariously, or in minor acts of punition in their own spheres of influence; the little nations warring around the immobile feet of the giants. The giants aware of the ease with which the ultimate blast could be triggered, aware too of the consequences â not millions of dead people but a macrotonnage of ruined electronic equipment on both, or all, sides; the pygmies innocent in their belligerence
.
Not innocent so much as shrewdly aware of how far they can go. And how far their economies will permit them to go. Itâs interesting to note, by the way, that the Orwell war rationale hasnât worked in the nuclear age. I mean the using-up of the products of the industrial machine inwasteful war, in order to keep the standard of living low. That notion came from Nazi Germany â guns not butter. The American economy has been marked by colossal expenditure on armaments accompanied by an ever-growing consumption of pacific commodities. Itâs as though the intercontinental missile and the colour television set reside in the same area of economic expansion. In the modern age you canât keep the two kinds of ingenuity apart â the lethal and the allegedly life-enhancing. Indeed, itâs possible to sum up part of the age in terms of a synthesis of the two â you know what I mean, the cosy television evening with the Vietnam war as part of the chromatic entertainment. The American war adventures have been tied up with teaching the world the merits of consumption. Nothing Orwellian there.
But something Orwellian in American imperialism â the building of a kind of Oceania with the centres of power, as with Ingsoc, curiously hidden, dispersed and anonymous. The CIA a kind of Thought Police. The doublethink of democracy, self-determination, freedom of speech and action reconciled with bullying and brutality. A free Francophone Canada? Unthinkable, shoot the dissidents. Too much American capital invested in Our Lady of the Snows. A communist government in Italy? Not to be thought of. I, a harmless British apolitical writer living in Rome, was well aware that the CIA was tapping my telephone. Doing their job, in the name of global freedom, the travelling men of the Thought Police
.
Letâs be sensible. Thereâs nothing in the traditions of the United States which predisposes them to authoritarianism on the European model. The hysterical anti-communism of the fifties can be seen as a symptom, though an unpleasant and dangerous one, of an ingrained hatred of centralized authority. You canât deny that America did a great deal to promote democratic self-determination in western Europe. Truman, Acheson, Marshall Aid. There was a kind of arrogant assumption on Americaâs part that she knew best, that God had endowed her with a moral superiority that was the reward of an enlightened democratic tradition, but thatâs very different from collectivist
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