Nationalism is the habit of assuming that
human beings can be classified like insects
and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions
of people can be confidently labelled
good or bad.
But much more importantly, it's the habit of
identifying oneself with a single nation
or other unit, and placing it beyond good and evil,
and recognising no other duty
than advancing its interests.
Nationalism is inseparable
from the desire for power.
The abiding purpose of every nationalist
is to secure more power
and more prestige,
not for himself,
but for the nation or other unit
in which he has chosen to
sink his own individuality.
A nationalist is one who thinks
solely or mainly in
terms of competitive prestige;
his thoughts always turn on
victories, defeats,
triumphs and humiliations.
He sees history,
especially contemporary history,
as the endless rise and decline
of great power units,
and every event that happens
seems to him a demonstration
that his own side is on the upgrade
and some hated rival is on the downgrade.
The nationalist does not go on the
principle of simply ganging up
with the strongest side.
On the contrary,
having picked his side,
he persuades himself
that it is the strongest,
and he is able to stick to his belief
even when the facts are
overwhelmingly against him.
Nationalism is power hunger
tempered by self-deception.
Every nationalist is capable of
the most flagrant dishonesty,
but he is also
-- since he is conscious of
serving something bigger than himself --
unshakably certain of
being in the right.
It would be an oversimplification
to say that all forms
of nationalism are the same,
even in their mental atmosphere,
but there are certain rules
that hold good in all cases.
The following are principal
characteristics of nationalist thought.
No nationalist ever thinks, talks, or writes
about anything except the
superiority of his own power unit.
It is difficult, if not impossible,
for any nationalist to conceal his allegiance.
The smallest slur upon his own unit
or any implied praise of a rival
fills him with uneasiness,
which he can only relieve
by making some sharp retort.
He will show great sensitivity
about such things as
the correct display of flags,
relative size of headlines,
and the order in which
different countries are named.
He will generally claim
superiority for it,
not only in military power and political virtue,
but in art, literature, sport,
the structure of the language,
the physical beauty of its inhabitants,
and perhaps even in climate,
scenery, and cooking.
The intensity with which
they are held does not prevent
nationalist loyalties
from being transferable.
To begin with,
they can be and often are,
fastened upon some foreign country.
A country or other unit
which has been worshiped for years
may suddenly become detestable,
and some other objective affiliation
may take its place
with almost no interval.
All nationalists have the power
of not seeing resemblances
between similar sets of facts.
A British Tory will defend self-determination
and oppose it in the same breath
with no feeling of inconsistency.
Actions are held to be good or bad,
not on their own merits,
but according to who does them,
and there is almost no kind of outrage
-- forced labor, mass deportations,
imprisonment without trial, forgery,
assassination, the bombing of civilians --
which does not change its moral character
when it is committed by "our side".
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.
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 unmentioned and ultimately denied.
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 genuine doubt
about the most enormous events.
The calamities that are constantly being reported
-- massacres, famines, revolutions --
tend to inspire in the average person
a feeling of unreality.
One has no way of
independently verifying the facts.
One is not even fully certain
that they might have happened,
and one is always presented
with totally different interpretations
from different sources.
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
for swallowing lies
or for failing to even form an opinion.
The general uncertainty as to what is
really happening makes it
easier to cling to lunatic beliefs.
Since nothing is ever proven or disproven,
the most unmistakable fact
can be impudently denied.
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.
If one harbors in one's mind
a nationalistic loyalty or hatred,
certain facts, although in a sense
known to be true, are inadmissible.
Here are just a few examples;
Types of nationalists each for whom
I append a fact which it is
impossible for that type of nationalists
to accept, even in his secret thoughts :
The reason for the rise and spread
of nationalism is too big
a question to be raised here.
The point is that as soon as
fear, hatred, jealousy,
and power worship are involved,
the sense of reality becomes unhinged.
And, as I have pointed out already,
the sense of right and wrong
becomes unhinged also.
There is no crime, absolutely none,
that cannot be condoned
when our side commits it.
Even if one does not deny
that the crime has happened,
even if one knows that
it is exactly the same crime
that one has condemned
in some other case,
even if one admits,
in an intellectual sense,
that it is unjustified,
still cannot feel that it is wrong.
Loyalty is involved and so
pity ceases to function.
It can be plausibly argued,
for instance -- it is even possibly true --
that patriotism is inoculation
against nationalism,
that monarchy is a
guard against dictatorship,
and that organised religion
is a guard against superstition.
Or again, it can be argued
that no unbiased outlook is possible,
that all creeds and causes
involve the same lies,
follies and barbarities.
As for the nationalist loves and hatreds
of which I have spoken,
they are part of the makeup of most of us,
whether we like it or not.
Whether it is possible to get rid of them
I do not know, but I do believe
it is possible to struggle against them,
and that this is essentially a moral effort.
It is a question first of all of
discovering what one really is,
of what one's own feelings really are,
and then of making allowances for the inevitable bias.
If you hate and fear Russia,
if you are jealous of
the wealth and power of America,
if you have a sentiment of inferiority
towards the British ruling class,
you cannot get rid of those feelings
simply by taking thought.
But you can at least recognise
that you have them, and prevent them
from contaminating your mental processes.
The emotional urges which are
inescapable and perhaps even necessary
to political action, should be able
to exist side by side
with an acceptance of reality.