In the bleak post-war Britain of October 1945, an essay by George Orwell appeared in the first edition of Polemic. Edited by abstract artist and ex-Communist Hugh Slater, the new journal was marketed as a “magazine of philosophy, psychology, and aesthetics.” Orwell was not yet famous — Animal Farm had only just started appearing on shelves — but he had a high enough profile for his name to be a boon to a new publication. His contribution to the October 1945 Polemic was “Notes on Nationalism,” one of his best and most important pieces of writing. Amidst the de-Nazification of Germany, the alarmingly rapid slide into the Cold War, and the trials of German and Japanese war criminals, Orwell set out to answer a question which had occupied his mind for most of the past seven years — why do otherwise rational people embrace irrational or even contradictory beliefs about politics?
As a junior colonial official in Burma, the young Eric Blair (he had not yet adopted the name by which he would be known to posterity) had been disgusted by his peers and superiors talking up the British liberty of Magna Carta and Rule Britannia while excusing acts of repression like the massacre of Indian protestors at Amritsar in 1919. As a committed socialist in the late 1930s, he openly ridiculed those who claimed to be champions of the working class while holding actual working-class people in open contempt. And he had watched the British Communist Party insist that the Second World War was nothing more than an imperialist adventure right up until the moment when the first German soldier crossed the Soviet frontier, at which point it instantly became a noble struggle for human freedom.
Orwell’s most personally searing experience, though, had come in Barcelona in 1937. The previous year, he had travelled to Spain to fight in the Civil War on the Republican side. His poor relationship with the British Communist Party led him to enlist in the militia of an anti-Stalinist socialist party, the POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista, or Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification). Even while it was fighting a bitter winter campaign in the Aragon mountains, the POUM was subject to a relentless propaganda campaign by pro-Soviet Republicans who insisted it was a secret front for fascism.
Over May and June 1937, the POUM and the other independent left-wing organisations in Barcelona were brutally suppressed by the Republican Government and Soviet-backed Communists. Orwell saw his friends and comrades smeared, arrested, and in some cases shot. He only made a narrow escape back into France himself. Upon his return to Britain, he found the British Communist Party resolute in its line that the POUM was a fascist party. Admitting that there could be a difference of opinion among left-wing groups with respect to the Soviet Union, or that the Spanish Communists could have acted unjustly, was unacceptable. And when Orwell published his own account of the events in Spain, Homage to Catalonia, few were interested in reading it. The betrayal of the POUM weighed on Orwell’s mind through the Second World War, and Animal Farm provided an outlet for his anger. But those bloody spring days in Barcelona also informed “Notes on Nationalism.”
“Notes on Nationalism” is not an ideal title, as Orwell was not talking only about loyalty to country. Rather, he used nationalism as a short-hand for any type of group loyalty — to a country, but also to a religion, a political party, or an ideology itself. A nationalist may be defined by his membership of a group, or by his opposition to one, which Orwell called “negative” nationalism. Orwell used anti-Semites as an example of the latter, as well as the “minority of intellectual pacifists whose real though unadmitted motive appears to be hatred of Western democracy and admiration of totalitarianism.” He then set out to explain how everyone — no matter how reasoned and level-headed — is capable of irrational and biased thinking when our sense of group identity is challenged.
He identified three characteristics of “‘nationalistic’ thinking.” First, obsession — the ideologue’s need to filter everything through an ideological lens. Entertainment is not entertaining unless it is orthodox. Second, instability — the ability of the ideologue to go from believing one thing to quickly believing another to follow the party line. And thirdly, indifference to reality. One of the most interesting aspects of “Notes on Nationalism” is the “inadmissible fact” — something which can be proven to be true and is generally accepted but cannot be admitted by the adherents of a particular ideology. Or, if the fact is admitted, it is explained away or dismissed as unimportant.
The ideas explored in “Notes on Nationalism” run through much of Orwell’s writing, most obviously his anti-totalitarianism and hatred of hypocritical pieties. But central to his argument is how nationalistic thinking exposes our inescapable biases. “The Liberal News Chronicle,” he wrote, “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.” This anticipated the doublethink of Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which atrocities “are looked upon as normal, and, when they are committed by one’s own side and not by the enemy, meritorious.” The first step down the deceptively short road to totalitarianism is believing that our political enemies pose such a grave threat that defeating them takes precedence over truth, consistency, or common sense.
