Note where the fundamental dishonesties of our propaganda lead us in the matter of policy, in what we declared to be one of the main objects of the War: the erection of Europe upon a basis of nationality. Our whole campaign implied that the problem resolved itself into the destruction of one great Power, who denied that principle, as against the Allies, who were ready to grant it. How near that came to the truth, the round score of ‘unredeemed’ nationalities deliberately created by the Allies in the Treaties sufficiently testifies. If we had avowed the facts, that a Europe of completely independent nationalities is not possible, that great populations will not be shut off from the sea, or recognise independent nationalities to the extent of risking economic or political strangulation, we should then necessarily have gone on to devise the limitations and obligations which all must accept and the rights which all must accord. We should have been fighting for a body of principles as the basis of a real association of States. The truth, or some measure of it, would have prepared us all for that limitation of independence without which no nationality can be secure. The falsehood that Germany alone stood in the way of the recognition of nationality, made a treaty really based on that principle (namely, upon all of us consenting to limit our independence) impossible of acceptance by our own opinion. And one falsehood leads to another. Because we refused to be sincere about the inducements which we held out in turn to Italy, Bulgaria, Rumania, Greece, we staggered blindly into the alternative betrayal first of one party, then of another. Just as we were faithless to the principle of nationality when we acquiesced in the Russian attitude towards Finland and Poland, and the Italian towards Serbia, so later we were to prove faithless to the principle of the Great State when we supported the Border Nationalities in their secession from Russia. We have encouraged and helped States like Ukrainia, Azerbaidjan. But we have been just as ready to stand for ‘Great Russia,’ if Koltchak appeared to be winning, knowing perfectly well that we cannot be loyal to both causes.
Our defence is apparent enough. It is fairly illustrated in the case of Italy. If Italy had not come into the war, Serbia’s prospect of any redemption at all would have been hopeless; we were doing the best we could for Serbia.[92]
Assuredly—but we happened to be doing it by false pretences, sham heroics, immeasurable hypocrisy. And the final effect was to be the defeat of the aims for which we were fighting. If our primary aims had been those we proclaimed, we could no more have violated the principle of nationality to gain an ally, than we could have ceded the Isle of Wight to Germany, and the intellectual rectitude which would have enabled us to see that, would also have enabled us to see the necessity of the conditions on which alone a society of nations is possible.
The indispensable step to rendering controllable those passions now ‘uncontrollable’ and disrupting Europe, is to tell the truth about the things by which we excuse them. Again, our fundamental nature may not change, any more than it would if we honestly investigated the evidence proving the innocence of the man, whose execution we demand, of the crime which is the cause of our hatred. That investigation would be an effort of the mind; the result of it would be a change in the direction of our feelings. The facts which it is necessary to face are not abstruse or difficult. They are self-evident to the simplest mind. The fact that the ‘person’ whose punishment we demand in the case of the enemy is not a person at all, either bad or good, but millions of different persons of varying degrees of badness and goodness, many of them—millions—without any responsibility at all for the crime that angers us, this fact, if faced, would alter the nature of our feelings. We should see that we were confronted by a case of mistaken identity. Perhaps we do not face this evidence because we treasure our hate. If there were not a ‘person’ our hate could have no meaning; we could not hate an ‘administrative area,’ nor is there much satisfaction in humiliating it and dominating it. We can desire to dominate and humiliate a person, and are often ready to pay a high price for the pleasure. If we ceased to think of national States as persons, we might cease to think of them as conflicting interests, in competition with one another, and begin to think of them instead as associations within a great association.
Take another very simple truth that we will not face: that our arms do, and must do, the things that raise our passions when done by the enemy. Our blockades and bombardments also kill old women and children. Our soldiers, too, the gallant lads who mount our aeroplanes, the sailors who man our blockades, are baby-killers. They must be; they cannot help it if they are to bomb or blockade at all. Yet we never do admit this obvious fact. We erect a sheer falsehood, and then protect ourselves against admitting it by being so ‘noble’ about it that we refuse to discuss it. We simply declare that in no circumstances could England, or English soldiers, ever make war upon women and children, or even be unchivalrous to them. That is a moral premise beyond or behind which patriotism will not permit our minds to go. If the ‘nobility’ of attitude had any relation to our real conduct, one would rejoice. When, during the armistice negotiations, the Germans exacted that they should be permitted means, after the surrender of their fleet, of feeding their people, a New York paper declared the condition an insult to the Allies. ‘The Germans are prisoners,’ it said, ‘and the Allies do not starve prisoners.’ But one discovers a few weeks later that these noble gestures are quite compatible with the maintenance of the blockade, on the ground that Germans for their sins ought to be starved. We then become the agents of Providence in punitive justice.
When the late Lord Fisher[93] came out squarely and publicly in defence of the killing of women and children (in the submarine sinking) as a necessary part of war, there seemed a chance for intellectual honesty in the matter; for a real examination of the principles of our conduct. If we faced the facts in this honest sailor-like fashion there was some hope either that we should refuse to descend to reprisals by disembowelling little girls; or, if it should appear that such things are inseparable from war, that it would help to get a new feeling about war. But Lord Fisher complains that the Editor of the paper to which he sent his letter suppressed it from the later editions of his paper for fear it should shock the public. Shock!
You see, our shells falling on schools and circuses don’t disembowel little girls; our blockades don’t starve them. Everybody knows that British shells and British blockades would not do such things. When Britain blockades, pestilence and hunger and torture are not suffering; a dying child is not a dying child. Patriotism draws a shutter over our eyes and ears.
When this degree of self-deception is possible, there is no infamy of which a kindly, humane, and emotionally moral people may not prove themselves capable; no moral contradiction or absurdity which mankind may not approve. Anything may become right, anything may become wrong.
The evil is not only in its resultant inhumanities. It lies much more in the fact that this development of moral blinkers deprives us of the capacity to see where we are going, and what we are crushing underfoot; and that may well end by our walking over the precipice.
During the War, we formed judgments of the German character which literally make it sub-human. For our praise of the French (during the same period) language failed us. Yet less than twenty years ago the rôles were reversed.[94] The French were the mad dogs, and the Germans of our community of blood.