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Notes on Nationalism (1945)

by brandonhall on 5/13/18, 4:51 AM with 89 comments

• by eklavya on 5/13/18, 8:22 AM

  Boy oh boy if only I could make more people read this. So many people in India just conflate patriotism with nationalism and it has become a fashion to brand any patriotic talk as "nationalistic". And they assume they are right because they think great people of past agree.

• by JohnStrangeII on 5/13/18, 12:46 PM

  Both nationalism nor patriotism barely make sense any more. Time are changing. When Orwell wrote this piece he was influenced by the war, extreme situations like wars or famines always cloud your judgements.

  I recommend reading the seemingly unrelated The Knowledge by Lewis Dartnell. It describes the skills that would be necessary to rebuild civilisation after a hypothetical global cataclysm. Why is it relevant? If you read it, you will realize that all of civilization is fundamentally based on global markets and the global shipping of crude oil and other resources. Without these, nearly all technologies of daily life would break down in a very short time frame, including agriculture and medicine. The connections and dependences between countries are massive and completely unavoidable at our current level of technological development. In the long run, all countries have to work together or modern society will fail. (It may also fail because the resources dwindle extremely fast, viewed at an evolutionary time scale. Expanding mankind into space is unavoidable, or at least robot mining will be needed.)

  Add to this the fact that we can communicate in real-time with the whole world and get news about distant events and politics within minutes, and patriotism starts to appear in a completely different light - as a silly appeal to traditions with no substance. Bear in mind that nations are entirely artificial entities and territorial conflicts have become (almost) impossible due to the global trade dependences.

  This doesn't mean that there is anything wrong with mild forms of patriotism, of course, just that there are no particular advantages to it in the long run.

  In a nutshell, we live in an essentially transnational society and this cannot change unless you're willing to give up almost all of modern technology.

• by dalbasal on 5/13/18, 9:21 AM

  I always really admired Orwell's style as a political journalist and writer. He writes clearly and gets to the point. He doesn't hide in flowery ambiguity, like most journalists do when writing about "isms."

  Here specifically, I don't think he's clear and timeless.

  This is an essay about British politics of the time, for the British. Nationalism meant the bad guys from the war, which was just ending. Orwell is warning against fanatical politics likes those of the 1930s. Besides the war, the British Empire was ending. Orwell is warning the British about paranoid, nationalist politics the loss of empire was stirring up.

  He is being delicate with his labels to avoid just calling his readers fanatics^. I think this leaves us with something less timeless.

  Anyway.... First, he splits hairs to define nationalism separately from patriotism, the safer & less violent flavour of nation-centric "ism". Then he extends his definition of "nationalism" to include also... "such movements and tendencies as Communism, political Catholicism, Zionism, Antisemitism, Trotskyism and Pacifism."

  So, wtf does Orwell mean when he says "nationalism". It's not like patriotism, but is like Trotskyism? I think he just means fanatics. Ideologists that care more about winning arguments and wars then morals & greater goods supposedly furthered by ideologies.

  That is relevant today. I think this essay would have been gone on to the top shelf of timeless political writing if Orwell had pretended to write for the French about the British, instead of "anticipating the troll" and mincing his words in response. Name the thing.

  ^Orwell's essay on Gandhi is written for Brits too. He doesn't hold back pointing out the fanaticism of Gandhi. This makes his positive points about Gandhi's nonviolent political methods clearer and more honest, having already named the superstitious elements what they were.

• by coldtea on 5/13/18, 2:41 PM

  >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.

  And here Orwell is being "nationalistic" (in his sense of the word) over his preferred ideas, doing what he accused others of: "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."

• by candu on 5/13/18, 12:22 PM

  This reminds me of Hoffer's The True Believer - he makes similar observations about how fanatics of different / opposing stripes are much more similar to each other than to non-fanatics, and how fanaticism is often transferable to a different object (nation, ideology, religion, etc.) for this reason.

• by coldtea on 5/13/18, 3:01 PM

  A better name for what Orwell calls "nationalism" here would be "partisanship".

• by Jedi72 on 5/13/18, 8:58 AM

  "Among the intelligentsia, it hardly needs saying that the dominant form of nationalism is Communism — using this word in a very loose sense, to include not merely Communist Party members, but ‘fellow travellers’ and russophiles generally. A Communist, for my purpose here, is one who looks upon the U.S.S.R. as his Fatherland and feels it his duty t justify Russian policy and advance Russian interests at all costs. Obviously such people abound in England today, and their direct and indirect influence is very great."

  I find this somehow hard to believe. I can buy that the British intelligensia was probably full of people who thought communism was a good philosophy. But outright supporting Russia as their homeland? That doesnt make sense, unless there was some huge ex-patriation of Russian intelligensia types to other countries?