Guess At Unwritten History

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Title:     Guess At Unwritten History
Author: Henry Major Tomlinson [More Titles by Tomlinson]

That fairly violent scuffling during the years 1914-1918, the opening skirmishes of the war between Organization and Liberty which our fore-fathers named so strangely the "War to End War," did not appear to conclude satisfactorily for the victorious nations, especially England. Actually it was an excellent ground for the founding of that Perfect State which, in the centuries that followed, arose on the lines laid largely by chance and the exigencies of that early scramble. Yet it is possible the victorious statesmen may not have guessed that they had done really well. The name by which the war of those remote years was popularly known is enough to show that the difficulties faced by those men at the end of the war may have obscured the good they had done. That name is itself clear evidence of the not unpleasing credulity and ridiculous but innocent desire of the people of that time.

After all, those peoples were not so long out of the Neolithic Age. Their memory was still strong of the freedom of their earlier wanderings when they could go where they liked, work at what suited them, eat and drink what pleased them, choose who should be their chief, and worship in any Temple which promised most personal benefits. It was, then, natural for them to make so amusing a mistake in the naming of their "Great War." They not only certainly imagined they were ending War, but they imagined, too, they had a right to end it, thinking that not only War, but every other act of the State, was for their decision. Their Governors, therefore, judged it wise to allow them this illusion to play with, so to distract their attention from the reality, which they would have resented. This illusion was known as Popular Government.

We may laugh at it now, but in those days the directing minds of great nations found that common illusion no laughing matter. Some who laughed at it openly discovered they had laughed on the wrong side of the guillotine. It is usual in this era of science, when control by the Holy State of the national mass-power, both of body and mind, is complete, and when national emotion is raised by Press and Pulpit whenever it is required and put wherever it is wanted, to ridicule the laxity of the statesmen who directed the nations in that early war. A little reflection, however, shows us that that laxity is but apparent. Those statesmen went as far as they dared, and dared a little more with each success they won. They discovered that control may be gained by announcing control to be necessary for some quite innocent object, and then using and retaining the power thus acquired for a real but undivulged purpose. Sheep, we are aware, never understand they are securely folded till the completing hurdle of the circuit is in its place, and then they soon forget it, and begin grazing; for all sheep want is grass, and perhaps a turnip or two to give content in a limited pasture.

It would be wrong for us, nevertheless, to blame those early folk for not understanding, as finely as we do, the true science of government to be complete and unquestioned mastery. We have learned much since then. Let us look back to those days for a moment, to get the just perspective. One of the first significant things we notice is that those people were free to criticize their politicians--baaing across the hurdles, as it were. That was why they had to have explained to them the "Objects of the War." They actually did not want to die. They were reluctant to go to battle unless they knew why they were going. True, it was easy enough to find a reason to satisfy them, but it is necessary for us to remember that they would not submit to mutilation and death without some reason. Much as their governors may have desired it, those primitives would not agree willingly to the total surrender of conscience, individual liberty, and of life, to "politicians," as the High Priests of the Holy State were then familiarly named. Individual conscience, therefore, had to be cajoled, had to be bamboozled, had to be hypnotized; and a man's liberty could not be taken from him unless he was helpless, or was looking, under clever political finger-pointing, the other way.

It was this almost intractable matter of personal conscience and liberty which was the cause of the angry disappointment following the Versailles Treaty which, illustrating still further the need for subtle tact in dealing with our hairy forefathers, was called a Peace Treaty.

What a light is thrown upon those distant days and peoples when that ancient document, the fragmentary relic of which is now treasured in the museum at Tobolsk, is examined with even the little knowledge we possess of the events immediately following it! For a time, we must believe, humanity then was deliriously bereft. One could almost believe the moon had a greater pull in those years.

"No more secret diplomacy!" historians tell us was one of the cries of the soldiers as they went to battle. There is considerable ground, too, for accepting the amusing traditional tale that even at the end of the war the then President of the American Republic (mainly confined at the time to the Western Continent), declared the first point for the guidance of the Peace Conference must be an open discussion of the covenant. And the first thing to happen when the war ended was the closing of the door of the council room by the peacemakers, who, naturally, were the very men with no other interest till that moment but the full pursuit of war; yet nobody noticed the door was shut, though nobody could hear what was going on inside the room. The faith in their politicians held by the natives of the backyard communities into which Europe was then divided--on the very eve, we see now, of the full continental control of international man-power by consolidated finance--was the measure of their annoyance when, too late, naturally, the fact that the old shackles from which they had been promised freedom were noticed to be riveted upon them several links tighter.

