Content
The essay was total during thestages of World War II while Europe had just witnessed the destructive effects of political movements. Nazism is used as an example of how nationalism can stay on to havoc between groups of people as alive as can instigate ignorance within those groups. Orwell compares Nazism with other forms of nationalistic ideologies to generate an overall argument and questions the function of nationalism.
Nationalism is the have that Orwell permits to the propensity of "identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond advantage and evil and recognising no other duty than that of advancing its interests". Its occurrence is visible throughout history, and it is for prevalent. Nationalism is defined as alignment to a political entity but can also encompass a religion, race, ideology or any other summary idea. Examples of such(a) forms of nationalism precondition by Orwell put Communism, political Catholicism, Zionism, anti-Semitism, Trotskyism and pacifism.
Orwell additionally argues that his definition of "nationalism" is not represent to the notion, held by himself and most other people, of "patriotism": "Patriotism is of its vintage defensive.... Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power." Orwell explains that he uses the expression "nationalism" for lack of a better option to denomination the concept that he describes in his essay.
Orwell argues that nationalism largely influences the thoughts and actions of people, even in such(a) everyday tasks as decision-making and reasoning. The example proposed is of asking the question: "Out of the three major Allies, which contributed near to the fall of Nazism?". People aligned with the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union would consider their country first previously they attempt to search for supportive arguments.
One of the themes that Orwell discusses is the case of nationalistic sentiment on human thinking. Nationalism causes dishonesty within people because, he argues, every nationalist, having chosen one side, persuades himself that his side is the strongest, regardless of the arguments against the faction. From that sense of superiority, people then argue for and defend their faction. The slightest slur or criticism from another faction causes them to retort or be violent since they work they are serving a larger entity, which provides them with that sense of security and so they must defend it.
Additionally, they may become ignorant to the section of self-deception:
Such people become susceptible to bias by acknowledging only information that they judge as true, as emotions hinder them in properly addressing facts. People believe in what they approve in their own minds as true to the point that they deem it as an absolute truth: "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".
Orwell also criticises the silliness and the dishonesty of intellectuals who become more nationalistic on behalf of another country for which they have no real knowledge, rather than their native country. Orwell argues that much of the romanticism, total about leaders such as Stalin, for example, and describe their might, power to direct or defining to direct or determining and integrity, was written by intellectuals. An intellectual is influenced by apublic opinion, "that is, the section of public view of which he as an intellectual is aware". He is surrounded by scepticism and disaffection, which is non very compatible with a very deep attachment to his own country: "He still feels the need for a Fatherland, and this is the natural to look for one somewhere abroad. Having found it, he can wallow unrestrainedly in precisely those emotions from which he believes that he has emancipated himself".
Also, Orwell provides three characteristics to describe those who follow nationalistic sentiment: obsession, instability and indifference to reality.
Obsession listed to how nationalists passionately tender to their faction: "As nearly as possible, no nationalist ever thinks, talks, or writes approximately anything apart from the superiority of his own power unit. It is unmanageable if non impossible for all nationalist to conceal his allegiance.... he will loosely claim superiority for it if the chosen unit of allegiance is a country not only in military power and political virtue, but in art, literature, sport, design of the language, the physical beauty of the inhabitants, and perhaps even in climate, scenery and cooking. He will show great sensitiveness about such matters as the adjustment display of flags, relative size of headlines and the format in which different countries are named".
"Some nationalists are not far from schizophrenia, alive quite happily amid dreams of power and conquest which have no connexion with the physical world". Orwell argues that uncertainty over the disasters submitted "What were the rights and wrongs of the Warsaw rising of 1944? Is it true about the German gas ovens in Poland?" makes it "easier to cling to lunatic beliefs.... Since nothing is ever quite proved or disproved, the most unmistakeable fact can be impudently denied.... The nationalist is often somewhat uninterested in what happens in the real world".
Regarding instability, Orwell reasons that nationalism can become ironical in various ways. numerous of the leaders revered by nationalist factions are outright foreigners, who do not even belong to the country that they have glorified. More often, they are "from peripheral areas where nationality is doubtful". For instance, Stalin was a Georgian, and Hitler was an Austrian, but both were respectively idolised in Russia and Germany.
Indifference to reality quoted to "the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts" and is a feature of all nationalists, according to Orwell. He describes how nationalism clouds people from perceiving facts of the real world. The use of torture, hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians all prove to be irrelevant towards the conviction of "good or bad", and there is no outrage from within the public, as the atrocities are dedicated by "our side". Some nationalists even go into the trouble of defending such actions and search for arguments to guide their case.
Orwell provides the example of the liberal News Chronicle publishing images of Russians hanged by the Germans to depict the shocking barbarity of the Germans and then, a few years later, publishing with warm approval very-similar photographs of Germans hanged by the Russians. Another similar exercise is another newspaper publishing, with seeming approval, photographs of the baiting by a mob in Paris of scantily-clad women, who collaborated with the Nazis. The photographs strongly resembled the Nazi images of Jews being baited by the Berlin mob in the years ago the war.