Even as We Speak by Clive James Read Free Book Online Page B

precepts from classic Marxism. He got at least one of them, and perhaps the
most misleading one, from classic Leninism – a still more dubious patrimony. Even in Orwell’s own time, it should have been evident that the idea was a misconception. The mere existence
of Sweden, for example, was enough to refute it. Sweden had a capitalist system, advanced social welfare, and no imperial dreams that had not died with Gustavus Adolphus. After Orwell’s
death, when the last of the British Empire was given up and the final accounts came in, it became easy to question whether colonialism had ever yielded a dividend, let alone supported Britain as a
capitalist economy. But Orwell, who justly prided himself on his capacity to puncture received notions, should have questioned the assumption when questioning was hard. Had he done so, however, it
might have made him a less effective speaker for the independent Left. It might have sapped the confidence that energized his style. Any successful style is a spell whose first victim is the
wizard. Unless he is alert to the trickery of his own magic, he will project an air of Delphic infallibility that can do a lot of damage before the inevitable collapse into abracadabra. The obvious
example is Shaw, but no master stylist has ever been exempt from the danger. It follows that there is always something useful to say, even about the man who appears to say everything. Orwell said
what mattered, and will always matter, about totalitarianism. But he never got far with saying what mattered about democracy. He thought it was a capitalist trick. It’s a lot trickier than
that.
    2001

 
HITLER’S UNWITTING EXCULPATOR
    Hitler’s Willing Executioners
by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Alfred A. Knopf
    There was a hair-raising catchphrase going around in Germany just before the Nazis came to power:
Besser ein Ende mit Schrecken als ein Schrecken ohne Ende
. Better an
end with terror than terror without end. Along with Nazi sympathizers who had been backing Hitler’s chances for years, ordinary citizens with no taste for ideological politics had reached the
point of insecurity where they were ready to let the Nazis in. The Nazis had caused such havoc in the streets that it was thought that only they could put a stop to it. They did, but the order they
restored was theirs. When it was over, after twelve short years of the promised thousand, the memory lingered, a long nightmare about what once was real. It lingers still, causing night sweats. A
cool head is hard to keep. Proof of that is Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s new book
Hitler’s Willing Executioners
, provocatively subtitled ‘Ordinary Germans and the
Holocaust’. Hailed in the publisher’s preliminary hype by no less an authority than the redoubtable Simon Schama as ‘the fruit of phenomenal scholarship and absolute
integrity’, it is a book to be welcomed, but hard to welcome warmly. It advances knowledge while subtracting from wisdom, and whether the one step forward is worth the two steps back is a
nice question. Does pinning the Holocaust on what amounts to a German ‘national character’ make sense? I don’t think it does, and in the light of the disturbingly favourable press
endorsement that Goldhagen has already been getting, it becomes a matter of some urgency to say why.
    The phenomenal scholarship can be safely conceded: Schama and comparable authorities are unlikely to be wrong about that. Tunnelling long and deep into hitherto only loosely disturbed archives,
Goldhagen has surfaced with persuasive evidence that the Holocaust, far from being, as we have been encouraged to think, characteristically the work of cold-blooded technocrats dispassionately
organizing mass disappearance on an industrial basis, was on the contrary the enthusiastically pursued contact sport of otherwise ordinary citizens, drawn from all walks of life, who were united in
the unflagging enjoyment with which they inflicted every possible form of