Fifty Orwell Essays

by George Orwell

everyone. Intermittently these generalizations are seen to be unfounded,

  but the habit of making them persists, and people of professedly

  international outlook, e.g., Tolstoy or Bernard Shaw, are often guilty of

  them. (Author's footnote)]

  So long as it is applied merely to the more notorious and identifiable

  nationalist movements in Germany, Japan, and other countries, all this is

  obvious enough. Confronted with a phenomenon like Nazism, which we can

  observe from the outside, nearly all of us would say much the same things

  about it. But here I must repeat what I said above, that I am only using

  the word 'nationalism' for lack of a better. Nationalism, in the extended

  sense in which I am using the word, includes such movements and

  tendencies as Communism, political Catholicism, Zionism, Antisemitism,

  Trotskyism and Pacifism. It does not necessarily mean loyalty to a

  government or a country, still less to ONE'S OWN country, and it is not

  even strictly necessary that the units in which it deals should actually

  exist. To name a few obvious examples, Jewry, Islam, Christendom, the

  Proletariat and the White Race are all of them objects of passionate

  nationalistic feeling: but their existence can be seriously questioned,

  and there is no definition of any one of them that would be universally

  accepted.

  It is also worth emphasising once again that nationalist feeling can be

  purely negative. There are, for example, Trotskyists who have become

  simply enemies of the U.S.S.R. without developing a corresponding loyalty

  to any other unit. When one grasps the implications of this, the nature

  of what I mean by nationalism becomes a good deal clearer. A nationalist

  is one who thinks solely, or mainly, in terms of competitive prestige. He

  may be a positive or a negative nationalist--that is, he may use his

  mental energy either in boosting or in denigrating--but at any rate his

  thoughts always turn on victories, defeats, triumphs and humiliations. He

  sees history, especially contemporary history, as the endless rise and

  decline of great power units, and every event that happens seems to him a

  demonstration that his own side is on the upgrade and some hated rival is

  on the downgrade. But finally, it is important not to confuse nationalism

  with mere worship of success. The nationalist does not go on the

  principle of simply ganging up with the strongest side. On the contrary,

  having picked his side, he persuades himself that it IS the strongest,

  and is able to stick to his belief even when the facts are

  overwhelmingly against him. Nationalism is power-hunger tempered by

  self-deception. Every nationalist is capable of the most flagrant

  dishonesty, but he is also--since he is conscious of serving something

  bigger than himself--unshakeably certain of being in the right.

  Now that I have given this lengthy definition, I think it will be

  admitted that the habit of mind I am talking about is widespread among

  the English intelligentsia, and more widespread there than among the mass

  of the people. For those who feel deeply about contemporary politics,

  certain topics have become so infected by considerations of prestige that

  a genuinely rational approach to them is almost impossible. Out of the

  hundreds of examples that one might choose, take this question: Which of

  the three great allies, the U.S.S.R., Britain and the USA, has

  contributed most to the defeat of Germany? In theory, it should be

  possible to give a reasoned and perhaps even a conclusive answer to this

  question. In practice, however, the necessary calculations cannot be

  made, because anyone likely to bother his head about such a question

  would inevitably see it in terms of competitive prestige. He would

  therefore START by deciding in favour of Russia, Britain or America as

  the case might be, and only AFTER this would begin searching for

  arguments that seemed to support his case. And there are whole strings of

  kindred questions to which you can only get an honest answer from someone

  who is indifferent to the whole subject involved, and whose opinion on it

  is probably worthless in any case. Hence, partly, the remarkable failure

  in our time of political and military prediction. It is curious to

  reflect that out of al the 'experts' of all the schools, there was not a

  single one who was able to foresee so likely an event as the

  Russo-German Pact of 1939.[Note 1, below] And when news of the Pact

  broke, the most wildly divergent explanations were of it were given, and

  predictions were made which were falsified almost immediately, being

  based in nearly every case not on a study of probabilities but on a

  desire to make the U.S.S.R. seem good or bad, strong or weak. Political

  or military commentators, like astrologers, can survive almost any

  mistake, because their more devoted followers do not look to them for an

  appraisal of the facts but for the stimulation of nationalistic

  loyalties.[Note 2, below] And aesthetic judgements, especially literary

  judgements, are often corrupted in the same way as political ones. It

  would be difficult for an Indian Nationalist to enjoy reading Kipling or

  for a Conservative to see merit in Mayakovsky, and there is always a

  temptation to claim that any book whose tendency one disagrees with must

  be a bad book from a LITERARY point of view. People of strongly

  nationalistic outlook often perform this sleight of hand without being

  conscious of dishonesty.

