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.
[Note: The NEWS CHRONICLE advised its readers to visit the news film at
which the entire execution could be witnessed, with close-ups. The STAR
published with seeming approval photographs of nearly naked female
collaborationists being baited by the Paris mob. These photographs had a
marked resemblance to the Nazi photographs of Jews being baited by the
Berlin mob.(Author's footnote)]
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 [Note, below]. 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 propaganda 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.
[Note: En example is the Russo-German Pact, which is being effaced as
quickly as possible from public memory. A Russian correspondent informs
me that mention of the Pact is already being omitted from Russian
year-books which table recent political events.(Author's note)]
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
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
&
nbsp; 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
(i) 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 recognise 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 through 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.
(ii) 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
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 McDiarmid
and Sean O'Casey. No modern Irish writer, even of the stature of Yeats or
Joyce, is completely free from traces of nationalism.
(iii) ZIONISM. This 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 incongruous 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 found among Gentiles.
TRANSFERRED NATIONALISM
(i) COMMUNISM.
(ii) POLITICAL CATHOLICISM.
(iii) COLOUR FEELING. The old-style contemptuous attitude towards
'natives' has been much weakened in England, and various
pseudo-scientific theories emphasising the superiority of the white race
have been abandoned.[Note, below] 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 scandalised 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.
[Note: A good example is the sunstroke superstition. Until recently it was
believed that the white races were much more liable to sunstroke that the
coloured, and that a white man could not safely walk about in tropical
sunshine without a pith helmet. There was no evidence whatever for this
theory, but it served the purpose of accentuating the difference between
'natives' and Europeans. During the war the theory was quietly dropped
and whole armies manoeuvred in the tropics without pith helmets. So long
as the sunstroke superstition survived, English doctors in India appear
to have believed in it as firmly as laymen.(Author's footnote)]
(iv) 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 bourgeoisie, can
and often do co-exist with ordinary snobbishness in everyday life.
(v) 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 defence 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 hav
e 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 retransferred.
NEGATIVE NATIONALISM
(i) 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.
(ii) ANTI-SEMITISM. 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.
(iii) 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 r�gime.
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 organised 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