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George Orwell > Notes on Nationalism > Essay

Notes on Nationalism

Essay


Somewhere or other Byron makes use of the French word LONGEUR, and
remarks in passing that though in England we happen not to have the WORD,
we have the THING in considerable profusion. In the same way, there is a
habit of mind which is now so widespread that it affects our thinking on
nearly every subject, but which has not yet been given a name. As the
nearest existing equivalent I have chosen the word 'nationalism', but it
will be seen in a moment that I am not using it in quite the ordinary
sense, if only because the emotion I am speaking about does not always
attach itself to what is called a nation--that is, a single race or a
geographical area. It can attach itself to a church or a class, or it may
work in a merely negative sense, AGAINST something or other and without
the need for any positive object of loyalty.

By 'nationalism' I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human
beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions
or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled 'good' or
'bad'.[See note, below] But secondly--and this is much more important--I mean
the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing
it beyond good and evil and recognising no other duty than that of
advancing its interests. Nationalism is not to be confused with
patriotism. Both words are normally used in so vague a way that any
definition is liable to be challenged, but one must draw a distinction
between them, since two different and even opposing ideas are involved.
By 'patriotism' I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular
way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no
wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive,
both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is
inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every
nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, NOT for himself
but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own
individuality.


[Note: Nations, and even vaguer entities such as Catholic Church or the
proleteriat, are commonly thought of as individuals and often referred to
as 'she'. Patently absurd remarks such as 'Germany is naturally
treacherous' are to be found in any newspaper one opens and reckless
generalization about national character ('The Spaniard is a natural
aristocrat' or 'Every Englishman is a hypocrite') are uttered by almost
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-Russianm pro-blimp or anti-blimp. Such
errors as believing the Mrginot 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 teachs 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 sme 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 to 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 symphatetic 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 submite '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 foreigners, 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 is
the same with historical events. History is thought of largely in nationalist
terms, and such things as the Inquisition, the tortures of the Star
Chamber, the exploits of the English buccaneers (Sir Francis Drake, for
instance, who was given to sinking Spanish prisoners alive), the Reign of
Terror, the heroes of the Mutiny blowing hundreds of Indians from the
guns, or Cromwell's soldiers slashing Irishwomen's faces with razors,
become morally neutral or even meritorious when it is felt that they were
done in the 'right' cause. If one looks back over the past quarter of a
century, one finds that there was hardly a single year when atrocity
stories were not being reported from some part of the world; and yet in
not one single case were these atrocities--in Spain, Russia, China,
Hungary, Mexico, Amritsar, Smyrna--believed in and disapproved of by the
English intelligentsia as a whole. Whether such deeds were reprehensible,
or even whether they happened, was always decided according to political
predilection.


[Note: The NEWS CHRONICLE advised its readers to visit the news film at
which the entire execution could be witnessed, with close-ups. The STAR
published with seeming approval photographs of nearly naked female
collaborationists being baited by the Paris mob. These photographs had a
marked resemblance to the Nazi photographs of Jews being baited by the
Berlin mob.(Author's footnote)]


The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by
his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about
them. For quite six years the English admirers of Hitler contrived not to
learn of the existence of Dachau and Buchenwald. And those who are
loudest in denouncing the German concentration camps are often quite
unaware, or only very dimly aware, that there are also concentration
camps in Russia. Huge events like the Ukraine famine of 1933, involving
the deaths of millions of people, have actually escaped the attention of
the majority of English russophiles. Many English people have heard
almost nothing about the extermination of German and Polish Jews during
the present war. Their own antisemitism has caused this vast crime to
bounce off their consciousness. In nationalist thought there are facts
which are both true and untrue, known and unknown. A known fact may be so
unbearable that it is habitually pushed aside and not allowed to enter
into logical processes, or on the other hand it may enter into every
calculation and yet never be admitted as a fact, even in one's own mind.

