My Mother, Drunk or Sober: George Orwell on Nationalism and Patriotism
Barkan, Joanne
LIKE A FEW million other people, I consider George Orwell one of my favorite political writers, but I don't riffle through his books, looking for wisdom whenever a political crisis comes along....
...For Orwell, the HitlerStalin Pact transformed the balance of force, putting England at tremendous risk...
...Some leftists today find patriotism repellent not so much because it implies conserving what exists but because, for them, it means endorsing a superpower whose unlimited power and arrogance they detest...
...on the contrary, left politics seems especially in tune with America's (yet-to-be-realized) ideals...
...All this was politically neutral...
...Since Orwell's own politics are so often identified with patriotism, I decided to go back to the story of his ideological transformation...
...More than a year after 9/11, a greater number and variety of voices on the left admit that blame-America-first failed miserably as a response...
...But blame-America-first often seems to dominate the left's public presence—in the media, on campuses, on the lecture circuit...
...But does the patriotism of leftists have a distinct form...
...In between there was the transformational dream...
...Orwell's concern with patriotism coincided with the war years...
...He aimed his polemics at the Popular Front, defined by Orwell as "a lineup of capitalist and proletarian for the ostensible purpose of opposing Fascism" or, more succinctly, "an unholy alliance between the robbers and the robbed...
...Bidding a pox on all their houses, Orwell joined the anti-imperialist/anti-war camp, and for the next two years, he argued 84 n DISSENT / Winter 2003 that fascism did not differ fundamentally from capitalism, and Hitler was no worse than the British imperialists...
...But the night before the Russo-German pact was announced I dreamed that the war had started...
...The rest of us see no inherent or necessary contradiction between left politics and patriotic feeling...
...Letter to Geoffrey Gorer, September 15, 1937) No patriotism here...
...In his own words: Fascism after all is only a development of capitalism, and the mildest democracy, so-called, is liable to turn into Fascism when the pinch comes...
...A better description focuses on the rancorous and self-destructive alienation from the rest of the country...
...Writing about the near future in the same essay, Orwell chose to qualify his predictions with the words "if only we can keep Hitler out" and "if only we can hang on...
...Second, blame-America-first leftists have an ingrained ideological aversion to patriotism...
...JOANNE BARKAN is a writer based in New York City and Truro, Massachusetts...
...Who ever is...
...in part he had to reconnect two identities that had become separated after the First World War to the point of seeming mutually exclusive...
...I hadn't read the essay in years, but I thought the distinction Orwell makes between nationalism and patriotism might be useful in thinking about the "blame-America-first" part of the American left...
...one could be both a leftist and patriotic...
...In the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, however, I did reach for a volume of his essays, specifically the volume that contains his 1945 "Notes on Nationalism...
...He expected England to go fascist, but from within, steered by an alliance of the British right and left...
...When, instead, some leftists responded primarily with the rhetorical question, "Don't you think we deserved it...
...It takes more mental energy as well as a sense of balance to think critically while acting politically, but that's what makes a decent left...
...He also created a subcategory called "negative nationalism" for attachments that "work in a merely negative sense, against something or other and without the need for any positive object of loyalty...
...He came up with the following formula in "My Country Right or Left" and reiterated it in The Lion and the Unicorn: "Patriotism has nothing to do with conservatism...
...Dissent did not conflict with patriotism...
...Either way it is an accurate account of what happened to Orwell's thinking: this was an about-face, a real or metaphoric overnight conversion...
...Some of us saw the desire to fly American flags everywhere as a sign of solidarity and grief (we saw this even when we ourselves didn't care to fly a flag...
...Thinking about England in the years just preceding the Second World War meant thinking primarily about the misdeeds of its capitalist-imperialist government...
...It also represents the left in the popular imagination, where it wins over few hearts and minds...
...The time is long overdue for an examination of the left's negative nationalism...
...Examining your own biases and preventing them from "contaminating your mental processes" are intrinsic to radical thought...
...They saw only jingoism and vulgar sentimentality...
...If one collaborates with a capitalist-imperialist government in a struggle "against Fascism," i.e...
...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 . . . " ALTHOUGH Orwell made his distinction between nationalism and patriotism clear in "Notes," the essay says nothing about the possible forms or content of patriotism...
...None of the nice cups of tea, homey suet puddings, or red pillar-boxes that Orwell later relied on to communicate his identification with the English people...
...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 upon other people...
...and third, only left intellectuals lacked patriotism...
...But something emotional was also askew...
...Orwell had much the same thing to say about England's intelligentsia (which he considered almost exclusively left-wing...
...Chesterton "who courageously opposed the Boer War, and once remarked that 'My country, right or wrong' was on the same moral level as 'My mother, drunk or sober'" ("As I Please," December 24, 1943...
...Orwell's description of Anglophobia in the 1940s fits their attitude: "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...
...If we laid in printing presses etc in some discreet place we could then cautiously go to work to get together a distributing agency, and we could then feel "Well, if trouble does come we are ready...