But it is not their faith, so happily youthful, which so reveals their ingenious minds as their resultant annoyance. That resentment illuminates the essential fact for us in studying their mentality as social animals. They really did accept without question, with open and receptive mouths and eyes shut, what was considered pleasing enough to fortify them in the trials of warfare. They were, difficult though it is for us to understand it, too vacant and generous to realize that the "Objects of the War" were but figments nicely calculated to get them busy. The figments--we must give credit to the leaders of the time-were indeed not un-imaginatively conjured up. Those inducing visions worked. They were accepted readily, and even with delight. It was sincerely believed that the pleasing dreams were substantial, that those chromatic vapours evoked by gifted statesmen were veritable promises of divine favor for meritorious endurance.

From that we can the more easily go with understanding to a study of the consequences of that attractive faith of undisciplined peoples so difficult to grasp for modern students, who witness daily the admirable submission of our own uniform herds to the divine ordinances of the High Priests of the Sacred Entity the State. Why, we even learn that the survivors of the not inconsiderable armies returned from the battlefields of 1918 with the innocent conviction that the gentlemen of England would keep a bond as faithfully as common soldiers! The hardest tasks of the statesmen of those days arose out of such extraordinary expectations, out of the ruinous supposition of the childish-minded that the honoring of a bond, the fulfilment of a promise in return for benefits received, is equally incumbent on everybody!

With that knowledge we begin to realise the difficulties of their statesmen. A careful computation shows us that in England, where indeed the lavish promises had been most picturesque, and where the tough idea of personal liberty took longest to kill, it required just four years of severe disciplinary measures and dry bread to reduce the masses generally to a pale, obedient, and constructive spirit. At first they would not work unless they wanted to, and then only at their own price. They pointed, when answering their masters, to the fact that the best-fed people never worked at all, and lived in the best houses. They refused to cancel the official contracts made with them, even when ordered to do so by the police. They behaved indeed, those ex-soldiers, as though it had been their war. Such a state of mind we in these days really find impossible to elucidate. It is rather like trying to read the spots on a giraffe. It is as inscrutable as the once general opinion that the community has a right to decide upon its own affairs.

Today we have reached that point in the evolution of society when uniformity is known to be more desirable, because more comfortable than liberty; and uniformity is impossible without compulsion. A man with a free and contentious mind is a danger to the community, for he destroys its ease. He compels his fellows to active thought, if only to refute him. This is a dissipation of energy, and a local weakening of the structure of the State. It is historically true that a few men with ranging and questioning minds have sometimes injected so strong an original virus of thought that the community has been changed in form and nature.

It was the mistake of the earlier nations to give little attention to these troublesome and subversive fellows, who always thought more of the truth than they did even of the inviolability of the High Priests of the State. They preferred to die rather than surrender the out-dated rights of man. Therefore they had to die. The rights of man cannot be allowed to stand in the way of a nation's perfect uniformity. It was many centuries before man realized that the only freedom worth having is freedom from the necessity for individual thought. Perfectly unembarrassed freedom, freedom in which the mind may be empty and sunny, and assured happily of not the slightest interruption from any unsanctioned unofficial idea, became possible to a community only after the sanitary measures were devised which sufficed against unexpected epidemics of speculative thinking.

This, we are sadly aware, took time; for the brightly-colored hopes sent skyward so long ago as 1914, and the vistas discovered as a consequence by young men whose eyes till then had been resting safely on the ground, and the daring and lively questioning that was aroused by the incessant nudging of sleeping minds, coincided, as it unluckily happened, with the beginnings when the "Great War" ended, of mass-production and international finance, so developing problems of government, the solving of which could not be reconciled with any admission of individual liberty and personal right. It was, therefore, the elimination of the notion of justice and liberty from common opinion which occupied statesmen from 1918 onwards.

Gradually the true social morality has been evolved--that one citizen should be so like all other citizens that his only distinguishing characteristic is his number; that the right ideal of citizenship, plain for all to follow, and ensuring the stability of society, is to be so loyal to the Holy State that an expression of a man's views in a gathering of his fellows will rouse no more curiosity than a glass of water. Obviously so desirable a similarity of mind and character, making disputation impossible, and preventing all dislike of the ordinances of the Sacred Entity, or Cabal of Inviolable Dispensers, a uniformity in which war and peace become merely the national output of a vast machine controlled by the Central Will, has been developed only through ages of Press Suggestion, popular education with a bias that was designed but was scarcely noticeable, the seizing and retaining of opportunities by legislators whenever public opinion was sufficiently diverted, and a development of chemical science and aeronautics which has been encouraged by the enlightened directors of the major industries.

