THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT

The Fatal Division Of Camps
Al the Editor's request, Mr. Douglas Jerrold is expressing in these Week by Week articles his own independent views, which are not necessarily those of this newspaper.
IN the current number of the Dublin Review, Mr. Christopher Dawson has pointed out how fatal to clear thinking about that Christian Freedom for which we are today fighting has been the division of thinkers and writers, as well as politicians. into two opposite camps, " The Left " and " The Right." This warning has now been endorsed by his Eminence Cardinal Hinsley in a letter announcing his intention to set up the new organisation. The Sword of the Spirit, It is a warning which must not be allowed to fall on deaf ears.
The whole country, certainly not excluding the Catholic section of the population, is by long tradition deeply divided along the line of cleavage which is generally indicated by these terms Left and Right. This division is not healed, but only temporarily and rather suspiciously put on one side, by the existing political truce. On our ability as a nation to heal this division permanently depends our ability to build, after the war is won, a world worthy of the sacrifices which victory will entail.
We shall not heal this division by pretending that it does not exist, and still less by pretending that truth and wisdom lie somewhere midway between the two positions. We must define our terms before we can see the nature of the present division, and the conditions necessary for the reconciliation of the ideals of those who today proclaim themselves members of one group or the other.
THE LABEL "RIGHT" THE intellectual position of those individuals, groups and parties generally spoken of as "The Right" is deliberately confused by the propagandists of " The Left," a fact which is in itself revealing. The men of the Left are proud of being on the Left. Their famous and
foolish slogan : " No enemies to the Left," is sufficient proof. But no man ever admits to being a Right-wing extremist. The reactionary himself pays lip-service to the general feeling that the men of the Left are somehow on the side of the angels by calling himself a Counter-Revolutionary. In the last decade, this habit has been exploited with extreme skill by the revolutionary junta in Germany, who have carried the Army, most of " big business," and almost the whole of the small bourgeoisie along the primrose path of a revolution headed directly and clearly towards Communism, by announcing themselves to be Counter-Revolutionaries, i.e., men of the Right irrevocably opposed to Communism but animated by a firm purpose to reform and improve out of all recognition the old and worn-out capitalist system. This trick, for trick it has been proved to be by the RussoGerman Agreement, has not been exposed in this country because our own Left-wingers are only too anxious to tar with the Nazi or Fascist brush everyone who does not see, in the nationalisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange, the short-cut to Utopia. Anti-Socialists have retaliated by accusing everyone guilty of uttering mildly liberal sentiments of being a revolutionary Communist.
The Spanish Civil War added immensely to the fun and fury of this game of mutual mud-slinging. Conservatives, Liberals and Labour men who objected to mass-murder and religious persecution were labelled Fascists. Liberals who had so far forgotten the history of the Great Rebellion and the Glorious Revolution as to insist that a military revolt was a threat to the cause of freedom were accused not merely of muddle-headedness but of complicity with the murder-gangs of Barcelona and Madrid. Simultaneously there was a reaction. sufficiently comic but for the underlying tragedy. in the traditional
attitude to Italy. For three generations, a passionate admiration of Italian culture and institutions was an indispensable passport to Liberal society. After 1936, the slightest doubt as to the inability of the Italians to produce anything more valuable than ice-cream was sufficient to brand even the most devoted Liberal as a Fascist, a proGerman. and a confessed enemy of the whole human race. Tantutn religio potuit suadere n2alorum.
The truth is that the men of the Right can never by their nature be either Fascist or Communist: they are the supporters. by implication if not by definition, of something like the existing social order. That is why, in the horse-show Continental parliaments of yesterday (Ou sons les neiges d'antan'?), they sat on the Speaker's right. They might be hard-boiled business men or mere thieves, or members of a olass still fortunate enough to be privileged—landowners, trade unionists belonging to sheltered industries, government servants or rentiers—or merely men convinced on intellectual grounds that neither socialism, communism nor fascism, nor any amount of state regulation or bureaucratic tyranny can compensate man for the loss of his freedom. They may, on the other hand, be ecstatic dreamers or ardent pioneers of some form of distributist state. but forced to put off the organisation of their own revolution by the one great need of defeating a revolution of a different kind which would put an end to freedom as they understand it.
THE ESSENCE OF THE " RIGHT " POSITION THE essence of the so-called Right position is that a healthy society is something which, in their judgment, cannot be dissociated from economic independence, from private ownership, and from a rough and ready, but still wide, distribution of property. Most of the effective reforms have come from the men of the Right because of their very real anxiety to preserve a system which, if it does not give them the ideal society which they want, at least does not finally close the door upon their dreams.
