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Orwell has some biting remarks on the intellectual accommodations that English writers were willing to make for Soviet gangsterism.
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Our civilization produces in increasing numbers two types, the gangster and the pansy. They never meet, but each is necessary to the other. Somebody in eastern Europe “liquidates” a Trotskyist; somebody in Bloomsbury writes a justification of it. And it is, of course, precisely because of the utter softness and security of life in England that the yearning for bloodshed - bloodshed in the far distance - is so common among our intelligentsia. Mr. Auden can write about “the acceptance of guilt for the necessary murder” because he has never committed a murder, perhaps never had one of his friends murdered, possibly never even seen a murdered man’s corpse.
-- George Orwell, “Political Reflections on the Crisis” (1938) in Essays (Everyman’s Library, p. 100)
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Our civilization produces in increasing numbers two types, the gangster and the pansy. They never meet, but each is necessary to the other. Somebody in eastern Europe “liquidates” a Trotskyist; somebody in Bloomsbury writes a justification of it. And it is, of course, precisely because of the utter softness and security of life in England that the yearning for bloodshed - bloodshed in the far distance - is so common among our intelligentsia. Mr. Auden can write about “the acceptance of guilt for the necessary murder” because he has never committed a murder, perhaps never had one of his friends murdered, possibly never even seen a murdered man’s corpse.
-- George Orwell, “Political Reflections on the Crisis” (1938) in Essays (Everyman’s Library, p. 100)
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