Analysis of an argument
Aseeloo23
Notes on Nationalism
George Orwell (1945)
''All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed—they must rely exclusively on force.'' ~George Orwell
Note: This essay uses the original, mid-20th century British English spelling (e.g., adding the vowel “u” and using “s” in
cases where American usage does not add the “u” and uses “z”, etc.) which might appear incorrect to non-British readers.
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’(1). 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.
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 all
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(2). 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 (3). 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.
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
travelers’ 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 to 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
chose 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(4). 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 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 nationalist 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.
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, and 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' 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 skeptical 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(5). 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.
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 (6). 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.
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 Catholicism.
(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 (7). 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.
(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 retransferred.
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
regime. 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 Führer 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 regime 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.
1945
_____ Author’s Notes
1) Nations, and even vaguer entities such as Catholic Church or the proletariat, 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. [back]
2) 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. [back]
3) 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. [back]
4) 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’. [back]
5) 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. [back]
6) An 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. [back]
7) 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 maneuvered 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. [back]
THE END
____BD____
George Orwell: ‘Notes on Nationalism’
First published: Polemic. — GB, London. — May 1945.
Reprinted:
— ‘England Your England and Other Essays’. — 1953.
URL: http://orwell.ru/library/essays/nationalism/english/e_nat
Machine-readable version: O. Dag
Last modified on: 2004-07-24
George Orwell
‘England, Your England and Other Essays’
© 1953 Secker and Warburg