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Notes on Nationalism (1945)

• eklavya 8y ago
  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.
  • wu-ikkyu 8y ago
    I googled "nationalism", and it's defined as "patriotic feeling". What do you think the difference is, according to your definition?
    • eklavya 8y ago
      Isn't exactly that discussed and defined in the article?
  • mistermann 8y ago
    > it has become a fashion to brand any patriotic talk as "nationalistic" Considering modern usage of the word, I can't tell what you mean by this. I've explained why here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17059121 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17059121 EDIT: Aaaaand, immediately downvoted with no reply. I rest my case. :)
    • pasbesoin 8y ago
      This makes me think of a new (to me) term I may find useful: Trickle down participation. Politics such as this: The real winners are the political and financial elite. But their supporters experience trickle down participation. Professional sports: Trickle down participation. A bit simplistic, and ignoring local-scale advantages to the participants. But I'm going to keep it in mind. A few people getting very rich and powerful. And the rest celebrating this, while propping them up through their participation.
    • Zuider 8y ago
      I didn't downvote, but it may be more inspired by your style of presentation than your opinion. It is hard to make out what you are saying because your writing looks more like lecture notes or a shorthand of your private thinking process than a means of communicating to others. Please understand that I don't mean to be snarky, and I would be the first to acknowledge that writing clearly is difficult.
      • mistermann 8y ago
        I'm genuinely confused how writing in a transparent manner, being detailed, providing links to claims, etc can be considered hard to understand. And as usual, I am always happy to answer any question asked of me in an honest manner, so feel free. I had a more substantial reply, but since my sincere and valid question was enthusiastically and immediately downvoted requiring me to keep the tab open until my censorship is lifted, I accidentally closed the tab. To me, the anti-intellectual groupthink overtaking online sites is rather alarming, especially considering how they are now where the vast majority of news (and accompanying discussion) is hosted and due to private ownership, no freedom of speech is required. And even if it was, a deliberate "misrepresentation" of someone's words can turn a controversial-at-best comment into a claimed (see this subthread) racial slur or threat of violence.
    • eklavya 8y ago
      Sorry man, I didn't downvote, I haven't even read your comment properly :D
  • Koshkin 8y ago
    Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.--Samuel Johnson
    • eklavya 8y ago
      Why, how? In what sense?
      • everybodyknows 8y ago
        The meaning is that scoundrels, when confronted with evidence of their unanswerable crimes, will instead answer a different question: "Do you support some unquestionably virtuous cause?" This is the reason that that runners of big cons typically give very generously to charities. See Anthony Trollope's "The Way We Live Now".
        • eklavya 8y ago
          Oh, I understood it differently. So it means that some scoundrels will use some virtue (in this case patriotism) to hide behind and not that patriotism is a bad thing?
          • Koshkin 8y ago
            I wonder if this particular 'virtue' has ever led to anything good. There is a parallel in the difference between, say, love (for one's land) and faith on the one hand and patriotism and (organized) religion on the other - the latter ones have invariably been used directly to promote hatred and intolerance in support of some political goals or in justifying criminal acts.
            • eklavya 8y ago
              You seem to be defining the "nationalism" being discussed here.
      • Koshkin 8y ago
        These are exactly the questions one begins one's path to enlightenment with.
  • dragonsh 8y ago
    Nationalism breeds patriotism which breeds selfishness. I still prefer Rabindranath Tagore’s human to human connection over nationalism. Patriotism cannot be our final spiritual shelter; my refuge is humanity. I will not buy glass for the price of diamonds, and I will never allow patriotism to triumph over humanity as long as I live - Rabindranath Tagore Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high. Where knowledge is free. Where the world has not been broken up into fragments. By narrow domestic walls. Where words come out from the depth of truth. Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection. Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way. Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit. Where the mind is led forward by thee. Into ever-widening thought and action. Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
• Jedi72 8y ago
  "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?
