A year of prophesying

by H. G. Wells

Now the alarming and disconcerting thing is that the Court of King’s Bench showed itself far less intelligent, far less alive to the realities of the Indian situation, than General Dyer’s military superiors in India. It is impossible to read the reports of the case without realising that the mutual irritation of English and Indian, the profound temperamental incompatibility of the two worlds, was manifested in that Court in an exaggerated degree. The case transcended its proper limits and became a wrangle on the whole Punjab question. Mr. Justice McCardie took upon himself to inform the world at large and the people of India in particular, with all the weight and prestige of the High Court upon him, “speaking with due deliberation,” that in his view General Dyer had been wrongly punished by the Secretary of State for India.

The case of General Dyer was not before the Court. This announcement was a lawless outbreak on the part of Justice McCardie. How much due deliberation there was in Justice McCardie’s utterance and how much instinctive passion may be judged by the fact that General Dyer does not seem to have been punished by the Secretary of State for India at all; his case did not come up to the Secretary of State for India; he was punished for his hasty excessive violence by his own proper military superiors in India. Internal dissension restrained the jury from inflicting excessive and exemplary damages upon Sir C. Sankaran Nair for his careless libel; the damages awarded amounted to five hundred pounds, but it will be very difficult, it will be impossible, to persuade the sore and sensitive, quick and resentful mind of India that Britain has not gone back upon even such clumsy and insufficient apologies and atonements as she had made for Amritsar and its associated sins.

There comes a time in the relationships of nations and peoples, as in the relationships of partners and lovers and married couples, when offences become irrevocable. The breaking point seemed to have been reached by the British in India. The argument is practically over, the negotiations at an end. When in the opening stages of the Great War Ireland was bilked of Home Rule there remained nothing for it, between Britain and Ireland, but a practical separation. Englishmen like myself, who regard the present detachment of Ireland and England as excessive and regrettable, were entangled, in spite of themselves, in that offence; and we were helpless to avert its just and logical consequences. So now with India. It is a sort of treachery to Indians to go on talking liberally to them, to seek their friendship, to attempt co-operations, with Dyer’s impenitent rifles reloaded and our Justice McCardies ready and eager to tear up our poor attempts to make amends.

XLV
THE SPIRIT OF FASCISM: IS THERE ANY GOOD IN IT AT ALL?

12.7.24

During the last few weeks an extraordinary fuss has been made over the brutal murder of one of Signor Mussolini’s most able and honourable opponents. Fascism has been put upon its defence. Weak but distinct sounds of disapproval have come from the more respectable sections of the Italian public. Even the London Times has published leading articles that seem to hint at a faint reluctant perception that the Italian dictator is remotely connected with the bloody and filthy terrorism on which his power rests.

It is, I say, an extraordinary fuss, a remarkable and almost unaccountable outbreak of the public conscience of Europe. Because it is surely a matter of common knowledge that hundreds of people have been beaten and tortured to death by the Fascisti, that innumerable outrages of a peculiarly dirty kind have been committed, that arson, wreckage, and threats are the normal expedients of Italian political life, and that the power of Mussolini has been built up upon the organisation of such violence. These things have been going on for some years in Italy. Ambitious imitators have arisen in France and Germany and Britain. British “Crusaders” have gathered for the blessing of the Duke of York and strange young men in Oxford and Cambridge have braved misunderstanding by wearing badges bearing the challenging initials B. F. Young Italians in black shirts have even been allowed to insult the decent British dead by cocking snooks—or performing whatever the Fascist salutation is—holding out an arm and twiddling the fingers or something of that sort—at the Westminster Cenotaph. In America, however, there does not seem to be much of a Fascist movement. There has been no temptation for America, with the Ku Klux Klan in active operation and a long tradition of lynch law, to adopt the Italian model. But there have been many American expressions of sympathy with Fascism. And then in the full tide of sunny approval just one more little murder occurs—a murder not essentially different from many other Fascist murders—and the world wakes up to the infernal vileness of a thing that has been plainly before its eyes for years.

There never was so remarkable a case of the camel bearing itself bravely up to the very moment of the last straw.

To me this break back from Fascism is astonishing. I am inclined to think that Signor Mussolini found it so too. His prompt repudiation of the crime, his eager search for the body of his butchered antagonist, his sacrifice of valued cronies and close associates seem to show that his rich, emotional, rhetorical nature was very considerably scared. Nitti’s house had been burnt and Nitti driven abroad. No one had protested, except perhaps Nitti. No apology to Nitti has been made by Mussolini, and no apology, no reparation for the stupid, malicious violence shown him, is likely to be made. And now, simply because Matteotti had been more difficult to handle and had got himself rather nastily killed, this uproar! It may be some time before the dictator is really comfortable again about the matter.

I do not propose to speculate here whether the storm will blow itself out and leave Signor Mussolini still on his blood-stained pedestal doing his solemn gestures of good government before the world, or whether we are in sight of the beginning of the end of Fascism. What interests me most is the complex of motives that drives behind Fascism, Ku Klux Klanism, the British Crusaders, and all these romantic attempts to organise ultra-legal tyrannies. The destructive instinct that gives us all a pleasure in smashing plates is plainly there, the natural malice against the unlike or the disturbing is very powerfully present, and the craving to exercise power. The stuff is in all of us, almost ineradicably so. (It betrays itself in this article.) We repress these impulses to a very large extent largely out of a fear of our fellow creatures’ reprisals. But by joining a great society with high and disinterested professions of purpose we can conspire with a certain number of our fellows for a common indulgence of this malignant drive, and we can get some protection from the consequences and establish a real sense of moral justification. Many of us who would never dare to stab a negro in the street because of his offensive contrast with ourselves, or even to push him off the sidewalk if we encountered him alone, can respond to the call for his lynching with a tremulous reassurance. Many an Italian employer who would not dare to face his workers in a crisis about wages will help burn up a Labour Party office with a stout heart.