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.