  [Note 1: A few writers of conservative tendency, such as Peter Drucker,

  foretold an agreement between Germany and Russia, but they expected an

  actual alliance or amalgamation which would be permanent. No Marxist or

  other left-wing writer, of whatever colour, came anywhere near

  foretelling the Pact.(Author's footnote)]

  [Note 2: The military commentators of the popular press can mostly be

  classified as pro-Russian or anti-Russian pro-blimp or anti-blimp. Such

  errors as believing the Maginot Line impregnable, or predicting that

  Russia would conquer Germany in three months, have failed to shake their

  reputation, because they were always saying what their own particular

  audience wanted to hear. The two military critics most favoured by the

  intelligentsia are Captain Liddell Hart and Major-General Fuller, the

  first of whom teaches that the defence is stronger that the attack, and

  the second that the attack is stronger that the defence. This

  contradiction has not prevented both of them from being accepted as

  authorities by the same public. The secret reason for their vogue in

  left-wing circles is that both of them are at odds with the War Office.

  (Author's footnote)]

  In England, if one simply considers the number of people involved, it is

  probable that the dominant form of nationalism is old-fashioned British

  jingoism. It is certain that this is still widespread, and much more so

  than most observers would have believed a dozen years ago. However, in

  this essay I am concerned chiefly with the reactions of the

  intelligentsia, among whom jingoism and even patriotism of the old kind

  are almost dead, though they now seem t
o be reviving among a minority.

  Among the intelligentsia, it hardly needs saying that the dominant form

  of nationalism is Communism--using this word in a very loose sense, to

  include not merely Communist Party members, but 'fellow travellers' and

  russophiles generally. A Communist, for my purpose here, is one who looks

  upon the U.S.S.R. as his Fatherland and feels it his duty t justify

  Russian policy and advance Russian interests at all costs. Obviously such

  people abound in England today, and their direct and indirect influence

  is very great. But many other forms of nationalism also flourish, and it

  is by noticing the points of resemblance between different and even

  seemingly opposed currents of thought that one can best get the matter

  into perspective.

  Ten or twenty years ago, the form of nationalism most closely

  corresponding to Communism today was political Catholicism. Its most

  outstanding exponent--though he was perhaps an extreme case rather than

  a typical one--was G. K. Chesterton. Chesterton was a writer of

  considerable talent who whose to suppress both his sensibilities and his

  intellectual honesty in the cause of Roman Catholic propaganda. During

  the last twenty years or so of his life, his entire output was in reality

  an endless repetition of the same thing, under its laboured cleverness as

  simple and boring as 'Great is Diana of the Ephesians.' Every book that

  he wrote, every scrap of dialogue, had to demonstrate beyond the

  possibility of mistake the superiority of the Catholic over the

  Protestant or the pagan. But Chesterton was not content to think of this

  superiority as merely intellectual or spiritual: it had to be translated

  into terms of national prestige and military power, which entailed an

  ignorant idealisation of the Latin countries, especially France.

  Chesterton had not lived long in France, and his picture of it--as a

  land of Catholic peasants incessantly singing the MARSEILLAISE over

  glasses of red wine--had about as much relation to reality as CHU CHIN

  CHOW has to everyday life in Baghdad. And with this went not only an

  enormous overestimation of French military power (both before and after

  1914-18 he maintained that France, by itself, was stronger than Germany),

  but a silly and vulgar glorification of the actual process of war.

  Chesterton's battle poems, such as Lepanto or The Ballad of Saint

  Barbara, make The Charge of the Light Brigade read like a pacifist tract:

  they are perhaps the most tawdry bits of bombast to be found in our

  language. The interesting thing is that had the romantic rubbish which he

  habitually wrote about France and the French army been written by

  somebody else about Britain and the British army, he would have been the

  first to jeer. In home politics he was a Little Englander, a true hater

  of jingoism and imperialism, and according to his lights a true friend of

  democracy. Yet when he looked outwards into the international field, he

  could forsake his principles without even noticing he was doing so. Thus,

  his almost mystical belief in the virtues of democracy did not prevent

  him from admiring Mussolini. Mussolini had destroyed the representative

  government and the freedom of the press for which Chesterton had

  struggled so hard at home, but Mussolini was an Italian and had made

  Italy strong, and that settled the matter. Nor did Chesterton ever find a

  word to say about imperialism and the conquest of coloured races when

  they were practised by Italians or Frenchmen. His hold on reality, his

  literary taste, and even to some extent his moral sense, were dislocated

  as soon as his nationalistic loyalties were involved.

  Obviously there are considerable resemblances between political

  Catholicism, as exemplified by Chesterton, and Communism. So there are

  between either of these and for instance Scottish nationalism, Zionism,

  Antisemitism or Trotskyism. It would be an oversimplification to say that

  all forms of nationalism are the same, even in their mental atmosphere,

  but there are certain rules that hold good in all cases. The following

  are the principal characteristics of nationalist thought:

  OBSESSION. As nearly as possible, no nationalist ever thinks, talks, or

  writes about anything except the superiority of his own power unit. It

  is difficult if not impossible for any nationalist to conceal his

  allegiance. The smallest slur upon his own unit, or any implied praise

  of a rival organization, fills him with uneasiness which he can relieve

  only by making some sharp retort. If the chosen unit is an actual

  country, such as Ireland or India, he will generally claim superiority

  for it not only in military power and political virtue, but in art,

  literature, sport, structure of the language, the physical beauty of the

  inhabitants, and perhaps even in climate, scenery and cooking. He will

  show great sensitiveness about such things as the correct display of

  flags, relative size of headlines and the order in which different

  countries are named.[Note, below] Nomenclature plays a very important

  part in nationalist thought. Countries which have won their independence

  or gone through a nationalist revolution usually change their names, and

  any country or other unit round which strong feelings revolve is likely

  to have several names, each of them carrying a different implication.