The war which began in 1914 showed quite clearly, for example, the value of the Censorship. The instituting of this office was never questioned, for it was based on man's first impulse of obedience to superiors when faced by a sudden danger, caused by his fear of the unknown. More than that, the English were in a lucky state of exaltation at the time, and were ready to sacrifice everything to save from destruction what they were told was the ancient, exquisite, and priceless civilization of France. They did save it; but in the prolonged and costly process they learned more than they had known before of that civilization, as well as of their own; and so much of their fear of losing either was evaporated. By that time, anyhow, criticism was useless, because the Censorship then was empowered to deal even with a derisive cough when Authority was solemnly giving orders. Once the office of the Censor was set in its place unnoticed in a time of public nervousness and excitement, the rest was easy, for it became possible to bring all criticism within a law which was elastic enough to be extended even to those figments which merely worked on the timidity of unbalanced minds.

It became unpatriotic to express a dislike for margarine, when butter was prohibited. It was unpatriotic for a blind hunchback with heart disease to protest that he was no soldier, if he were ordered to the Front. For though the Censor, in the early period of that war, dealt merely with news and opinions which might aid the enemy, yet, as the value of adding to a nation's enemies became apparent to Authority, it became necessary to turn into enemies of the State those who denounced profiteers for turning blood into money, those who denounced generals for wasting the lives of boys in purposeless actions, those who spoke against the spending of the nation's resources to succor needy contractors, and those who asked whether the war was to go on till all were dead, or whether it might be stopped profitably at any time by using a little common sense. Luckily for the welfare of the community, this need for recognizing as enemies all, at home and abroad, who differed from the decision of the Central Will, a need which was the natural flower of that confidence which Authority acquired through discovering the ease of control, put within the power of the Censor by the time of the Peace Conference every possible form of protest, every call for light, every cry of pain, every demand that such a "horrible nonsense" as war should cease from human affairs, every plea for compassion and generosity.

Thus the problem of perfect government was engendered and simplified. It was at last possible to ensure, at least outwardly, a semblance of uniformity. The rest was a matter of evolution, till today only a particular enquiry will determine a man from a woman, though it may fail to determine a fool from a man. All are alike, all agree with what is officially announced by the Sacred Entity, and the nation is as loyal and homogeneous, as contented, as stable and industrious, as a reef of actinozoal plasm. Thus the Perfect State has been built like a rock. The City of God has at last arisen; and in each of the uniform homes of its neuters, or workers, there is to be found the Patriotic Symbol--a portrait of a Sheep, enjoined by law to hang in a principal place, and bearing the legend "God Bless this Loyal Face."

Here, however, we see at once that such a right condition of the public mind could never have been acquired by a Censorship, by a mere prohibition, that is, of individual thinking and acting. That ensures merely a simulacrum of homogeneity. The appearance of general acquiescence may exist, though not the real thing. It is easy to compel men to do what they would not do freely if allowed an opportunity for their reason to work. The problem was to prevent the working of reason. Today, as we know, an order is issued by The Chosen, and is followed by a campaign in the Press, and by revivals exhorted from the Pulpit. There is no chance for the intrusion of reason.--No facts are ever issued for reason to work upon, no questioning is ever allowed. The suggestions of the Press and Pulpit prompt loyalty and obedience, and what might, in early times, have been resented as ridiculous, becomes the mode; and thus, if any rebels exist, it is but briefly, for they are denounced as solitary and repugnant independents. A suggestion becomes public opinion because the majority of people accept it without knowing there is reason to question the suggestion; and the minority also accept it in the end through weariness of an unpleasant and even dangerous distinction.

Yet not, observe, all the minority. It was the experience of our forefathers that unsuspected centres of infection always remained, and were not discovered till they had poisoned large areas of the country. Some bold fellow, here and there, had withstood all efforts at intimidation, and in time made others as courageous as himself. A means had to be found to eliminate the possibility of infection by original minds, or clearly the Holy State could not consider itself safe. Here, indeed, we see the hardest of the problems statesmen of the past had to solve. From the mere negation of the Censorship, a positive advance had to be made to the obliteration of original thought. This at first, necessarily, was but tentative, and only the confidence gained through successful experiment enabled governments at last to find where the real trouble lay.