...the other side has wealth and power...
...against a rival imperialism, one is simply letting Fascism in by the back door...
...I came downstairs to find the newspaper announcing Ribbentrop's flight to Moscow...
...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...
...Orwell moves on to classify examples of nationalism, including the Stalinist communism (a type of "transferred nationalism") that he wrote about until his death in 1950...
...Of course he wasn't completely successful...
...So war was coming, and the Government, even the Chamberlain Government, was assured of my loyalty...
...His idiosyncratic notion of nationalism went far beyond the identification with a particular nation to include zealotry of almost any kind...
...In part he needed to explain his own sudden conversion...
...Negative identifications counted as "nationalism" because they exhibited two core characteristics: obsessiveness and the ability to ignore inconvenient truths...
...Before the pact, the prospect of war with Germany didn't seem to threaten England's survival (although he might have changed his mind if a war had actually started...
...The paragraph has an authentic ring because Orwell himself made the moral effort, again and again, to discover his own aversions and to keep them from contaminating his thinking...
...Ironically, today's blame-America-first leftists, who undoubtedly consider themselves too enlightened to stumble into jingoism, think exactly like Orwell's negative nationalists: they are obsessive and undiscriminating in their anti-Americanism, but they no longer wave anyone else's flag...
...it doesn't provide any insights into the components or style of leftist patriotism...
...This was not Orwell's finest hour...
...In The Lion and the Unicorn (1940), he wrote, "Two incompatible visions of life are fighting one another," and as a result, there was only one question to answer: "Do you want to see England conquered, or don't you...
...The Nazis overrunning the British Isles suddenly looked feasible...
...He went to bed with one politics and got up with another...
...On the contrary, the worse the government in Washington (and the current one is execrable), the more urgent the need for an effective left...
...Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally...
...WATCHING THE twin towers collapse and the Pentagon burn on 9/11, most Americans (including part of the left) instinctively felt that their way of life and shared values were threatened...
...I do not see how one can oppose Fascism except by working for the overthrow of capitalism, starting, of course, in one's own country...
...Communism, political Catholicism, color feeling, class feeling, pacifism, Christendom, Islam, and Jewry (all his terms) qualified as inDISSENT / Winter 2003 n 83 RECONSIDERATIONS stances of nationalism along with the more conventional Celtic nationalism, Zionism, and neoToryism...
...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...
...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 esRECONSIDERATIONS sentially a moral effort...
...He made short shrift of the idea 86 n DISSENT / Winter 2003 by citing conservative author G.K...
...It seemed natural to feel patriotic—protective as well as proud of the best in our national culture—in much the same way Orwell did...
...But you can at least recognize that you have them, and prevent them from contaminating your mental processes...
...A politics so deeply alienated from a nation can't attract its citizens...
...Or from "Boys' Weeklies": DISSENT / Winter 2003 n 85 RECONSIDERATIONS "Failure to understand [the patriotism of ordinary people] is one of the reasons why left-wing political parties are seldom able to produce an acceptable foreign policy...
...This need doesn't disappear just because we also need to fight the Bush administration's reckless unilateralism abroad and its assault on liberty and social justice at home...
...they opened the way for a fascist victory which, in the end, they dreaded less than an authentic but autonomous revolution...
...First, it relied almost exclusively on "blowback" to explain the atrocities: American imperialism understandably generates so much hate for us around the world that some of the haters inevitably turn to mass terrorism...
...Their initial response to the terrorist attacks: "We had it coming...
...The last paragraph of "Notes" alone makes the essay well worth rereading...
...But his enduring appeal depends just as much on this moral effort and the tough independence it produced as on his famously engaging writing style...
...As late as March 1939, he was prodding his comrades to stockpile supplies for an underground resistance to the upcoming British regime...
...By Orwell's account, nothing in his thinking changed much until the early morning hours of August 21, 1939...
...they came across as morally, politically, and intellectually deficient...
...Everything else is left out: no analysis of the Wahhabi brand of fundamentalist Islam, no consideration of the lack of democracy in Arab Muslim nations or the loss of dignity associated with economic underdevelopment or the role of religious brainwashing...
...No one knows what proportion of the U.S...
...But even if Orwell's attachments looked conventional, he never gave up his critical option...
...Orwell analyzed nationalism by classifying the various attitudes of the English intelligentsia— he considered intellectuals the best source of data: "In them, much more often than in ordinary English people, [nationalism] is unmixed with patriotism and can therefore be studied pure...
...The essay begins with definitions of nationalism and patriotism and Orwell's warning not to confuse the terms "since two different and even opposing ideas are involved": By "nationalism" . . . 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...
...WHO KNOWS if this argument persuaded many leftists in the 1940s...
...As he saw it, almost all the political forces on the Republican side—liberals, socialists, and, above all, Moscow-directed communists—conspired to abort a working class uprising...
...left has this Johnny-one-note politics (where do you draw the borders of the left...
...At the same time, Orwell felt obliged to demonstrate that patriotism was not conservative...