Every nationalist is haunted by the belief that the past can be altered.
He spends part of his time in a fantasy world in which things happen as
they should--in which, for example, the Spanish Armada was a success or
the Russian Revolution was crushed in 1918--and he will transfer
fragments of this world to the history books whenever possible. Much of
the propagandist writing of our time amounts to plain forgery. Material
facts are suppressed, dates altered, quotations removed from their
context and doctored so as to change their meaning. Events which it is
felt ought not to have happened are left unmentioned and ultimately
denied[Note, below]. In 1927 Chiang Kai Shek boiled hundreds of Communists
alive, and yet within ten years he had become one of the heroes of the Left.
The re-alignment of world politics had brought him into the anti-Fascist
camp, and so it was felt that the boiling of the Communists 'didn't
count', or perhaps had not happened. The primary aim of propaganda is, of
course, to influence contemporary opinion, but those who rewrite history
do probably believe with part of their minds that they are actually
thrusting facts into the past. When one considers the elaborate forgeries
that have been committed in order to show that Trotsky did not play a
valuable part in the Russian civil war, it is difficult to feel that the
people responsible are merely lying. More probably they feel that their
own version was what happened in the sight of God, and that one is
justified in rearranging the records accordingly.


[Note: En example is the Russo-German Pact, which is being effaced as
quickly as possible from public memory. A Russian correspondent informs
me that mention of the Pact is already being omitted from Russian
year-books which table recent political events.(Author's note)]


Indifference to objective truth is encouraged by the sealing-off of one
part of the world from another, which makes it harder and harder to
discover what is actually happening. There can often be a genuine doubt
about the most enormous events. For example, it is impossible to
calculate within millions, perhaps even tens of millions, the number of
deaths caused by the present war. The calamities that are constantly
being reported--battles, massacres, famines, revolutions--tend to
inspire in the average person a feeling of unreality. One has no way of
verifying the facts, one is not even fully certain that they have
happened, and one is always presented with totally different
interpretations from different sources. What were the rights and wrongs
of the Warsaw rising of August 1944? Is it true about the German gas
ovens in Poland? Who was really to blame for the Bengal famine? Probably
the truth is discoverable, but the facts will be so dishonestly set forth
in almost any newspaper that the ordinary reader can be forgiven either
for swallowing lies or failing to form an opinion. The general
uncertainty as to what is really happening makes it easier to cling to
lunatic beliefs. Since nothing is ever quite proved or disproved, the
most unmistakable fact can be impudently denied. Moreover, although
endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge, the nationalist is
often somewhat uninterested in what happens in the real world. What he
wants is to FEEL that his own unit is getting the better of some other
unit, and he can more easily do this by scoring off an adversary than by
examining the facts to see whether they support him. All nationalist
controversy is at the debating-society level. It is always entirely
inconclusive, since each contestant invariably believes himself to have
won the victory. Some nationalists are not far from schizophrenia, living
quite happily amid dreams of power and conquest which have no connection
with the physical world.

I have examined as best as I can the mental habits which are common to
all forms of nationalism. The next thing is to classify those forms, but
obviously this cannot be done comprehensively. Nationalism is an enormous
subject. The world is tormented by innumerable delusions and hatreds
which cut across one another in an extremely complex way, and some of the
most sinister of them have not yet impinged on the European
consciousness. In this essay I am concerned with nationalism as it occurs
among the English intelligentsia. In them, much more than in ordinary
English people, it is unmixed with patriotism and therefore can be
studied pure. Below are listed the varieties of nationalism now
flourishing among English intellectuals, with such comments as seem to be
needed. It is convenient to use three headings, Positive, Transferred,
and Negative, though some varieties will fit into more than one category:


