Insightful and relevant as ever, Orwell is always worth reading (and rereading). Sometimes I feel that his fictional works have unjustly overshadowed his enormous production of essays, so it's good to see these pop up on the front page once in a while.
Also for those who might be mislead by the title, Orwell is discussing something much broader here:
>But here I must repeat what I said above, that I am only using the word ‘nationalism’ for lack of a better. Nationalism, in the extended sense in which I am using the word, includes such movements and tendencies as Communism, political Catholicism, Zionism, Antisemitism, Trotskyism and Pacifism. It does not necessarily mean loyalty to a government or a country, still less to one’s own country, and it is not even strictly necessary that the units in which it deals should actually exist. To name a few obvious examples, Jewry, Islam, Christendom, the Proletariat and the White Race are all of them objects of passionate nationalistic feeling: but their existence can be seriously questioned, and there is no definition of any one of them that would be universally accepted.
I think what happens here is that Orwell is having a big stab at the intelligencia, and the intelligencia at the time (as now) hated nationalism. He is trying to point out all the ways their behavior is just like that of overzealous nationalists at the time, so he redefines the word so as the label all the intelligencia as the thing they hate.
It makes for effective rhetoric. I think anyone reading this should keep in mind that he seems to have good things to say about what he defines as "patriotism", which is what we would mean by the word nationalism today. In other words, he would absolutely not agree with the anti-nationalists of today who hate their country. In fact, he goes out of his way in this essay to label those people as prime examples of "nationalists".
More often than not it's (sadly, i guess) necessary for an author to transform/include such fictional elements in order to attract attention about a topic, especially when it's a sensible one (surveillance, trust in authority,etc).
I'm not sure i prefer this instead of a raw analysis of culture & society without the fictional elements, but at the same time I personally think having such fictional elements often anchor a work better throughout time(though a downside to this might be that future artistic adaptations might "rewrite" some original thoughts).Even more interestingly: raw, almost technical analyses often get forgotten and dismissed by people even if they contain 'predictions' that turned out to be true, coming back to the first point that the masses understandably aren't interested in them.It's like we don't care about truth/future if it doesn't make us feel good.
I didn’t enjoy 1984. If you have been exposed to those ideas elsewhere the book just doesn’t work. I did however love his memoir of his time fighting as a socialist volunteer in the Spanish civil war [1]. Very insightful read and clearly shows where his thinking was going when he later wrote animal farm and 1984.
Also for those who might be mislead by the title, Orwell is discussing something much broader here:
>But here I must repeat what I said above, that I am only using the word ‘nationalism’ for lack of a better. Nationalism, in the extended sense in which I am using the word, includes such movements and tendencies as Communism, political Catholicism, Zionism, Antisemitism, Trotskyism and Pacifism. It does not necessarily mean loyalty to a government or a country, still less to one’s own country, and it is not even strictly necessary that the units in which it deals should actually exist. To name a few obvious examples, Jewry, Islam, Christendom, the Proletariat and the White Race are all of them objects of passionate nationalistic feeling: but their existence can be seriously questioned, and there is no definition of any one of them that would be universally accepted.