Notes on Nationalism (George Orwell)

By ‘nationalism’ I mean first of all 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 secondly — and this is much more important — I mean the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognising no other duty than that of advancing its interests. Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism. Both words are normally used in so vague a way that any definition is liable to be challenged, but one must draw a distinction between them, since two different and even opposing ideas are involved. 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 on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, 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.

6 thoughts on “Notes on Nationalism (George Orwell)

  1. shinichi Post author

    Notes on Nationalism

     
    George Orwell 著、Penguin Classics、2018年刊

    Notes on Nationalism”, “Antisemitism in Britain” and “The Sporting Spirit

    ‘The general uncertainty as to what is really happening makes it easier to cling to lunatic beliefs’

    Biting and timeless reflections on patriotism, prejudice and power, from the man who wrote about his nation better than anyone.

    **

    Notes on Nationalism

    Wikipedia
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notes_on_Nationalism

    Notes on Nationalism is an essay completed in May 1945 by George Orwell and published in the first issue of the British magazine Polemic in October 1945. Political theorist Gregory Claeys has described it as a key source for understanding Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

    In the essay, Orwell uses the term nationalism to pick out a tendency to think in terms of ‘competitive prestige’ and argues that it causes people to disregard common sense and become more ignorant towards facts. He specifies that this is not a standard use of the term ‘nationalism’, but is instead a placeholder for a term that would better characterise this unreflective partisanship. The essay was soon translated into French and Dutch, Italian and Finnish. The article was abridged in the translated versions by omitting details of particular relevance to British readers. A short introduction, based on material supplied by Orwell, preceded the translated abridgements.

    Content

    The essay was written during the final stages 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 cause havoc between groups of people and 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 name that Orwell gives to the propensity of “identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognising no other duty than that of advancing its interests”. Its occurrence is visible throughout history, and it is prevalent. Nationalism is defined as alignment to a political entity but can also encompass a religion, race, ideology or any other abstract idea. Examples of such forms of nationalism given by Orwell include Communism, political Catholicism, Zionism, anti-Semitism, Trotskyism and pacifism.

    Orwell additionally argues that his definition of “nationalism” is not equal to the notion, held by himself and most other people, of “patriotism”: “Patriotism is of its nature 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 alternative to label the concept that he describes in his essay.

    Orwell argues that nationalism largely influences the thoughts and actions of people, even in such everyday tasks as decision-making and reasoning. The example provided is of asking the question: “Out of the three major Allies, which contributed most to the fall of Nazism?”. People aligned with the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union would consider their country first before they attempt to search for supportive arguments.

    One of the themes that Orwell discusses is the effect 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 realise 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 point of self-deception:

    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.

    — Orwell 1945, paragraph 13

    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, written about leaders such as Stalin, for example, and describe their might, power and integrity, was written by intellectuals. An intellectual is influenced by a certain public opinion, “that is, the section of public opinion of which he as an intellectual is aware”. He is surrounded by scepticism and disaffection, which is not very compatible with a very deep attachment to his own country: “He still feels the need for a Fatherland, and it is natural to look for one somewhere abroad. Having found it, he can wallow unrestrainedly in exactly 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 refers to how nationalists passionately tender to their faction: “As nearly as possible, 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…. he will generally 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, structure of the language, the physical beauty of the inhabitants, and perhaps even in climate, scenery and cooking. He will show great sensitiveness about such things as the correct display of flags, relative size of headlines and the order in which different countries are named”.

    “Some nationalists are not far from schizophrenia, living quite happily amid dreams of power and conquest which have no connexion with the physical world”. Orwell argues that uncertainty over the disasters reported (“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. Many 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 refers 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 notion of “good or bad”, and there is no outrage from within the public, as the atrocities are committed by “our side”. Some nationalists even go into the trouble of defending such actions and search for arguments to support 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 instance 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 before the war.

