Notes on Nationalism [ελληνικά]
George Orwell, May, 1945
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 labeled "good" or "bad." 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 recognizing
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,
Anti-semitism, 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 emphasizing once
again that nationalist feeling can be purely negative. There are, for example,
Trotskyists who have become simply enemies of the USSR 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 -- unshakably 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 USSR, 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. 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 USSR 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. 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 travellers" and russophiles generally. A Communist,
for my purpose here, is one who looks upon the USSR 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, Anti-semitism 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. 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.
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
realizes 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 recognized 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. 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 anti-semitism 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. 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
1. 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 recognize 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.
2. 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 MacDiarmid and Sean O'Casey. No modern
Irish writer, even of the stature of Yeats or Joyce, is completely free from
traces of nationalism
3. ZIONISM. This has 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
1. COMMUNISM
2. POLITICAL CATHOLOCISM
3. COLOUR FEELING. The old-style
contemptuous attitude towards "natives" has been much weakened in
England, and various pseudo-scientific theories emphasizing the superiority
of the white race have been abandoned. 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 scandalized
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.
4. 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.
5. 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 defense 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
1. 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.
2. ANTISEMITISM 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.
3. 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 organized 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 deodorizing 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 realize 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 criticized 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 organized 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 recognize 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 recognize 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.