So then, why will men not forgive the war, and their humiliations at the
hands of these war-like authorities? Because men were _compelled_ into
the service of a dead ideal. And perhaps nothing but this compulsion
made them realise it _was_ a dead ideal. But all those filthy little
stay-at-home officers and coast-watchers and dirty-minded doctors who
tortured men during the _first_ stages of the torture, did these men _in
their souls_ believe in what they were doing? They didn’t. They _had_ no
souls. They had only their beastly little _wills_, which they used to
bully all men with. With their wills they determined to fight for a dead
ideal, and to bully every other man into compliance. The inspiring
motive was the bullying. And every other man complied. Or else, by
admitting a conscientious objection to war, he admitted the dead ideal,
but took refuge in one of its side-tracks.
All men alike, and all women, admitted and still admit the face value of
the ideal of Love, Self-sacrifice, and Humanity united in love,
brotherhood, and peace. So, they persist in the dead ideal. _Fata
nolunt._ Fata nolunt. Then see how the fates betray them. In their
service of the defunct ideal they find themselves utterly humiliated,
_sold_. In England, Italy, Germany, India, Australia, that had been the
one word men had used to describe their feeling. They had been sold. But
not before they had sold themselves. Now then. The moment a man feels he
has been sold, sold in the deepest things, something goes wrong with his
whole mechanism. Something breaks, in his tissue, and the black poison
is emitted into his blood. And then he follows a natural course, and
becomes a creature of slow, or of quick, revenge. Revenge on all that
the old ideal is and stands for. Revenge on the whole system. Just
revenge. Even further revenge on himself.
Men revenged themselves on Athens, when they felt sold. When Rome,
persisting in an old, defunct ideal, gradually made her subjects feel
sold, they were revenged on her, no matter how. Constantinople and the
Byzantine Empire the same. And now our turn. “Revenge,” Timotheus cries.
And Timotheus is just everybody, except those that have got hold of the
money or the power.
There is nothing for it but revenge. If you sow the dragon’s teeth, you
mustn’t expect lilies of the valley to spring up in sweet meekness.
And Kangaroo? Kangaroo insisted on the old idea as hard as ever, though
on the Power of Love rather than on the Submission and Sacrifice of
Love. He wanted to take his revenge in an odour of sanctification and
Lily of the Valley essence. But he was the mob, really. See his face in
a rage. He was the mob: the _vengeful_ mob. Oh, God, the most terrifying
of all things.
And Willie Struthers? The vengeful mob also. But if the old ideal had
still a logical leaf to put forth, it was this last leaf of
communism--before the lily-tree of humanity rooted in love died its
final death. Perhaps better Struthers than Kangaroo.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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