    **

    George Orwell

    Wikipedia
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell

    Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950) was a British novelist, poet, essayist, journalist, and critic who wrote under the pen name of George Orwell. His work is characterised by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to all totalitarianism (i.e. to both left-wing authoritarian communism and to right-wing fascism), and support of democratic socialism.

    Orwell produced literary criticism, poetry, fiction, and polemical journalism. He is known for the allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945) and the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). His non-fiction works, including The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), documenting his experience of working-class life in the industrial north of England, and Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his experiences soldiering for the Republican faction of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), are as critically respected as his essays on politics, literature, language and culture.

    Born in India, Blair was raised and educated in England from the age of one. After school he became an Imperial policeman in Burma, before returning to Suffolk, England, where he began his writing career as George Orwell—a name inspired by a favourite location, the River Orwell. He made a living from occasional pieces of journalism, and also worked as a teacher or bookseller while living in London. From the late 1920s to the early 1930s, his success as a writer grew and his first books were published. He was wounded fighting in the Spanish Civil War, leading to his first period of ill health on return to England. During the Second World War he served as a sergeant in the Greenwich Home Guard (1940–41), worked as a journalist and, between 1941 and 1943, worked for the BBC. The 1945 publication of Animal Farm led to fame during his lifetime. During his final years, he worked on Nineteen Eighty-Four and moved between London and the Scottish island of Jura. Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in June 1949, less than a year before his death.

    Orwell’s work remains influential in popular culture and in political culture, and the adjective “Orwellian”—describing totalitarian and authoritarian social practices—is part of the English language, like many of his neologisms, such as “Big Brother”, “Thought Police”, “Room 101”, “Newspeak”, “memory hole”, “doublethink”, and “thoughtcrime”. In 2008, The Times named Orwell the second-greatest British writer since 1945.

    Reply
  2. shinichi Post author

    2024年5月26日(金)

    ナショナリズムの正体

    今週の書物/
    『Notes on Nationalism』
    George Orwell 著、Penguin Classics、2018年刊

    「めぐりあう書物たち/尾関章」は 2023年12月1日付「休載のお知らせ」以降 お休みが続いている。 「休載のお知らせ」の前、最後の投稿が、2023年11月24日付「オーウェルは二つの社会主義を見た」だった。その投稿は

    オーウェルのスペイン体験を知ると、彼は『動物農場』『一九八四年』でディストピアの社会主義を描きながらも、ユートピアの社会主義に対する思いは捨てなかったのだろうと推察される。それが、どんな理想郷なのか。次回もまた、本書を読む。

    で終わっている。お休みに入らなければ、12月1日に オーウェル についての尾関さんの考察が続いていたはずだ。オーウェルの「明朗な理想郷(ユートピア)の社会主義」がどんなものだったのかが 気になってしょうがない。

    尾関さんは 以前にもオーウェルを取り上げている。2022年6月24日付「オーウェル、嘘は真実となる」と 2022年7月1日付「オーウェル、言葉が痩せていく」だ。それらはどちらも『一九八四年』についての書評で、とても面白かったのを覚えている。

    2023年11月24日付「オーウェルは二つの社会主義を見た」は 『一九八四年』についての書評とは違い、オーウェルの生涯にフォーカスしている。私も、私なりの方法で、オーウェルの生涯をたどることにした。

    すると、想像とは違うオーウェルが、次から次へと浮かび上がってくる。「マルクス主義統一労働者党 (POUM)」の一員としてウエスカ近郊の前線で負傷した時の生々しい描写は『カタロニア讃歌』の終わり近くに見られるが、オーウェルを救ったというアメリカ人のハリー・ミルトンの証言が面白い。

    「オーウェルの不運は彼の身長と、部隊の要塞化された陣地の上から見下ろすというやや無謀な習慣の両方によるものだ」というのだ。「高速の銃弾の鋭い音が聞こえ、オーウェルは倒れた。彼は仰向けに倒れた」と、その時の記憶は鮮やかだ。ミルトンは、オーウェルが病院に運ばれるのを待っている間に応急処置をしたことを覚えているが、自分の役割は控えめなもので「私はただ出血を止めただけだ」と言っている。

