It’s Funny How Easy it is to Forget Some Things

While reading an old essay by Orwell in which he defends the reputation of P. G. Wodehouse, something struck me. Not what he wrote about Wodehouse, but about the left’s historic sales-job. It is one that we’re enduring to this day:

It is nonsense to talk of “Fascist tendencies” in his books. There are no post-1918 tendencies at all. Throughout his work there is a certain uneasy awareness of the problem of class distinctions, and scattered through it at various dates there are ignorant though not unfriendly references to Socialism. In THE HEART OF A GOOF (1926) there is a rather silly story about a Russian novelist, which seems to have
been inspired by the factional struggle then raging in the U.S.S.R. But the references in it to the Soviet system are entirely frivolous and, considering the date, not markedly hostile. That is about the extent of Wodehouse’s political consciousness, so far as it is discoverable from his writings.

The controversy surrounding Wodehouse goes back to the Second World War. He was incarcerated by the Nazis upon their “liberation” of Vichy France. To get out of jail early, he agreed to do 4 radio broadcasts for the Nazis.

Nowhere, so far as I know, does he so much as use the word “Fascism” or “Nazism.” In left-wing circles, indeed in “enlightened” circles of any kind, to broadcast on the Nazi radio, to have any truck with the Nazis whatever, would have seemed just as shocking an action before the war as during it. But that is a habit of mind that had been developed during nearly a decade of ideological struggle against Fascism.

Which then and now still compares favorably to the appeasement that sent millions into the clutches of fascism, in any case. But never mind that – there is a fellow countryman to demonize.

Does that sound familiar?

The bulk of the British people, one ought to remember, remained antethetic to that struggle until late into 1940. Abyssinia, Spain, China, Austria, Czechoslovakia — the long series of crimes and aggressions had simply slid past their consciousness or were dimly noted as quarrels occurring among foreigners and “not our business.”

One can gauge the general ignorance from the fact that the ordinary Englishman thought of “Fascism” as an exclusively Italian thing and was bewildered when the
same word was applied to Germany. And there is nothing in Wodehouse’s writings to suggest that he was better informed, or more interested in politics, than the general run of his readers.

For those of you not familiar with Wodehouse’s wit, I beg you to give the old bird a chance. After all, he made fun of the idle rich without, by some magic, fall in the vulgar habit found so often in the UK to demonize and detest – only to find themselves reinforcing those concepts of class that they to this day pretend to be on a Jihad to “smash”.

And yet these demons forever trouble them.