Politics & Power Quote by J.B. Priestley

Priestley’s line lands like a moral paradox: democracy arrives not by enlightened reform but by high explosives. The bite is in “such democratic virtues as it possessed,” a clipped, unsentimental appraisal of interwar Britain as complacent, class-bound, and politically fraying. He’s not romanticizing the nation; he’s diagnosing it. Then comes the brutal twist: “bombed and burned into democracy.” The phrasing refuses comfort. “Into” suggests coercion, as if the Luftwaffe is an accidental constitutional tutor, forcing a society that was drifting toward deference and inequality to rediscover solidarity under pressure.

The specific intent is double-edged wartime persuasion. Priestley, a key public voice during WWII, wants listeners to see the Blitz not only as catastrophe but as an engine of civic leveling: shared shelters, rationing, mass mobilization, a heightened sense that the state owes protection to everyone, not just the well-placed. Subtext: the old order couldn’t be trusted to modernize itself. It took a collective ordeal to make egalitarian promises feel non-negotiable.

Context sharpens the cynicism. In the 1930s, Europe’s democracies looked fragile; fascism was ascendant; Britain’s establishment often treated unemployment and poverty as unfortunate scenery. War scrambles that complacency. Priestley’s sentence dares the ruling class to live up to the unity it suddenly praises. If bombs can force a more equal “we,” he implies, peace must not become an excuse to revert to “such virtues as it possessed.” The real target isn’t Germany; it’s Britain’s prewar willingness to settle for less democracy than it claimed.