     POSITIVE NATIONALISM

(i) NEO-TORYISM. Exemplified by such people as Lord Elton, A.P. Herbert,
G.M. Young, Professor Pickthorn, by the literature of the Tory Reform
Committee, and by such magazines as the NEW ENGLISH REVIEW and THE
NINETEENTH CENTURY AND AFTER. The real motive force of neo-Toryism,
giving it its nationalistic character and differentiating it from
ordinary Conservatism, is the desire not to recognise that British power
and influence have declined. Even those who are realistic enough to see
that Britain's military position is not what it was, tend to claim that
'English ideas' (usually left undefined) must dominate the world. All
neo-Tories are anti-Russian, but sometimes the main emphasis is
anti-American. The significant thing is that this school of thought seems
to be gaining ground among youngish intellectuals, sometimes
ex-Communists, who have passed through the usual process of
disillusionment and become disillusioned with that. The anglophobe who
suddenly becomes violently pro-British is a fairly common figure. Writers
who illustrate this tendency are F. A. Voigt, Malcolm Muggeridge, Evelyn
Waugh, Hugh Kingsmill, and a psychologically similar development can be
observed in T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, and various of their followers.

(ii) CELTIC NATIONALISM. Welsh, Irish and Scottish nationalism have
points of difference but are alike in their anti-English orientation.
Members of all three movements have opposed the war while continuing to
describe themselves as pro-Russian, and the lunatic fringe has even
contrived to be simultaneously pro-Russian and pro-Nazi. But Celtic
nationalism is not the same thing as anglophobia. Its motive force is a
belief in the past and future greatness of the Celtic peoples, and it has
a strong tinge of racialism. The Celt is supposed to be spiritually
superior to the Saxon--simpler, more creative, less vulgar, less
snobbish, etc.--but the usual power hunger is there under the surface.
One symptom of it is the delusion that Eire, Scotland or even Wales could
preserve its independence unaided and owes nothing to British protection.
Among writers, good examples of this school of thought are Hugh McDiarmid
and Sean O'Casey. No modern Irish writer, even of the stature of Yeats or
Joyce, is completely free from traces of nationalism.

(iii) ZIONISM. This the unusual characteristics of a nationalist
movement, but the American variant of it seems to be more violent and
malignant than the British. I classify it under Direct and not
Transferred nationalism because it flourishes almost exclusively among
the Jews themselves. In England, for several rather incongruous reasons,
the intelligentsia are mostly pro-Jew on the Palestine issue, but they do
not feel strongly about it. All English people of goodwill are also
pro-Jew in the sense of disapproving of Nazi persecution. But any actual
nationalistic loyalty, or belief in the innate superiority of Jews, is
hardly to be found among Gentiles.

     TRANSFERRED NATIONALISM

(i) COMMUNISM.

(ii) POLITICAL ATHOLICISM.

(iii) COLOUR FEELING. The old-style contemptuous attitude towards
'natives' has been much weakened in England, and various
pseudo-scientific theories emphasising the superiority of the white race
have been abandoned.[Note, below] Among the intelligentsia, colour feeling
only occurs in the transposed form, that is, as a belief in the innate
superiority of the coloured races. This is now increasingly common among
English intellectuals, probably resulting more often from masochism and
sexual frustration than from contact with the Oriental and Negro
nationalist movements. Even among those who do not feel strongly on the
colour question, snobbery and imitation have a powerful influence. Almost
any English intellectual would be scandalised by the claim that the white
races are superior to the coloured, whereas the opposite claim would seem
to him unexceptionable even if he disagreed with it. Nationalistic
attachment to the coloured races is usually mixed up with the belief that
their sex lives are superior, and there is a large underground mythology
about the sexual prowess of Negroes.


[Note: A good example is the sunstroke superstition. Until recently it was
believed that the white races were much more liable to sunstroke that the
coloured, and that a white man could not safely walk about in tropical
sunshine without a pith helmet. There was no evidence whatever for this
theory, but it served the purpose of accentuating the difference between
'natives' and Europeans. During the war the theory was quietly dropped
and whole armies manoeuvred in the tropics without pith helmets. So long
as the sunstroke superstition survived, English doctors in India appear
to have believed in it as firmly as laymen.(Author's footnote)]


(iv) CLASS FEELING. Among upper-class and middle-class intellectuals,
only in the transposed form--i.e. as a belief in the superiority of the
proletariat. Here again, inside the intelligentsia, the pressure of
public opinion is overwhelming. Nationalistic loyalty towards the
proletariat, and most vicious theoretical hatred of the bourgeoisie, can
and often do co-exist with ordinary snobbishness in everyday life.

