It is shocking to me to see how low Rupert Murdoch has sunk over his career in terms of catering and pandering to the dark side of our world.
He came from better stock than that.
I want to share with you this wonderful essay, written by his uncle Sir Walter Murdoch in the dark days of World War 2.
It is both brilliant and uplifting.
I only wish his nephew had continued his fine work,
Victory!
Sir Walter Murdoch (1874-1970)
(Written in October, 1938)
“Steadfast, a Commentary,” Walter Murdoch. Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1941
His preface reads:
This volume contains articles which have appeared under my name, in the Melbourne Herald and other Australian journals, since the outbreak of war (with one pre-war paper by way of prelude). They make a sort of diary; a record of what one Australian thought and felt about events in these tremendous months. There is nothing original or profound in them, but I have reason to believe that they did put into words what many other Australians were thinking and feeling about the same events. It is only fair to add that every one of the articles in this selection brought me letters of more or less violent disagreement.
They are re-published in the belief, possibly illusory, that some of those who read them with approval when they first appeared would like to read them again, and to possess them in a handy collective form.
W.M., Perth, Western Australia, February, 1941.
October, 1938:
The real difficulty about writing for the newspapers, I have always felt, is the interval between the writing and the printing. During that interval, things may happen which will make nonsense of what you have written. At the present moment—when I am writing these words—that possibility almost paralyses my pen. The great days range like tides across the face of the world; and by the time you read what I am now writing, you and I may be living on a changed planet, a planet in which everything looks different. Events may have taken place which will have sent our old earth spinning down a new groove.
You may say, if you like, that this is sheer illusion; and that these days are no more momentous than any other days; every day, and every minute, history is being made. And that, of course, is true. History is a continuous whole. All events are links in an unbroken chain. What is happening today is bound, by the inescapable logic of fate, to what happened in a palace of Versailles 19 years ago—to go no further back than that. The reader of history watches a steady flight of chickens coming home to roost. Granted. Nevertheless, I find it hard to rise to the philosophic heights from which all days seem equally decisive. There do seem to be certain crucial moments in history; moments when humanity stands at the fatal cross-roads where its choice determines its destiny. As I write, we are passing through such a moment; and by the time this appears, the choice of roads may have been made. Is it possible to write something which is true now and which will be true the, no matter what may have happened in the interim?
I think it is possible. Whether reason and justice, or unreason and savagery, have won a momentary triumph—no matter which force may seem, for the moment, to be in the ascendancy—a great victory has been won for the good cause, which is the cause of democracy—or, if you prefer, the cause of humanity, the cause of civilization. It is a victory which, no matter what terrors and tribulations may yet be in store for us, may in the long run prove decisive. The powers arrayed against democracy have been defeated, in this sense: that they have been forced to show themselves in their true colours, to show what it is that they really stand for; with the result that in all civilized countries millions of people who were doubtful and hesitant—who wondered whether after all there was not something to be said for a dictatorship—who wondered whether the masses were fit for freedom—who wondered whether liberty was anything but a catchword, and whether democracy was not a complete failure—these millions, I say, doubt no longer; they have been shown, in a flash, the truth—that the way of democracy, difficult and dangerous as it may prove, is the only way to a better world than the present; and that the way of Fascism is the way straight back to the jungle, and the law of the jungle. And I say that this vivid revelation of the true nature of the enemies of democracy is a great victory for the democratic cause all over the world. Let me explain.
I once had the hardihood to maintain, in print, that men would never willingly fight for an abstraction; and I mentioned ‘a pale abstraction called democracy.’ This was not, as some readers may have imagined, a scoff at democracy; it was intended as a scoff at those who use half-understood abstract nouns without any clear vision of the concrete things for which they stand. Until we know what our words mean we can hardly communicate with one another at all. When we use the word ‘Democracy’ we think, or ought to think, of men and women and the lives they lead in certain countries; when we speak of ‘Fascism’ we should have before our eyes the lives of individuals in certain other countries. Abstract nouns are quite unobjectionable—and indeed essential as a kind of shorthand—when you are sure you understand what you really mean by them. The present crisis has made clearer than it ever was before to most of us the difference between these particular abstractions; and I wish here to set forth that difference in words plan and few.
The faith of Democracy has been put into words by an Australian poet; it is the belief, he says,
Than man is God, however low;
Is man, however high.
To put it more briefly still, it is faith in man; or, in theological terms, the belief that man was made in the image of God. Or, again, to quote Thomas Mann—that great exile from Nazi Germany—‘We must define Democracy as that form of government and of society which is inspired above every other with the feeling and consciousness of the dignity of man.’
