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.
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 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 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 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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