    「オーウェルの不運は彼の身長」とはどういうことかと思って写真を見てみたら、なんとオーウェルは大男だったのだ。サッカー選手だったら間違いなくゴール前のポジションだっただろう。

    写真を見て、オーウェルを助けたという ハリー・ミルトン に目が行く。手にライフルを持っている ミルトンのポーズは、明らかにカメラを意識したものだ。オーウェルがただ突っ立っているのと対照的だ。ミルトンのことを読み出して、その自信に驚く。オーウェルに思想的な大きな影響を与えたのは自分だという、オーウェルの著作も 自分なしにはなかったろうともいう。アメリカ人によくあるタイプの 単純で明るい人だったのだろう。

    ミルトンより もっと目をひくのが、オーウェルの妻 アイリーンだ。戦場という男の世界に女がひとりだけ紛れ込んでいる。気になって調べてみたら、興味深いことがたくさん見つかった。

    スターリンの威を借るスペイン人たちのせいで スペイン国内にいるのが危険になってきたとき、パスポートを手配し フランスに脱出する手はずを整えたのは、他でもないアイリーンだった。オーウェルが著作に専念できるようにと働きに出て家計を支えたのも アイリーンだ。

    それよりもなによりも、オーウェルの小説『1984年』は、アイリーンの詩『世紀末、1984年』に影響を受けた可能性があるというから 驚きだ。この詩は1934年に、彼女が通っていたサンダーランド教会高校の創立50周年を祝い、1984年の創立100周年まで50年先を見据えて書かれたという。オーウェルと出会う1年前に書かれたアイリーンの詩の未来的なビジョンと『1984年』のビジョンには、マインドコントロールの使用や警察国家による個人の自由の根絶など、いくつもの類似点がある。

    また、アイリーンが『動物農場』でオーウェルと「微妙で間接的な方法で」協力したという記述がある。オーウェルは当初、エッセイを書くつもりだったが、アイリーンは寓話を提案した。二人は夜に一緒にその作業に取り組み、オーウェル夫妻の友人たちはその小説の中にアイリーンのスタイルとユーモアを見いだしたという。

    アイリーンは1945年の3月に死んだ。オーウェルはアイリーンのことをあまり書いていない。ただ、アイリーンがオーウェルにとって大事な人だったことは間違いないようだ。

    で今週は、そんなオーウェルの膨大な著作のなかから、アイリーンが死んだ1945年に書かれたエッセイを読む。『Notes on Nationalism』(George Orwell 著、Penguin Classics、2018年刊)だ。

    オーウェルは、ナショナリズム(nationalism)は 2つの習慣(habit)によるという。「何百万、何千万という集団を 自信を持って善と悪とに分類する習慣」と「自分を一つの国家などの単位と同一視し その利益だけを最優先する習慣」だ。そしてその目的は 自分自身のためではなく、自らの個性を注ぎ込むことに決めた国家や組織のために さらなる権力や名声を確保することにあるという。

    オーウェルはまた、ナショナリズムを、パトリオティズム(patriotism)のような気持ちと混同してはいけないともいう。特定の場所や生活様式に思いを寄せるのは自然のことで、他人に強制する意図がなく防衛的なものであれば、何も悪いことはないという。

    もちろん、ことはそんなに単純ではない。ナショナリズムとパトリオティズムの境はクモの糸のようなものだし、そもそもパトリオティズムのような気持ちは、ナショナリズムの高揚に容易に利用されてしまう。