  • jhbadger 8y ago
    There were really was a belief among orthodox Western Communists that the Soviet Union was the future and that Stalin was a great man. They often became Rusophiles who learned Russian and went on trips to the Soviet Union where they were given carefully controlled tours which made the place seem like Utopia. That was different from just a belief in Communism -- as Orwell notes, there certainly were the Trotskyists, who believed that Lenin's revolution in the USSR had been betrayed by Stalin, but they had their own parties and organizations (and weren't that numerous).
  • dalbasal 8y ago
    Orwell is being obtuse when he says "nationalism." What he meant is some flavour of what we'd call "ideologist" today, whether or not the ideology has much to do with nations or nation states. Communism was a major political movement all over europe (and the world) at the time. Most labour movements considered themselves communists. Anglo-American liberalism was the biggest ideological faction, but Orwell doesn't seem to count that as "Nationalism." After that, communism probably was the biggest faction in universities in 1945.
    • icebraining 8y ago
      But it's not just Communism, it's Russia itself. I see it even today among some members of our national Communist Party (which was historically Stalinist). They not only irrationally¹ defended the USSR, as they transferred that to current Russia and Putin. It truly boggles the mind. And they are not Russians, or particularly care about the land or the people, it's a support of the Russian nation specifically. ¹ By irrationally, I mean what Orwell describes - defending actions they would never defend in other countries and ignoring inconvenient facts
• dalbasal 8y ago
  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.
  • jhbadger 8y ago
    Yes, he really does seem to just mean fanatical adherents to an ideology, which may or may not be associated with a physical nation. He is certainly using the term "nationalism" in a non-standard way. But I think he did it because he was trying to point out the similarities between traditional nationalism and ideologues of all stripes.
    • dalbasal 8y ago
      I think he was. I think he was also trying to piggy-back. To the British of 1945, "Nationalism" meant Germany, Japan, Italy and their other recent enemies. Everyone knew they were irrational, destructive fanatics. I think he was warning of similar in British politics.
• candu 8y ago
  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.
• JohnStrangeII 8y ago
  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.
  • thankthunk 8y ago
    > Both nationalism nor patriotism barely make sense any more. Time are changing. People said the same thing in the late and early 20th century before ww1 and ww2. They were wrong. > 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. Modern nations are dependent on oil for sure. That's what ww1 and ww2 was fought over. > In the long run, all countries have to work together or modern society will fail. That's fundamentally not true. Certain nations, like the US, don't have to work with anyone. We are one of the few nations who have enough resources ( including oil ) to keep our civilization running. If you expand the US to include the anglo-nations ( Canada, Australia, etc ), then we are more than able to keep our society running without the rest of the world. > 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. What? Maybe if you are denmark or iceland, but that doesn't hold true for the US. Also, your entire argument is about international trade, not transnationalism. You need nations to have international trade. And as I said, your argument isn't new. It's been long debunked. The same argument was made in the midst of pax britannica before ww1 and ww2. People argued that nations were too dependent on each other for wars to break out. Hell, people argued that germany would never attack the soviet union since most of germany's oil/resources came from the soviet union. The current international system will continue as long as nations deem it beneficial to themselves. If it ceases to be, then it will end. There is nothing inherently good or bad about any system. And I highly doubt china, russia and much of the world will adhere to the US/European led international system for much longer. Pax americana will come to an end like all "pax" in the past. Instead of clinging to silly utopian transnationalism, we should be preparing ourselves for a multipolar nationalistic world. The post ww2 era is an anomaly in human history where one nation ruled the world. The only comparable situation in human history was the mongol empire where mongol's established direct or indirect control over pretty much all of eurasia. That system crumbled also.
• coldtea 8y ago
  >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."
• coldtea 8y ago
  A better name for what Orwell calls "nationalism" here would be "partisanship".
  • jqgatsby 8y ago
    The term that popped into my head was "tribalism", which seems related to but distinct from partisanship.