(v) PACIFISM. The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure
religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to the taking of
life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there
is a minority of intellectual pacifists whose real though unadmitted
motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration of
totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that
one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writings
of younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any
means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely
against Britain and the United States. Moreover they do not as a rule
condemn violence as such, but only violence used in defence of western
countries. The Russians, unlike the British, are not blamed for defending
themselves by warlike means, and indeed all pacifist propaganda of this
type avoids mention of Russia or China. It is not claimed, again, that
the Indians should abjure violence in their struggle against the British.
Pacifist literature abounds with equivocal remarks which, if they mean
anything, appear to mean that statesmen of the type of Hitler are
preferable to those of the type of Churchill, and that violence is
perhaps excusable if it is violent enough. After the fall of France, the
French pacifists, faced by a real choice which their English colleagues
have not had to make, mostly went over to the Nazis, and in England there
appears to have been some small overlap of membership between the Peace
Pledge Union and the Blackshirts. Pacifist writers have written in praise
of Carlyle, one of the intellectual fathers of Fascism. All in all it is
difficult not to feel that pacifism, as it appears among a section of the
intelligentsia, is secretly inspired by an admiration for power and
successful cruelty. The mistake was made of pinning this emotion to
Hitler, but it could easily be retransfered.


     NEGATIVE NATIONALISM

(i) ANGLOPHOBIA. Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile
attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked
emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism
of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear
that the Axis powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly
pleased when Singapore fell ore when the British were driven out of
Greece, and there was a remarkable unwillingness to believe in good news,
e.g. el Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle
of Britain. English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually
want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not
help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated,
and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or
perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics many
intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain
must be in the wrong. As a result, 'enlightened' opinion is quite largely
a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to
reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who
is a bellicist in the next.

(ii) ANTI-SEMITISM. There is little evidence about this at present,
because the Nazi persecutions have made it necessary for any thinking
person to side with the Jews against their oppressors. Anyone educated
enough to have heard the word 'antisemitism' claims as a matter of course
to be free of it, and anti-Jewish remarks are carefully eliminated from
all classes of literature. Actually antisemitism appears to be
widespread, even among intellectuals, and the general conspiracy of
silence probably helps exacerbate it. People of Left opinions are not
immune to it, and their attitude is sometimes affected by the fact that
Trotskyists and Anarchists tend to be Jews. But antisemitism comes more
naturally to people of Conservative tendency, who suspect Jews of
weakening national morale and diluting the national culture. Neo-Tories
and political Catholics are always liable to succumb to antisemitism, at
least intermittently.

(iii) TROTSKYISM. This word is used so loosely as to include Anarchists,
democratic Socialists and even Liberals. I use it here to mean a
doctrinaire Marxist whose main motive is hostility to the Stalin régime.
Trotskyism can be better studied in obscure pamphlets or in papers like
the SOCIALIST APPEAL than in the works of Trotsky himself, who was by no
means a man of one idea. Although in some places, for instance in the
United States, Trotskyism is able to attract a fairly large number of
adherents and develop into an organised movement with a petty fuerher of
its own, its inspiration is essentially negative. The Trotskyist is
AGAINST Stalin just as the Communist is FOR him, and, like the majority
of Communists, he wants not so much to alter the external world as to
feel that the battle for prestige is going in his own favour. In each
case there is the same obsessive fixation on a single subject, the same
inability to form a genuinely rational opinion based on probabilities.
The fact that Trotskyists are everywhere a persecuted minority, and that
the accusation usually made against them, i.e. of collaborating with the
Fascists, is obviously false, creates an impression that Trotskyism is
intellectually and morally superior to Communism; but it is doubtful
whether there is much difference. The most typical Trotskyists, in any
case, are ex-Communists, and no one arrives at Trotskyism except via one
of the left-wing movements. No Communist, unless tethered to his party by
years of habit, is secure against a sudden lapse into Trotskyism. The
opposite process does not seem to happen equally often, though there is
no clear reason why it should not.

