Notes on Nationalism (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 labelled "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 inseperable 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 movments and tendencies as Communism, political Catholocism, 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 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 -- 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 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 seemd 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 Protestan 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 overstimation 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 imperialsm 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. 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, ans 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 bgoted
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
sceptical and disaffected, and he may adopt the same attitude from imitativeness
or sheer cowardice: in that case he will have abandoned the form of nationalism
that lies nearest to hand without getting any closer to a genuinely internationalist
outlook. He still feels the need for a Fatherland, and it is natural to
look for one somewhere abroad. Having found it, he can wallow unrestrainedly
in exactly those emotions from which he believes that he has emancipated
himself. God, the King, the Empire, the Union Jack -- all the overthrown
idols can reappear under different names, and because they are not 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.
Indiference 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 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. 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 progaganda 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 throught 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 incongrous 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 foung among Gentiles.
Transferred Nationalism
1. Communism
2. Political Catholicism
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 bourgeoise, 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: Britian
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 inocculation 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.
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