Orwell and evil

You can always depend on George Orwell for bitter medicine. Here's this passage from his essay "No, Not One," written a couple of months before the attack on Pearl Harbor and when Europe's future was looking mighty bleak:

The notion that you can somehow defeat violence by submitting to it is simply a flight from fact. As I have said, it is only possible to people who have money and guns between themselves and reality. But why should they want to make this flight, in any case? Because, rightly hating violence, they do not wish to recognize it is integral to modern society and that their own fine feelings and noble attitudes are all the fruit of injustice backed up by force.

As a guy of moderately liberal impulses, this passage chills me. No one likes to consider the origin of his prejudices. It gets better:

They do not want to learn where their incomes come from. Underenath this lies the hard fact, so difficult for many people to face, that individual salvation is not possible, that the choice before human beings is not, a a rule, between good and evil but between two evils. You can let the Nazis rule the world; that is evil; or you cn throw them by war, which is also evil. There is no other choice before you, and whichever you choose you will not come out with clean hands....

There it is, without equivocation, in prose as lean and affectless as a reporter can write. Orwell then reaches this conclusion:

We only have the chance of choosing the lesser evil and of working for the establishment of a new kind of society in which common decency is possible...

And this explains in part why I supported the war. Despite the lies, compromises, failures, and incompetence.