WAR PROPAGANDA

Grey River Argus, 17 January 1940, Page 9

WAR PROPAGANDA

(By

H. G. Wells.)

(This is an excerpt from a speech he was to have delivered at, Sioe-,-aolm as President of the P.E.N. Ciub, _o the leading writers of the world, the war prevented its delivery). “I have had some experience of propaganda. For a time I was m control of the propaganda against the German Government conducted 05 the British Ministry for Propaganda irom Crewe House, and the facts are [ given without justification and concealment in my “Autobiography ana in a book by Sir Stuart Campoell, tne “Secrets of Crewe House.” The won< I did was done in absolute good iaitn, and the gist of the business is that we who lent ourselves to propaganda, were made fools of and ultimately ret down by the traditional tricks of the Foreign Office. We were kept in the dark about all. sorts of secret en-. tanglements to which these gentry had committed the country, and we were allowed to hold out hopes to the German people of a liberal post-war settlement our masters had no invention of making. We were tricked, and through us, the German liberals were cheated, and what these tricksters of the British Foreign Office and ;.he Quai d’Orsay imagined they were doing except being very, very diplomatic and very clever about thur double-crossing and generally having the laugh of their betters, I cannot magine. Betters, I say without a Plush. Every disastrous thing that has happened in the past f twenty years was clearly foretold by a galaxy of writers and thinkers twenty vears ago. Our politicians and officials were relatively speaking, little purblind, mean chaps. Orders and titles cannot alter that. It filled them w.tn joy to snub the highbrows. The evil state of Europe to-dav is traceable almost directly to-the want of imagination, the self-protective cunning a.id the deliberate breaches of faith ma le oy them during those eventful years that immediately followed the Great War Well, once bit, twice shy. I am not going to be a stalking horse for the British Foreign Office again. This is no remote problem I am discussing now. It is in all our minds here. I have’been approached, and I suppose quite a number of us have been approached, more or less officially, to do propaganda in Europe or America. One job suggested to- me was to go to Paris to lecture in the good old liaison style, singing the praises of dear old Colonel Blimp and dear old Colonel Bramble and explaining how verv simple and democratic our British system is. I was to be made much of. Who knows if 1 might not have been given a ribbon for my coat? And the effect of me and my fellow radical writers, going through our hoops obediently anu faithfully, upon the still slightly critical and suspicious republican and radical side of French intelligence, was to have been highly beneficial-to the British diplomatic schemes. Such as they are. It would demonstrate that we were all good little government boys when it came to a showdown, that the’real leaders of humanity are these bawlers anl scribblers and knowing politicians.- Hitler in

hysteria and Mr. Chamberlain with his resolute expression.

Well, I have written and spoken very plainly about the contemporary British oligarchy and, war or no war, I intend to go on doing so to the end. It is a mental paralysis for. India, and It blocks the way to any sincere federal. association of the more genuine democracies of the wor’d. Most of us know that this time the propaganda activities are going to be much intensified, they are going to be far more cunning and elaborately misleading than ever before. But the reality of the case is that any writer or artist, or teacher of repute, who allows himself to be put on a wire and dangled in this fashion, according to the narrow ideas of some Director of Propaganda, Herr Goebbels. .Lord Penth, Lord Lloyd or what not, fails to grasp his real significance tn the world. He is falling short of the essential aristocracy of his profession. This issue is a plain one- It Involves us all; no part of the world of thought and creative imagination can escape it. It is a conflict between gangster adventurers or dull politicians on the one hand, trading on old national jealousies and resent T ments, stale and decaying and now poisonous dogmas and fear, wno are blundering us down to destruction. That is one side of it. On the other hand, opposing this is the directive power of the fearless and unhampered human intelligence, expressing, 1 educating and discovering. For this last, and for its supremacy we stand. ( This is the fundamental choice in nre for every intelligent person, and by that choice mankind will triumph or end in complete disaster. We are in revolt against this game of power politics which seeks to monopolise all this world for the triumphs of such poor fools as these leaders we have examined. We are not concerned with their infernal wars. We are in open and plain »e--bellion against them.