In the classification I have attempted above, it will seem that I have
often exaggerated, oversimplified, made unwarranted assumptions and have
left out of account the existence of ordinarily decent motives. This was
inevitable, because in this essay I am trying to isolate and identify
tendencies which exist in all our minds and pervert our thinking, without
necessarily occurring in a pure state or operating continuously. It is
important at this point to correct the over-simplified picture which I
have been obliged to make. To begin with, one has no right to assume that
EVERYONE, or even every intellectual, is infected by nationalism.
Secondly, nationalism can be intermittent and limited. An intelligent man
may half-succumb to a belief which he knows to be absurd, and he may keep
it out of his mind for long periods, only reverting to it in moments of
anger or sentimentality, or when he is certain that no important issues
are involved. Thirdly, a nationalistic creed may be adopted in good faith
from non-nationalistic motives. Fourthly, several kinds of nationalism,
even kinds that cancel out, can co-exist in the same person.

All the way through I have said, 'the nationalist does this' or 'the
nationalist does that', using for purposes of illustration the extreme,
barely sane type of nationalist who has no neutral areas in his mind and
no interest in anything except the struggle for power. Actually such
people are fairly common, but they are not worth the powder and shot. In
real life Lord Elton, D. N. Pritt, Lady Houston, Ezra Pound, Lord
Vanisttart, Father Coughlin and all the rest of their dreary tribe have
to be fought against, but their intellectual deficiencies hardly need
pointing out. Monomania is not interesting, and the fact that no
nationalist of the more bigoted kind can write a book which still seems
worth reading after a lapse of years has a certain deodorising effect.
But when one has admitted that nationalism has not triumphed everywhere,
that there are still peoples whose judgements are not at the mercy of
their desires, the fact does remain that the pressing problems--India,
Poland, Palestine, the Spanish civil war, the Moscow trials, the American
Negroes, the Russo-German Pact or what have you--cannot be, or at least
never are, discussed upon a reasonable level. The Eltons and Pritts and
Coughlins, each of them simply an enormous mouth bellowing the same lie
over and over again, are obviously extreme cases, but we deceive
ourselves if we do not realise that we can all resemble them in unguarded
moments. Let a certain note be struck, let this or that corn be trodden
on--and it may be corn whose very existence has been unsuspected
hitherto--and the most fair-minded and sweet-tempered person may
suddenly be transformed into a vicious partisan, anxious only to 'score'
over his adversary and indifferent as to how many lies he tells or how
many logical errors he commits in doing so. When Lloyd George, who was an
opponent of the Boer War, announced in the House of Commons that the
British communiques, if one added them together, claimed the killing of
more Boers than the whole Boer nation contained, it is recorded that
Arthur Balfour rose to his feet and shouted 'Cad!' Very few people are
proof against lapses of this type. The Negro snubbed by a white woman,
the Englishman who hears England ignorantly criticised by an American,
the Catholic apologist reminded of the Spanish Armada, will all react in
much the same way. One prod to the nerve of nationalism, and the
intellectual decencies can vanish, the past can be altered, and the
plainest facts can be denied.

If one harbours anywhere in one's mind a nationalistic loyalty or hatred,
certain facts, although in a sense known to be true, are inadmissible.
Here are just a few examples. I list below five types of nationalist, and
against each I append a fact which it is impossible for that type of
nationalist to accept, even in his secret thoughts:

BRITISH TORY: Britain will come out of this war with reduced power and
prestige.

COMMUNIST: If she had not been aided by Britain and America, Russia would
have been defeated by Germany.

IRISH NATIONALIST: Eire can only remain independent because of British
protection.

TROTSKYIST: The Stalin régime is accepted by the Russian masses.

PACIFIST: Those who 'abjure' violence can only do so because others are
committing violence on their behalf.

All of these facts are grossly obvious if one's emotions do not happen to
be involved: but to the kind of person named in each case they are also
INTOLERABLE, and so they have to be denied, and false theories
constructed upon their denial. I come back to the astonishing failure of
military prediction in the present war. It is, I think, true to say that
the intelligentsia have been more wrong about the progress of the war
than the common people, and that they were more swayed by partisan
feelings. The average intellectual of the Left believed, for instance,
that the war was lost in 1940, that the Germans were bound to overrun
Egypt in 1942, that the Japanese would never be driven out of the lands
they had conquered, and that the Anglo-American bombing offensive was
making no impression on Germany. He could believe these things because
his hatred for the British ruling class forbade him to admit that British
plans could succeed. There is no limit to the follies that can be
swallowed if one is under the influence of feelings of this kind. I have
heard it confidently stated, for instance, that the American troops had
been brought to Europe not to fight the Germans but to crush an English
revolution. One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things
like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool. When Hitler invaded
Russia, the officials of the MOI issued 'as background' a warning that
Russia might be expected to collapse in six weeks. On the other hand the
Communists regarded every phase of the war as a Russian victory, even
when the Russians were driven back almost to the Caspian Sea and had lost
several million prisoners. There is no need to multiply instances. The
point is that as soon as fear, hatred, jealousy and power worship are
involved, the sense of reality becomes unhinged. And, as I have pointed
out already, the sense of right and wrong becomes unhinged also. There is
no crime, absolutely none, that cannot be condoned when 'our' side
commits it. Even if one does not deny that the crime has happened, even
if one knows that it is exactly the same crime as one has condemned in
some other case, even if one admits in an intellectual sense that it is
unjustified--still one cannot FEEL that it is wrong. Loyalty is
involved, and so pity ceases to function.

The reason for the rise and spread of nationalism is far too big a
question to be raised here. It is enough to say that, in the forms in
which it appears among English intellectuals, it is a distorted
reflection of the frightful battles actually happening in the external
world, and that its worst follies have been made possible by the
breakdown of patriotism and religious belief. If one follows up this
train of thought, one is in danger of being led into a species of
Conservatism, or into political quietism. It can be plausibly argued, for
instance--it is even possibly true--that patriotism is an inoculation
against nationalism, that monarchy is a guard against dictatorship, and
that organised religion is a guard against superstition. Or again, it can
be argued that NO unbiased outlook is possible, that ALL creeds and
causes involve the same lies, follies, and barbarities; and this is often
advanced as a reason for keeping out of politics altogether. I do not
accept this argument, if only because in the modern world no one
describable as an intellectual CAN keep out of politics in the sense of
not caring about them. I think one must engage in politics--using the
word in a wide sense--and that one must have preferences: that is, one
must recognise that some causes are objectively better than others, even
if they are advanced by equally bad means. As for the nationalistic loves
and hatreds that I have spoken of, they are part of the make-up of most
of us, whether we like it or not. Whether it is possible to get rid of
them I do not know, but I do believe that it is possible to struggle
against them, and that this is essentially a MORAL effort. It is a
question first of all of discovering what one really is, what one's own
feelings really are, and then of making allowance for the inevitable
bias. If you hate and fear Russia, if you are jealous of the wealth and
power of America, if you despise Jews, if you have a sentiment of
inferiority towards the British ruling class, you cannot get rid of those
feelings simply by taking thought. But you can at least recognise that
you have them, and prevent them from contaminating your mental processes.
The emotional urges which are inescapable, and are perhaps even necessary
to political action, should be able to exist side by side with an
acceptance of reality. But this, I repeat, needs a MORAL effort, and
contemporary English literature, so far as it is alive at all to the
major issues of our time, shows how few of us are prepared to make it.















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