by John Rossi
Contemporary Review, August 1992
GEORGE Orwell loved to shock his readers. One has only to look at the opening sentences of his essays for examples of this. 'As the corpse went past the flies left the restaurant table in a cloud and rushed after it, but they came back a few minutes later,' from Marrakech or 'In Moulmein, in Lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people--the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me' from Shooting an Elephant.
The purpose behind this literary device was, of course, to seize the reader's imagination and not just shock for shock's sake. But this approach reflects another dimension of Orwell's craft -- his love of paradox mixed with a talent for turning the obvious inside out. Nowhere is this more evident than in the service that Orwell rendered to the concept of patriotism. In the 1940s he almost single-handedly rescued the word from the intellectual dust heap and special preserve of the far Right and made it respectable again. Sprinkled through his writings after 1939 beginning with My Country Right or Left, Inside the Whale, as well as in columns for The Partisan Review and Tribune Orwell liberated patriotism from its suffocating association with reactionary Colonel Blimps. Orwell's ability to do this tells us much about the way one man can turn opinion around and also much about the movements of ideas in a democratic society.
The concept of patriotism has a long and varied history. The Oxford English Dictionary traces its use as far back as the 16th century but its modern meaning, ~excessive love of one's country combined with hatred of other nations and people' only surfaced in the mid-nineteenth century. (Dr. Johnson's famous saying that 'Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel' is nearly always misunderstood because he was attacking a group of his Whig opponents.) The First World War finished the word among respectable people because of the excessive claims made for patriotism and the windy rhetoric that surrounded its use by politicians in all countries. Nurse Edith Cavell's final words before her execution in 1915 could serve as an epitaph for it: 'patriotism is not enough'.
Western intellectuals in the 1920s and 30s heaped contempt on the very idea of love of country but they had a more difficult time finding a replacement for it as a unifying force. For some nihilism or sexual freedom became an alternative; for a larger group Marxism in the Soviet Union under Stalin was the answer. In their case Orwell said they had lost their patriotism and religious sense without losing the need for a god and a fatherland. When Orwell began to develop his own idiosyncratic philosophy in the mid-1930s none of these answers satisfied him. The approach of another war forced him to think seriously about where his real loyalties lay. Out of that emerged a powerful and fresh way of looking at patriotism.
Orwell's political evolution took a decade. His initial political views were similar to those of old fashioned English radicals like William Cobbett. He first embraced socialism because of his experiences among the unemployed workers while researching and writing The Road to Wigan Pier in 1936. This process was completed when he fought in the Spanish Civil War on the side of Catalan anarchists. But Orwell's socialism was always cranky. He took much pleasure in ridiculing the excesses of socialist ideologues, that ~dreary tribe of high-minded women and sandalwearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who came flocking toward the smell of "progress" like blue-bottles to a dead cat'.
In 1938-1939 Orwell talked like a pacifist--the next war would be another capitalist conflict which would have nothing to do with the rights of the working class. But on the eve of the war he wrote in My Country Right or Left -- he had a dream in which he saw clearly that if England went to war he would have to fight on her side. Orwell's acceptance of the war and its responsibilities, his defence of patriotism is the other side of Orwell the Radical. Like Cobbett, Orwell was a quintessential Englishman: scratch Orwell and find the patriot.
It took about two years for Orwell fully to develop his particular defence of patriotism. He volunteered for military service only to be rejected for health reasons. He wound up in the Home Guard, ~Dad's Army', that eccentric English amalgam of retired soldiers and civilians who wanted to do their part. More importantly, he cast about for a justification for supporting an England whose social and political policies he despised against Nazi Germany. While many of his socialist compatriots were desperately searching for a properly respectable stance, Orwell like Guy Crouchback in Evelyn Waugh's brilliant World War II trilogy, The Sword of Honour, knew exactly what he would do. Not for him the flight to America like W. H. Auden or Cecil Beaton. Orwell would stay and fight for an England revived by a genuine social and political revolution.
