In his diary for June 11, 1942, George Orwell records an atrocity. The Germans have massacred all the male inhabitants of the Czech town of Lidice, sent the women to concentration camps, sent the children to be ‘reeducated’, razed the village to the ground and changed its name. They have done this because the population of Lidice had harbored the assassins of a high Nazi official, Reinhard Heydrich, who as it turns out (Orwell could not know this at the time) had also been a leading architect of the ‘final solution’ for Europe’s Jews. The announcement comes via the BBC, but it also comes from the Germans themselves, who are obviously not afraid to publicize the slaughter they have committed. Resistance elsewhere will be discouraged.

‘It does not particularly surprise me that people do this kind of thing’, Orwell comments, ‘nor even that they announce that they are doing them. What does impress me, however, is that other people’s reaction to such happenings is governed solely by the political fashion of the moment.’ Orwell was perhaps reminding himself that like the Spanish Inquisition in Monty Python, good essays – he was using his diary to collect material for future essays – depend on the weapon of surprise. By rough definition, an atrocity is an act of disproportionate and indiscriminate violence aimed at civilians. Here, what surprises Orwell is that the news of such violence does not give rise to instinctive, universal horror and indignation. Instead, he says, people react according to their pre-existing political loyalties. Political loyalties are so strong that they cannot be overridden even by an atrocity as atrocious as the destruction of a whole village, most of the inhabitants of which could not have had anything whatsoever to do with the killing of Heydrich, however justified we may judge that killing to have been. Simple human decency, confronted by the simple facts, seems unable to suspend partisan loyalties. To Orwell, this failure comes as an especially unpleasant surprise. He wanted to believe in the power of the facts. He based his own politics – socialist politics, as is often forgotten – as well as his strategies for getting his politics across to the unconverted on the assumption that human decency, once put in clear, forceful possession of the facts, is capable of overriding differences of allegiance, whatever their basis, and coming to an independent, fair-minded conclusion.