It was supposed, at first, that the destruction of subversive political tracts and the persecution of radical views would be enough. Yet, of course, it was learned that as fast as these were cropped, growth elsewhere had become vigorous. The human intelligence is natively prone to look towards new things. Then it was that, after a long suspicion of the origin of ideals, great statesmen were led to an examination of classic literature and a study of the arts. Then they saw, what they might have known sooner, that in the very institutions supported by the State, the Public Libraries and Art Galleries, were actually preserved the potent ideals which demeaned that general opinion which the State was laboring to establish.

The famous Day of Release was ordered. This was ordained to free mankind from its heritage of the spirit. A test was made, and by that test any book or picture or poem which could not be approved or understood by native deacons of Solomon Island missions (who were imported for the purpose) was at once extirpated. This checked a great deal of the troublesome growth of the mind. Music, however, was strangely forgotten; and it was proved that the great revolution which burst out in Europe 120 years after the "Great War" began in the emotion occasioned by the continued playing of the compositions of one Beethoven, whose work is now fortunately lost, and other music which remained in favor in spite of the official insistence on the use of the steam saxophone for public concerts. Men, wherever they dared, insisted on having the best. And though the records were at length destroyed, the tenacious memories of a few fanatics and cranks preserved much of the old music, and that usually of the worst and most disloyal.

Here we see another step had to be taken by men in control of the State. The memory of what was classical was kept though in an ever-fading condition, and now and again some point of memory fructified to almost its original suggestive beauty in the fortuitously abnormal brain of a genius, and thus the state work of hygiene had to be done over again; for curiously enough people everywhere rose like a tide, and moved spontaneously towards these manifestations of liberty and beauty, and away from their loyalty to the God-State. A method, therefore, had to be discovered, first for obliterating what remained in the public memory of what was magical and rebellious, and then for the elimination of any possibility of original genius arising; and genius was, it was seen, first and last, the cause of all the trouble.

The destruction of all great works of art was followed, fifty years later, by the Period of Purging. All who were denounced for having quoted forbidden poetry, or for humming forbidden music, were executed. Such malefactors, who refused to forget, obviously could not be allowed to live. This gave a long period of peace, in which the Sacred Entity, the Unassailable Authority, took concrete form. Even so, the destruction of the treasures of the past, and of all memory of them, did not prevent the spontaneous appearance, now and then, of extraordinary men who, by divination it would seem, perceived a flatness and monotony in society, a sameness of common thought, and who laughed at the estimable uniform flocks; often, indeed, stampeding them.

Now science had its turn. It was more than a century since the works of Darwin and other philosophers had been burned. Young students who showed an aptitude for science, and so were potentially dangerous, were taken early within the Sacred Precincts, initiated into the mysteries of the Priests, and were given work and safety under the shadow of the Entity. They rarely went wrong; and when they did they went further or were heard of no more.

These men of science were set the problem of finding a method of sterilizing the unfit, that is, people who showed any decadent tendency to originality. All the increase of population by that time was occasioned under the direction of the High Priests, so that the Holy State had not only the power of dealing death, but of bringing new life. The new life, it is evident, had to be determined, as far as possible, by a scientific specification of a perfect citizen; and in the course of a century or two, through the destruction of intelligence wherever it inadvertently appeared, through the selection of parents sufficiently loyal and docile to accept marriage immediately when ordered by officials, and by certain signs, such as lustiness, by which, at a birth, the skilled Public Watchers who accompanied midwives were made suspicious of the new-born as possible enemies of the State, at last mankind arrived at its present perfection, content, and happiness, with hardly an intellectual doubt or a sign of suspicious joy to mar the whole serene horizon of the Holy State's exactitude.

Yet, we dare ask, had it not been for that little "War to End War" of 1914-1918, so innocently named by our forefathers who had too much liberty to know what they were talking about, would the possibility of our present social tranquility have arisen? It is hardly likely. The freedom we enjoy from all criticism, from all interruptions of mind and spirit, an internal peace which is indeed never broken except by the lethal germs of our modern wars that, in the due course of nature, obliterate every week or so a few of our cities, was a lucky chance that was seized upon by public-spirited legislators who had the prescience to know its value.

[The end]
Henry Major Tomlinson's essay: Guess At Unwritten History

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