3

The strike is one of the oldest phases of the warfare between the generality and the overbearing man. The common man comes to a point when his exploitation becomes unendurable, and he puts down his implements and says: "No more". In a rational order this leads to a discussion of the situation and a readjustment of relationships. On ships and in militant armies, however, where the masterful men have elaborated the idea and methods of "discipline", force comes into play forthwith, the strike takes the form of mutiny, and the masterful man, if he is not to be obeyed implicitly, has to be shot or put in irons or overboard. This is the natural consequence of overstressing mastery. The ultimate way of preserving human dignity in the face of arbitrary compulsion is to kill. Here reason and primordial instinct are in complete agreement.

The idea of a mutiny against belligerent governments, against all existing governments, seeped infectiously through the world. "Before there can be any world government," said Rud in one of his phases of vivid conviction, "men must realise that all their governments are wrong. No existing government can become a world government, and a world government cannot be a large–scale imitation of any existing government. It must be a new thing embodying a universal mutiny."

There had already been a foretaste of this mutinous reaction towards the end of the Great War of 1914–18. All the European fighting forces then were drifting to mutiny. The essential Russian Revolution was a mutiny, and the sit–down strikes of the early twenties in Italy and elsewhere, which immobilised factories and the mechanical plant of civilisation, not by the withdrawal of labour but by its cessation, were plainly experiments of the common man in his revolt against servitude and the exploitation of his necessities. These earlier efforts had failed because they had been local and regional. They had been premature. They had anticipated the necessary approximations and coalescences. They had occurred in a world which was still in a patchwork of dissimilar phases.

It was only now, with the abolition of remoteness, that the entire world was coming into step as one community. Now it was no longer possible to crush revolt in one region before another became aware of the general significance of the struggle. Bodisham and Norvel were particularly energetic and efficient in developing what Rud called this "Simultaneous Awareness" throughout the world. By 1944 there was not a country or region in the world where the "Common Man's Party" was not known, where Rud's beetling forehead had not become the familiar symbol for a vaguely apprehended, vast organisation of release, and where the essential conditions of any conflict against limited, impatient and outworn authority were unknown. All over the world there grew up a solidarity of expectation, a sense of a new order not simply dreamt of, but prepared and approaching.

Those who were most concerned with what still passed for government in those days seem to have been the least aware of the essential connection of a hundred apparently divergent movements that undermined the superficial orderliness of life. Whenever for example there was still definitely an organised military suppression of social adjustment, there was what one may describe compactly and brutally as a "Shoot the officers" movement. This was more apparent in what were then called the authoritarian communities than in those which claimed to be democratic. But it was by no means confined to them. The Nazis for example had never displayed the internal discipline of the old German armies, and there was clear evidence as early as 1939 that the leaders did not dare impose too severe an obedience upon the looting and raping with which the rank and file repaid themselves for the fatigues of warfare. The men put their own interpretation upon their duties, and treated any attempts to moderate their behaviour as disloyalty to their esprit de corps. The Japanese staffs and officers again were often too manifestly compelled and terrified men, as the discipline of the hungry and ill–paid hordes of armed Japanese peasants that still swarmed in China relaxed. By 1939 Japan, for instance, in China, and Italy in Spain, had armies that the government dared not bring home.

There was a constant repetition of the same cycle of phases in the experience of the various demoralised army fragments, great and small, which were now scattered over half the land surface of the globe. First came insubordination, "shoot the officers" and "lead us, Caesar, where we want to go"; a phase of successful lawlessness, a phase of rapine; then a feeling of isolation and fear and a great desire to link up again to some greater order. Bodisham and his staff, watching the world from their headquarters, had great maps flagged to mark down "contrite" troops. Most of these troops had heard vaguely of Rud. As apprehension grew in their minds they would usually claim that they were new revolutionaries, Rud's men. And the countries subjected to lawless brigandage and themselves forced towards counter–brigandage, found their only hope of restoring firm control in the anticipation of a World Common Law. They too claimed to be part of the great reconstruction. Every region too was now infested with de–nationalised exiles. Their dominant idea was to be legitimated as some new type of citizen. There comes a phase in social dislocation when the desire for order and security, for peaceful living overpowers partisanship, jealousy, possessiveness…

After the great naval losses in the first year of the War of the Ideologies and the development of the military deadlock in Central America and the Old World, the strike method assumed formidable dimensions both in the air forces and among the munition workers. These latter, as they realised their indispensability, began to refuse delivery of particular types of bombs and other weapons whose use they considered inimical to the common interest. The propaganda of Bellacourt had quickened the consciences of the airmen. Everywhere the air forces displayed a disposition to question the decisions of the military authorities. The roar of the planes overhead no longer gave the statesmen and politicians on the ground below a sense of unqualified power. They began to worry about the morale of the air forces, to organise espionage systems among these youngsters.

The propaganda organisations of the disintegrating national governments did an immense amount of work in the spread of the idea of Rud. Each assailed the prestige of its formal antagonists, and found an authority in his phrases, each in undermining the enemy morale sapped its own. Each appealed to Common Justice and the Common–sense of Mankind against its rival. In France and Britain Rud's activities were largely sustained by German money. In Germany his spreading reputation was financed and abetted by Russian, French and British propaganda. Russia paved his way in China and Japan, Germany and Russia in India. The Catholic Church denounced him in one country and claimed him in another, but everywhere it spread his name. There is no better advertisement in the world than to be denounced by an unattractive priest or teacher. With the most definite intentions possible, Rud could still find it the best policy to remain ambiguous. He was vaguely supposed to be revolutionary and "creative", and at the same time he was supposed to be anti–Red. In reality he was ultra–Radical, he left the Reds far behind him. The Common Man emerged at last less by a process of assertion than by a progressive elimination of narrower alternatives.