LUNACY OF WAR: A Guest Op-Ed By George Orwell
Stumbling across a used book featuring columnists from history, I found a 1943 post by George Orwell where he marvels at the lunacy of war
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“A world in which it is wrong to murder an individual civilian and right to drop a thousand tons of high explosive on a residential area does sometimes make me wonder whether this earth of ours is not a loony-bin made use of by some other planet.”—George Orwell, 1943
Author’s Note: Perusing a used bookstore, I came across a hardcover from 1997 titled The Penguin Book of Columnists, which featured prominent journalists from history. I turned randomly to a page, which printed the following column by George Orwell. It ran originally in the Tribune of London, where he was the literary editor. I am running an excerpt from that column as the world continues to navel gaze on the crimes of war. Originally published December 31, 1943 by Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950), an English novelist, poet, essayist, journalist, and critic who wrote under the pen name of George Orwell. He opposed totalitarianism, both authoritarian communism and fascism.—hsc
George Orwell’s press photo, 1943
As I Please
In his fourth Tribune column, George Orwell marvels that ‘war is not a crime’
READING the discussions of ‘war guilt’ which reverberate in the correspondence columns of the newspapers, I note the surprise with which many people seem to discover that war is not crime. Hitler, it appears, has not done anything actionable. He has not raped anybody, nor carried off any pieces of loot with his own hands, nor personally flogged any prisoners, buried any wounded men alive, thrown any babies into the air and spitted them on his bayonet, dipped any nuns in petrol and touched them off with church tapers—in fact he has not done any of the things which enemy nationals are usually credited with doing in war-time. He has merely precipitated a world war which will perhaps have cost twenty million lives before it ends. And there is nothing illegal in that. How could there be, when legality implies authority and there is no authority with the power to transcend national frontiers?
At the recent trials in Kharkov some attempt was made to fix on Hitler, Himmler and the rest the responsibility for their subordinates’ crimes, but the mere fact that this had to be done shows that Hitler’s guilt is not self-evident. His crime, it is implied, was not to build up an army for the purpose of aggressive war, but to instruct that army to torture its prisoners. So far as it goes, the distinction between an atrocity and an act of war is valid. An atrocity means an act of terrorism which has no genuine military purpose. One must accept such distinctions if one accepts war at all, which in practice everyone does. Nevertheless, a world in which it is wrong to murder an individual civilian and right to drop a thousand tons of high explosive on a residential area does sometimes make me wonder whether this earth of ours is not a loony-bin made use of by some other planet…
—George Orwell, excerpted from his As I Please column, originally published in the Tribune, December 31, 1943
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