...In a letter to the writer Herbert Read: RECONSIDERATIONS So long as the objective, real or pretended, is war with Germany, the greater part of the Left will associate themselves with the fascising [sic] process, which will ultimately mean associating themselves with wage-reductions, suppression of free speech, brutalities in the colonies etc . . . .I doubt whether there is much hope of saving England from fascism of one kind or another, but clearly one must put up a fight, and it seems silly to be silenced when one might be making a row merely because one had failed to take a few precautions beforehand...
...What surprises is how long Orwell hung on to this myopic position...
...Only critical patriotism was palatable to Orwell, but it could be found among both leftists and conservatives...
...Practically everything he wrote on the subject was written between 1939 and 1945, and he invariably elaborated on three observations: first, although the upper, middle, and working classes had different styles of patriotism, they all rallied to the nation's defense...
...Given what was happening in the German Reich and in the Far East, his fascism-equals-capitalism worldview had enough obsessiveness and delusions to qualify as a "negative nationalism...
...It taught me two things, first, that I should be simply relieved when the long-dreaded war started, secondly, that I was patriotic at heart, would not sabotage or act against my own side, would support the war, would fight in it if possible...
...Why that night...
...After 1945 he continued to write about nationalism, but the theme of patriotism disappeared from the essays...
...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...
...Similarly, "My country, right or wrong" was neither conservative nor left wing, it was simply mindless...
...They assume it means either a sheeplike loyalty—"my country, right or wrong"—or an aggressive nationalism...
...For example, from The Lion and the Unicorn: "England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality," and "There is little in [left publications] except the irresponsible carping of people who have never been and never expect to be in a position of power...
...They made their disdain for the outpouring of patriotism after 9/11 clear...
...Orwell wrote about the experience in "My Country Right or Left" (published in autumn 1940): For several years the coming war was a nightmare to me, and at times I even made speeches and wrote pamphlets against it...
...But coming across the notion of "negative nationalism" again has been useful for thinking about the blameAmerica-first leftists with their obsessiveness, resentments, and ability to shut out inconvenient realities...
...For Orwell, patriotism meant fond attachment to what you think is distinctive about your country, its "flavor...
...It was one of those dreams which, whatever Freudian inner meaning they may have, do sometimes reveal to you the real state of your feelings...
...Some Orwell readers regard the dream as a literary device rather than an actual event...
...Of course, few people did much better in the late 1930s...
...Orwell put anti-Semitism, Trotskyism, and Anglophobia into this subcategory...
...Perhaps benign patriotism remains essentially the same wherever it resides on the political spectrum...
...As for the nationalistic loves and hatreds that I have spoken of, they are part of the makeup of most of us, whether we like it or not...
...The whole struggle in Spain, on the [Republican] Government side, has turned upon this...
...second, without the resolute patriotism of the English people, England would lose the war...
...We like to think of England as a democratic country, but our rule in India, for instance, is just as bad as German Fascism, though outwardly it may be less irritating...
...The organization of "Notes on Nationalism" marks the transition...
...Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power...
...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...
...any English person, left or right, might have drawn up a similar list...
...When the war ended, Orwell expected the active patriotism of his fellow citizens to return to a more latent state, and his own emotion changed in the same way...
...After fighting for six months on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, Orwell returned to England in June 1937 embittered by the experience...
...The viability of the left depends on these practices because critical thinking and the commitment of activists are our side's most valuable resources...
...Because the inability to distinguish between nationalism and patriotism is part of that alienation, I decided to reread "Notes on Nationalism...
...He believed that, sooner or later, this alliance would drag England into a war with Germany, a war he opposed...
...These leftists see only one major problem in the world: the United States with its unlimited power and imperial arrogance...
...People outside the left have called it "lack of patriotism," which is a misleading phrase because it carries overtones of treason...
...His England had greener grass, solid breakfasts, smoky towns, winding roads, red pillar-boxes, respect for the law, and addiction to hobbies...
...But equally characteristic was the willingness to fight and die when England was "in a serious jam...
...I never found what I had started to search for in "Notes"—ideas about a distinctly leftwing patriotism...
...Written in May 1945 just as the war in Europe ended, "Notes" begins with both patriotism and nationalism, but then patriotism drops out...
...It is devotion to something that is changing but is felt to be mystically the same . . . [W]hen the red militias [of the socialist revolution] are billeted in the Ritz I shall still feel that the England I was taught to love so long ago and for such different reasons is somehow persisting...
...DISSENT / Winter 2003 n 87...
...Unlike some of his interlocutors during the war, Orwell rejected "My country, right or wrong" as a test of patriotism...
...It wasn't the overwhelming and imminent threat of a foreign army poised for the kind of war Europeans knew so well, but within a few hours of the terrorist attacks, everyone had enough information about al-Qaeda cells, suicide manuals, and mass murder as a shortcut to paradise to understand the danger...
...As soon as Hitler and Stalin made a deal, he could picture the destruction of "English-speaking civilization...
Vol. 50 • January 2003 • No. 1