    パリ・オリンピックが今日開幕するが、マスコミが作り出す雰囲気は まさにナショナリズムそのものだ。自国のメダルの数を誇り、自国の選手だけを取り上げ、英雄扱いする。

    この『Notes on Nationalism』は、今日という日にふさわしい。ということで、この本を読み続けてみよう。

    オーウェルの広い意味でのナショナリズムには、共産主義、政治的カトリック、シオニズム、反ユダヤ主義、トロツキズム、平和主義などの運動や傾向が含まれるという。ナショナリズムは必ずしも政府や国家への忠誠を意味するわけではなく、ましてや自分の国への忠誠を意味するわけではない。また、ナショナリズムが扱う単位が実際に存在することさえ厳密には必要ではない。ユダヤ教、イスラム教、キリスト教、プロレタリア階級、白人種はすべて熱烈なナショナリズム感情の対象だが、それらの存在に普遍的に受け入れられる定義はない。国や組織を良く見せたいとか 悪く見せたいとか、強く見せたいとか 弱く見せたいという願望が、すでにナショナリズムだという。

    ナショナリストの思考法として、執着(obsession)、不安定さ(instability)、現実への無関心(indifference to reality)をあげ、「ナショナリストは、自分の権力集団の優位性以外のことは考えたり、話したり、書いたりすることはほとんどない」「偉大な指導者が ナショナリストが称賛する国にさえ属していないことはよくあることだが、ナショナリストの忠誠心ほど 移ろいやすいものはない」「ナショナリストは、どんな行為についても、それ自体の価値ではなく、誰が行うかによって善悪の判断を行う」というような例をあげている。

    私が気になったのは「ナショナリストは、一人残らず、過去を変えようとする」というところだ。オーウェルは「重要な事実は隠蔽され、日付は変更され、引用文は文脈から外され、意味を変えるように改ざんされる。起こるべきではなかったと思われる出来事は言及されず、最終的には否定される」と書いている。ナショナリストに対する強い嫌悪が感じられるではないか。

    このエッセイの後半で、オーウェルはナショナリズムを「肯定的ナショナリズム(Positive Nationalism)」「すり替えられたナショナリズム(Transferred Nationalism)」「否定的ナショナリズム(Negative Nationalism)」に区分けし、それぞれについて詳細な検討を展開している。

    「共産主義者が 幻滅過程を経て反共産主義になる」とか「反英主義から いきなり英国支持に回る」「ある戦争での平和主義者が 次の戦争で好戦派になる」といった例をあげるまでもなく、どのカテゴリーにも「執着」「不安定さ」「現実への無関心」といった思考法が見られ、面白く読めるようにできている。

    オーウェルは最後のパラグラフで「国家主義的な愛憎は、好むと好まざるとにかかわらず、ほとんどの人が持っている」と書く。「それらを取り除くことが可能かどうかはわからないが、それらと闘うことは可能であり、それは本質的に道徳的な努力であると私は信じている」と続ける。「自分が本当は何者なのか、自分の感情は本当は何なのかを発見し、次に避けられない偏見を許容する」「それには道徳的な努力が必要だが、その準備ができている人がいかに少ないことか」という最後の文章から、オーウェルの絶望が読み取れる。

    オーウェルが POUM に加わった時に持っていた希望や明るさは、スペインを去ることには消え、第二次世界大戦を経て スコットランドの孤島の荒れた農場でに引きこもるころには 絶望と暗さでいっぱいになっていたように見える。46歳で死んだオーウェルの人生も 39歳で死んだ妻のアイリーンの人生も 悲しく感じられ、オーウェルの著作も違って感じられるようになった。

    ナショナリズムというとらえどころのないものについて、自分の主観を消すことなく書いたオーウェルに、最大限の賛辞を贈りたい。

    Reply
  3. Pingback: めぐりあう書物たちもどき | kushima.org

  4. Pingback: めぐりあう書物たちもどき2 | kushima.org

  5. Pingback: めぐりあう書物たちもどき | kushima.org

  6. Pingback: 追悼:めぐりあう書物たちもどき | kushima.org

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *