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
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