The suppression of everything good of the enemy was paralleled by the suppression of everything evil done by our side. You may search Press and cinemas in vain for one single story of brutality committed by Serbian, Rumanian, Greek, Italian, French, or Russian—until the last in time became an enemy. Then suddenly our papers were full of Russian atrocities. At first these were Bolshevik atrocities only, and of the ‘White’ troops we heard no evil. Then when later the self-same Russian troops that had fought on our side during the War fought Poland, our papers were full of the atrocities inflicted on Poles.
By the daily presentation during years of a picture which makes the enemy so entirely bad as not to be human at all, and ourselves entirely good, the whole nature of the problem is changed. Admit these premises, and policies like those proposed by Mr Wells become sheer rubbish. They are based on the assumption that Germans are accessible to ordinary human influences like other human beings. But every day for years we have been denying that premise. If the daily presentation of the facts is a true presentation, the New York Tribune is right:—
‘We shall not get permanent peace by treating the Hun as if he were not a Hun. One might just as well attempt to cure a man-eating tiger of his hankering for human flesh by soft words as to break the German of his historic habits by equally futile kind words. The way to treat a German, while Germans follow their present methods, is as a common peril to all civilised mankind. Since the German employs the method of the wild beast he must be treated as beyond the appeal of generous or kind methods. When one is generous to a German, he plans to take advantage of that generosity to rob or murder; this is his international history, never more conspicuously illustrated than here in America. Kindness he interprets as fear, regard for international law as proof of decadence; agitation for disarmament has been for him the final evidence of the degeneracy of his neighbours.’[90]
That conclusion is inevitable if the facts are really as presented by the Daily Mail for four years. The problem of peace in that case is not one of finding a means of dealing, by the discipline of a common code or tradition, with common shortcomings—violences, hates, cupidities, blindnesses. The problem is not of that nature at all. We don’t have these defects; they are German defects. For five years we have indoctrinated the people with a case, which if true, renders only one policy in Europe admissible; either the ruthless extermination of these monsters, who are not human beings at all; or their permanent subjugation, the conversion of Germany into a sort of world lunatic asylum.
When therefore the big public, whether in America or France or Britain, simply will not hear (in 1919) of any League of Nations that shall ever include Germany they are right—if we have been telling them the truth.
Was it necessary thus to ‘organise’ hate for the purposes of war? Violent partisanship would assuredly assert itself in war-time without such stimulus. And if we saw more clearly the relationship of these instincts and emotions to the formation of policy, we should organise, not their development, but their restraint and discipline, or, that being impossible in sufficient degree (which it may be), organise their re-direction to less anti-social ends.
As it was, it ended by making the war entered upon sincerely, so far as public feeling was concerned, for a principle or policy, simply a war for no purpose beyond victory—and finally for domination at the price of its original purpose. For one who is attracted to the purpose, a thousand are attracted to the war—the simple success of ‘our side.’ Partisanship as a motive is animal in its deep, remote innateness. Little boys and girls at the time of the University boat race will choose the Oxford or the Cambridge colours, and from that moment passionately desire the victory of ‘their’ side. They may not know what Oxford is, or what a University is, or what a boat race is: it does not in the least detract from the violence of their partisanship. You get therefore a very simple mathematical explanation of the increasing subservience of the War’s purpose to the simple purpose of victory and domination for itself. Every child can understand and feel for the latter, very few adults for the former.
This competitive feeling, looking to victory, domination, is feeding the whole time the appetite for power. These instincts, and the clamant appetite for domination and coercion are whetted to the utmost and then re-inforced by a moral indignation, which justifies the impulse to retaliation on the ground of punitive justice for inhuman horrors. We propose to establish with this outlaw a relationship of contract! To bargain with him about our respective rights! In the most favourable circumstances it demands a very definite effort of discipline to impose upon ourselves hampering restrictions in the shape of undertakings to another Power, when we believe that we are in a position to impose our will. But to suggest imposing upon ourselves the restrictions of such a relationship with an enemy of the human race.... The astonishing thing is that those who acquiesced in this deliberate cultivation of the emotions and instincts inseparable from violent partisanship, should ever have expected a policy of impartial justice to come out of that state of mind. They were asking for psychological miracles.
That the propaganda was in large part conscious and directed was proved by the ease with which the flood of atrocity stories could suddenly be switched over from Germans to Russians. During the time that the Russian armies were fighting on our side, there was not a single story in our Press of Russian barbarity. But when the same armies, under the same officers, are fighting against the Poles, atrocities even more ingenious and villainous than those of the Germans in Belgium suddenly characterise the conduct of the Russian troops. The atrocities are transposed with an ease equal to that with which we transfer our loyalties.[91] When Pilsudski’s troops fought against Russia, all the atrocities were committed by them, and of the Russian troops we heard nothing but heroism. When Brusiloff fights under Bolshevik command our papers print long Polish accounts of the Russian barbarities.
We have seen that behind the conception of the enemy as a single person is a falsehood: it is obvious that seventy millions of men, women, and children, of infinitely varying degrees of responsibility, are not a single person. The falsehood may be, in some degree, an unwitting one, a primitive myth that we have inherited from tribal forbears. But if that is so, we should control our news with a view to minimizing the dangers of mythical fallacies, bequeathed to us by a barbaric past. If it is necessary to use them for the purposes of war morale, we should drop them when the war is over, and pass round the word, to the Churches for instance, that on the signing of an armistice the moratorium of the Sermon on the Mount comes to an end. As it is, two years after the Armistice, an English Vicar tells his congregation that to bring Austrian children to English, to save them from death by famine, is an unpatriotic and seditious act.