Orwell's embrace of patriotism was motivated by a number of factors: the war which he had been predicting for years had come as well as his growing disgust at the behaviour of his Left wing contemporaries, that ~huge tribe of right left people' as he called them. During the 1930s he had watched their journey from pacifism to fawning admirers of Communism. One-eyed pacifists he had called them, typical of countries protected by a strong navy. Since he had not gone to Oxford or Cambridge and had not been embraced by the London literary set, Orwell avoided the growing belief in these circles of the Soviet utopia. As a natural contrarian, Orwell's distrust of the Left's hero worship of dictators like Stalin deepened after his personal experience in the Spanish Civil War where he saw Communism betray his view of the revolution.
Orwell became convinced that the Left in England worshipped power; an insight that would carry him eventually to his two masterpieces, Animal Farm and 1984. It was only after Russia became fully totalitarian, he noted acerbicly, that the British Left embraced it. That didn't surprise him. English socialist intellectuals he argued were nothing less than a deracinated class cut off from the mass of the public. 'I notice,' he wrote of them, 'they always say "under socialism". They look forward to being on top with all other underneath being told what is good for them'.
Since down deep the intellectuals worshipped power Orwell believed they would never be able to motivate the masses and bring about a real revolution. In a series of writings early in the war, culminating in his often overlooked gem, The Lion and the Unicorn in early 1941, Orwell sought in patriotism to find a way to energize the war effort and, more importantly, to further the cause of revolution.
Orwell's insights into patriotism are among his most original contributions to English thought during the early stages of the war. They reveal much about him personally, confirming among other things, Anthony Powell's shrewd observation, that Orwell was a revolutionary in love with the past.
Orwell could never find a source of loyalty in Communism -- that was simply replacing one dying dogma, capitalism, with another false idol. Orwell believed, however, that patriotism in its highest sense could be a source of inspiration and guidance for the people. In the modern world, patriotism could serve as a bridge between the middle classes and the masses in a way that Communism or Christianity or any other 'ism' could not. In The Lion and the Unicorn, Orwell called for a responsible patriotism that could be used as a positive force for change. Love of country threatened by a great evil like Nazism could inspire even the comfortable middle classes to make political and economic changes that they otherwise would reject out of hand. More significantly, the middle classes and the masses now found themselves in the struggle together and it was patriotism that showed, in one of Orwell's most brilliant insights, that England was like a family, albeit a family with the wrong relatives in charge, but a family nonetheless. The insularity of the English he believed had saved their patriotism from the kind of hatreds of others that characterized Europe. In fact, he noted the English never took foreigners very seriously.
If socialism was to be transformed and bring about a real revolution during the war it must tap the patriotism of the people as its galvanizing force. Given the general English dislike of foreigners, Orwell argued it would be a disaster to posit revolution on some vague international concept like 'democracy' or 'the United Nations'. This was typical of the thinking of the English intelligentsia, a crowd he described who 'take their Cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow'.
The patriotism of the middle and working classes which Orwell appealed to was largely an instinctive reaction among the English. It had about it a sense of decency and fair play that distinguished it from the uglier forms of patriotism in the recent past. It was a throwback to the initial meaning of the word, a love of the familiar in the form of your land and your people. The very failure of fascism or communism to take root in England Orwell believed was a hopeful sign.
Orwell was not unaware of the dangers of romanticizing patriotism. He was careful to distinguish it from chauvinism or excessive nationalism. In a passage from Notes on Nationalism written in May 1945 Orwell with typical precision differentiated patriotism from nationalism.
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. 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.. ., for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.
Orwell never lost his faith in the rugged good sense of the English people and their simple patriotism. They, and not the upper classes or the hopelessly degenerated intelligentsia, would save England. Even in his last grim and pessimistic work, 1984, one of few hopes for the future was the 'feel' for the lost past, a longing for an England that was somehow better, that Winston Smith discovers among the artifacts in the curiosity shop and in the songs of the working class. This was no mere nostalgia; it was a residual patriotism that Orwell found ennobling, uplifting and a sign of optimism for the future.