Faith in man is hard to maintain in the teeth of what we know about men and women—‘that odious little race of vermin,’ as the Emperor of Brobdingnag styles them when Gulliver has told him all about them. It would be quite possible for a visitor from Mars to spend a year on our planet and find human beings to be egoists, liars, cowards and bullies; stupid, cruel and dishonest. It is quite possible to fancy angels weeping over the vices and laughing over the follies of man. The heart of man is deceitful, and desperately wicked; there is no need to be sentimental, and ignore the fact of human depravity. But there is a sort of inverted sentimentalism, calling itself realism, which ignores the other side of human nature—the nobility of it, the passion for truth, the devotion to duty, the sense of justice, the comradeship, the readiness to die for a cause, the power of artistic creation—all that makes man different from the lower animals. Democracy, in short, believes that man is a spirit; and treats him as such. Fascism treats him as an animal and nothing more; and, so treated, he tends to become an animal and nothing more. A form of government that appeals to the best in man brings out that best; call upon his better self, and it will respond in a way that astonishes the skeptic. A form of government that appeals to the worst in man brings out that worst, releases unexpected forces of evil. Fascism has no faith in the ordinary man, and believes that he can be ruled only by fear; and fear is the worst poisoner of the human character. The bestial cruelties displayed in German concentration camps have made us ask ourselves what can have become of the once kindly race that gave us our fairy stories and our Christmas trees and the loveliest of songs; how did it come to make way for these brutal sadists? The answer is that a form of government based on a profound contempt for human beings ends by making human beings contemptible.
Fascism is convinced that the ordinary, common man is not fit for freedom; set him free to do as he pleases, and he will make the most hideous mistakes (to put it mildly). Democracy admits the likelihood of mistakes, but maintains that it is only by being free that a man learns, gradually and painfully, to become fit for freedom.
The faith of democracy is not a blind faith; it is not a shutting of the eyes to the shortcomings of men and women as they now are; but it is a faith in the possibility of improvement. Democracy, in short, believes in education; and the more democratic a country is, the more firmly does it believe in education. In the United States—on the whole, decidedly the most democratic country in the world, in spite o flagrant suppressions of liberty—the enthusiasm for education is inspiring; that extraordinary country is, I suppose, the only country in the world which is actually spending more on education than on defense. The difference between the two forms of government, in this respect, may be put in a nutshell: Democracy believes in education, Fascism believes in propaganda. There is a whole world of meaning in that distinction. Propaganda is a hypnotising, a stupefying, an enslaving force; education is an emancipating force. The belief in education is based on a faith in man, in the power for god latent in the human soul; the belief in propaganda is based on a contempt for man, on a faith only in his capacity for being turned into an efficient machine; military efficiency being the chief end in view. This is really a vital distinction, for it means that Fascism believes in physical force alone, while Democracy believes in the gradual substitution of reason for force, of the spiritual for the material.
But there is another distinction more vital still. There is said to be widespread, if dumb, discontent in the countries ruled by dictators; I don’t know whether that is true or not. But I do know that in the countries calling themselves democracies there is widespread, and not dumb, discontent. Nobody can be satisfied with Democracy as it is now, with all its economic injustices and the poverty and misery and degradation resulting therefrom. Nobody with eyes in his head can fail to see that the blessed word Freedom is for many millions, in all he democracies, a bitter jet; for where there is not economic freedom there is no freedom at all. If the democracies fall into complacency, I they fail to turn sternly self-critical eyes upon their own shortcomings, they are surely doomed. But just here is the very core of our hope in Democracy. It is, by its nature, self-critical. Fascism is, by its nature, self-satisfied; it allows no criticism of itself. Italy proclaims, loudly and proudly, that it has no room for an anti-Fascist. Fascism is so sure that it is right that it can only regard a reformer as an enemy of his country’s welfare. The glory of Democracy is that it is not sure that it is right; it is friendly to criticism, to the demand for change. It believes in educating all its people; which means, training them to think for themselves; which means, producing a generation of critics and reformers. Fascism, loudly proclaiming itself to be the perfect form of government, can hardly be expected to tolerate any proposals for reform. It trains its people to refrain from thinking, to do as they are told, to trust its leader, to cheer lustily whenever he speaks, to despise liberty, to be ready to become cannon-fodder when their leader gives the signal; in a word, to be efficient slaves.
The antithesis of Democracy is not Aristocracy, but mob-rule; and Fascism is a form of mob-rule; a nation is turned into a mob, and is used as a mob. Fascism, in the words of a writer whom I have already quoted, is ‘the contempt of pure reason, the denial and violation of truth in favour of power and the interests of the state, the appeal to the lower instincts, to so-called d "feeling,” the release of stupidity and evil from the discipline of reason and intelligence, the emancipation of blackguardism—in short, a barbaric mob-movement.’
I say that we have won a great victory, whatever defeats and humiliations and miseries may be in store for us. The stars in their courses have fought for Democracy in the last few weeks; what were shadowy abstractions have become clear realities for multitudes hitherto wavering in doubt. What sort of a world is it in which one man, and he of doubtful sanity, can hold the issues of peace and war in the hollow of his hand? It is the sort of world that Fascism brings forth. We know, now, what Fascism means. It means getting your own way by force, or by the threat o force; which is a return to jungle law and a surrender of all that civilization. Means. We know, too, what Democracy means; what it is that we are called upon to defend—a little seed, of immeasurable value to the future of humanity, though it is insignificant to look at, for it has hardly as yet put forth its first pair of leaves to greet the sun and he wind—the seed of Freedom.