  The two sides of the Spanish Civil War had between them nine or ten

  names expressing different degrees of love and hatred. Some of these

  names (e.g. 'Patriots' for Franco-supporters, or 'Loyalists' for

  Government-supporters) were frankly question-begging, and there was no

  single one of the which the two rival factions could have agreed to use.

  All nationalists consider it a duty to spread their own language to the

  detriment of rival languages, and among English-speakers this struggle

  reappears in subtler forms as a struggle between dialects.

  Anglophobe-Americans will refuse to use a slang phrase if they know it

  to be of British origin, and the conflict between Latinizers and

  Germanizers often has nationalists motives behind it. Scottish

  nationalists insist on the superiority of Lowland Scots, and socialists

  whose nationalism takes the form of class hatred tirade against the

  B.B.C. accent and even the often gives the impression of being tinged by

  belief in sympathetic magic--a belief which probably comes out in the

  widespread custom of burning political enemies in effigy, or using

  pictures of them as targets in shooting galleries.

  [Note: Certain Americans have expressed dissatisfaction because

  'Anglo-American' is the form of combination for these two words. It has

  been proposed to submit 'Americo-British'.(Author's footnote)]

  INSTABILITY. The intensity with which they are held does not prevent

  nationalist loyalties from being transferable. To begin with, as I have

  pointed out already, they can be and often are fastened up on some

  foreign country. One quite commonly finds that great national leaders, or

  the founders of nationalist movements, do not even belong to the country

  they have glorified. Sometimes they are outright foreig
ners, or more

  often they come from peripheral areas where nationality is doubtful.

  Examples are Stalin, Hitler, Napoleon, de Valera, Disraeli, Poincare,

  Beaverbrook. The Pan-German movement was in part the creation of an

  Englishman, Houston Chamberlain. For the past fifty or a hundred years,

  transferred nationalism has been a common phenomenon among literary

  intellectuals. With Lafcadio Hearne the transference was to Japan, with

  Carlyle and many others of his time to Germany, and in our own age it is

  usually to Russia. But the peculiarly interesting fact is that

  re-transference is also possible. A country or other unit which has been

  worshipped for years may suddenly become detestable, and some other

  object of affection may take its place with almost no interval. In the

  first version of H. G. Wells's OUTLINE OF HISTORY, and others of his

  writings about that time, one finds the United States praised almost as

  extravagantly as Russia is praised by Communists today: yet within a few

  years this uncritical admiration had turned into hostility. The bigoted

  Communist who changes in a space of weeks, or even days, into an equally

  bigoted Trotskyist is a common spectacle. In continental Europe Fascist

  movements were largely recruited from among Communists, and the opposite

  process may well happen within the next few years. What remains constant

  in the nationalist is his state of mind: the object of his feelings is

  changeable, and may be imaginary.

  But for an intellectual, transference has an important function which I

  have already mentioned shortly in connection with Chesterton. It makes it

  possible for him to be much MORE nationalistic--more vulgar, more silly,

  more malignant, more dishonest--that he could ever be on behalf of his

  native country, or any unit of which he had real knowledge. When one sees

  the slavish or boastful rubbish that is written about Stalin, the Red

  Army, etc. by fairly intelligent and sensitive people, one realises that

  this is only possible because some kind of dislocation has taken place.

  In societies such as ours, it is unusual for anyone describable as an

  intellectual to feel a very deep attachment to his own country. Public

  opinion--that is, the section of public opinion of which he as an

  intellectual is aware--will not allow him to do so. Most of the people

  surrounding him are sceptical and disaffected, and he may adopt the same

  attitude from imitativeness or sheer cowardice: in that case he will have

  abandoned the form of nationalism that lies nearest to hand without

  getting any closer to a genuinely internationalist outlook. He still

  feels the need for a Fatherland, and it is natural to look for one

  somewhere abroad. Having found it, he can wallow unrestrainedly in

  exactly those emotions from which he believes that he has emancipated

  himself. God, the King, the Empire, the Union Jack--all the overthrown

  idols can reappear under different names, and because they are not

  recognised for what they are they can be worshipped with a good

  conscience. Transferred nationalism, like the use of scapegoats, is a way

  of attaining salvation without altering one's conduct.

  INDIFFERENCE TO REALITY. All nationalists have the power of not seeing

  resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend

  self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of

  inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own

  merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of

  outrage--torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations,

  imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of

  civilians--which does not change its moral colour when it is committed

  by 'our' side. The Liberal NEWS CHRONICLE published, as an example of

  shocking barbarity, photographs of Russians hanged by the Germans, and

  then a year or two later published with warm approval almost exactly

  similar photographs of Germans hanged by the Russians.[Note, below] It