Obviously the men of the Right are a very mixed bunch. Some of them, more numerous in Left-wing cartoons than in real life, but still numerous enough, can see no further than the mystical virtues of competition. Others, including men so diverse as Edmund Burke,
Mr. Hilaire Belloc and His Holiness Pope Pius XII, base their attitude on a closely-reasoned philosophy of life. Others. again, are just anxious to keep as much as they have succeeded in wringing, legitimately or illegitimately. from their fellow-men. Finally, the vast army of the intellectually inert will always be found in the party of the status quo, although an important exception to this generalisation must he noted. The intellectual inertia among the professionally intelligent classes is very marked, and these people appear to drift
as a rnattcr of course to the Left.
All these different groups. except the last—the intellectually inert have been accused at one time or another of being Fascists, because the men of the Left have taken Hitler so confidently at his own valuation as an anti-Communist. All other anti-Communists must, it was argued, be in secret sympathy with so powerful a champion of their cause. Actually, in every European country, the leaders of Fascism are recruited, where they have been recruited from the political classes, almost exclusively from the men of the Left. The cleavage between the Fascist and the Communist is not ideological at all. It is purely social. The revolutionary of the working-class dreads the dictatorship of the proletariat. Both the working-class and the lower middle-class (which is the revolutionary section of the middle-class), being propertyless and considerably stifled by the operation of finance-capitalism, are liable, in any revolutionary situation, to rapid, almost instantaneous, changes of allegiance from one camp to another. Mussolini carried with him almost all the old Socialist party in Italy. Hitler converted the overwhelming majority of the German Communists, who are now his most ardent supporters. General Franco had no difficulty in securing for his much more liberal, but still dictatorial regime, the support of Spanish labourers and peasants.
Big business has, of course, supported Fascism, National Socialism and the Spanish Phalange. But that is because Big Business will always support the regime as long as it has a bargaining position. All these movements left Big Business with a bargaining position, because they needed its support in their early days, but ultimately they will swallow Big Business as certainly as any proletarian revolution.
MEN OF THE " LEFT" THE men of the Left in this country, be it noted, have exactly the
same attitude to Big Business as Hitler and Mussolini. They propose to use the great structure of credit and co-ordinated enterprise as a starting point for their socializing activities. They have already begun, with the London Transport Board. It would be ridiculous, however, to accuse the Labour Party of being, for that reason, the tools of Lord Ashfield and his shareholders.
The fundamental distinction between the men of the Left and the rest of their fellows lies in two things. They have an immense and unshaken belief in the power of a state bureaucracy to coordinate, direct and plan the whole life of a society, however complex. and they see nothing subversive of human rights or even of human dignity in a world where the will and personality of every individual is subordinated to the state bureaucracy. Their objection to the Fascists, who also share both these views. is a personal one. They do not trust the sincerity of middle-class revolutionaries. The political classes on the Left are, in one sense, quite right in this. They know that they are indispensable to the proletarian revolution. They know that they are infinitely less so in a revolution supported by the lower ranks of the professions who are in revolt against the lack of opportunity to exercise their talents, whereas the proletarian revolutionary is in revolt against intolerable conditions of living.
The dynamic of the Left wing movement is a genuine idealism which is inevitably absent from the men of the Right. This idealism does not, it is evident, survive the access of any revolutionary movements to power. It is. however, a very potent force in carrying them to power. To announce that you will go all lengths to remedy an injustice, that you will sacrifice all your traditions and comforts and complacencies to right the wrongs of the under-dog, naturally appeals strongly to the under-dog. To say, as the men of the Right must, that while you sympathise deeply, no immediate and revolutionary action will provide the desired result is extraordinarily refreshing news to
everyone except the under-dog. The moment, therefore, that the under-dogs are in a majority, as during an economic crisis or after an unsuccessful war, a revolutionary situation is created.
THOSE WHO VALUE FREEDOM
'["HE first thing to realise in this business of " left " and " right " is I. that the fight between Communists and Fascists is essentially a sham fight. Stalin and Hitler appear to be the only two people in
Europe who realise this, but after all, they are in the best position
to judge. The real fight is between those who at the same time value freedom and understand what it is, and those who, either because they do not value it or because they do not understand it, are ready to sacrifice it.
There are plenty on the Right, as on the Left, who do not value
freedom. This is as true of the hard-boiled capitalist, or of the
merely passively-possessive renticr, as of the Communist. On the
other hand, there are on the Right many who understand what freedom is without necessarily valuing it very highly, and many on the Left who value it without understanding. And there is on the Right a hard-core of Catholic-minded men who do both. These facts provide the opportunity for The Sword of the Spirit. Freedom as an ideal derives directly from Christianity. the first religion to teach the dignity of the human personality. Our task is not to restore the belief in this dignity, which is, thank Heaven, very much alive, but to show what conditions of life, what opportunities and what rewards
are necessary to its preservation, and why. In that task we can confidently expect to enlist all honest men, whether of the Right or the Left. The rest we can, and must, fight to the end. Happily they are in England a very small minority and intellectually negligible. Nor are they fighting men. We are.