A Tribute to My Great Uncle George. 1920-2005.

This is a brief tribute to my Great-Uncle, George Knight, who died when I was 16. He was one of the male role-models of my childhood, and this is based on the address at his funeral, written up from memory shortly afterwards. I discovered it again recently and with help from my Dad tidied it up.  This is a testament to an extra-ordinary life, from the aftermath of the First World War to the dawn of smartphones, one of the remarkable generation who lived right through the heart of the 20th Century, and saw their world change more than we can imagine.

My Fathers Uncle, my Grandma Florence's brother, a good and cheerful man to everyone he met: George Knight was born on the 9th January 1920 in South London.  His father died when he was young, he had been scarred by injuries from the Great War and couldn’t work, couldn’t operate, and then, in the late 1920s, sadly passed away.  George was part of a large family who would struggle to look after him at home, and so through a scholarship he was sent away to a boarding school. The experience was hard like the discipline. He used to say, 'when a cane wore out I was sent to buy another one'. But it taught him respect for elders, hard work, obedience and discipline. It also gave him a deep trust in God, that would last him his whole life.

As a child, a small lost boy from a poor family, he developed three dreams: To get into Oxford University, to become an officer in the Royal Navy and to become a Vicar in the Church of England. At the age of 17, he gained entry into London University and then at 19, with the help of a scholarship, he was granted entry to Oxford. His first impossible dream fulfilled. He was there from 1939-1942 and while there became Chairman of the Oxford Conservative Association and Captain of his college's Boat team. This taught him the skills of operating as part of a team and swiftly giving orders to react to the situations that faced him. He did not ignore his studies either, gaining the best theology degree of his entire year.

After graduating from Oxford he joined the Royal Navy in 1942 as an Ordinary Seaman, the lowest rung on the ladder, and on his first day was put in charge of a work party of 40 men.  He was soon promoted to Able Seaman and then, after completing training at the Britannia Royal Naval College, commissioned as a sub-Lieutenant.  His second ambition achieved.  He was later promoted to full Lieutenant, and commanded one of the second wave of ships that landed troops on Sword Beach on D-Day. One of his favourite stories from the War was when he was sailing in the Adriatic in 1945 shortly before VE Day. He was in charge of the bridge on his ship and from nowhere several vessels came speeding into view towards him. They were German boats and they had white sheets hung on their towers. They were trying to surrender, and George suddenly had this vision of all these enemy ships personally surrendering to little old him and escorting them triumphantly back into harbour. Think of the glory! So, he called his Captain to the bridge as quick as possible and asked him whether he should escort the ships back to harbour. The Captain said no, let them go on their way, so they did, and George continued on to Yugoslavia, glory sadly missed.

After the war George resigned his commission and entered the seminary, from which he was ordained as an Anglican priest. His last great ambition, fulfilled. He returned to the Navy as the Chaplain for the Royal Naval College in Greenwich, at that time the 2nd most senior religious post in the Royal Navy. There one day in 1951 he met a pretty blonde Swedish tourist on holiday. 18 months later they were married, and it was the start of 54 years of happy marriage that only ended with his sad death on the 7th December 2005. He was happy in his job too, and was very lucky one day after a service at the College, which as chaplain he was leading, to end up dancing with a certain Princess Elizabeth, now the Queen. He said, 'Who was I, to be cavorting with princesses?'

He later also met the late Queen Mother at a reception, where as chaplain he was required to say Grace before the meal and, as was Naval custom, afterwards thank God for the good things he had provided. Later he was honoured to have a long private conversation with the Queen Mother, then still Queen Elizabeth. He was also honoured to be appointed chaplain on the Vanguard, Britain’s last ever battleship, when it carried King George VI and Princess Elizabeth on a state visit to South Africa in 1947.

George served in the Royal Navy for 30 years, and he was thoroughly involved with all sorts of Naval developments. On one occasion he was asked to join a Naval commission to improve the prestige of the Fleet Air Arm. After many hours of discussion and various proposals, George suggested that Fleet Air Arm officers be granted the right to wear bicorne, Nelsonian hats when coming aboard ships, as that would do the job of marking them out distinctly as well as anything else mentioned and for considerably less money.

He retired from the Navy in 1975 and became a parish priest, at which time he was also awarded an OBE for his services in the College. His life was unfortunately mired by a tragedy as well during this time, as his only son, Christopher, died of Cancer at a young age. In 1990 after over 40 years as a Church of England priest he resigned in protest over the decision that year to ordain women as priests, and after that in his old age joined the Philadelphia Church of God, a small, distinct Protestant church to which his wife already belonged. He continued his life happily though, always cheery, always active, and luckily healthy right up until he was struck down by a stroke three weeks before his death.  Indeed on the very morning on which his stroke occurred he was out in the garden planting tubers. He was a good man.

Mandalay (by Rudyard Kipling)

By Rudyard Kipling

Read by Charles Dance at the 70th Anniversary 'Victory Over Japan' Day Commemorations

I've long been a Kipling fan, without any one of his poems leaping out at me. Kipling was a complex and brilliant writer, possibly the greatest phrase-turner since Shakespeare. Nobody could doubt his grip of rhyme, rhythm, and meter either, but at the same time the so-called 'vulgar' 'vitality' of his poems meant critics have struggled to classify him as a poet.

T.S.Elliot talked about Kipling writing more 'verse' than poetry, and Orwell called him a Good bad poet. Reading his poems you know what they meant, Kipling wrote with immediate, crude force - both serious and vivid, designed to hit home rather than ascend to fine art. His poems are a fiercely individual voice, whether his own, or representing a private British soldier, giving an experience or view intensely felt, and so stick in the mind longer than many more refined, delicate works.

On Kipling's politics one can't beat around the bush. He was a Tory supporter of late 19th Century British Imperialism, specifically as a civilising mission. He was also, in Orwell's words, neither a "yes-man or a time-server", and from the perspective of someone born 'out there' in the Empire, a bitter critic of Britain's government, its home population, and their failure to understand what Empire actually involved, particularly for the soldiers who had to defend it.

The British Empire was not what Kipling imagined it to be. But his own work was often too honest and concrete, even brutal and pessimistic, and in its own way sympathetic, to back up his personal enthusiasm. Even his most jingoist poems like The White Man's Burden sounds more like a warning of what a Vietnam or Iraq would turn into than a starry-eyed rhapsody about the joys of colonialism. He was an Imperialist but no bigot, without hatred or contempt for non-white peoples. He spoke with real sympathy for the world he knew 'East of Suez' and, at the same time, far more harshly about the evils of German militarism than anyone the British fought in the Empire. Reading Kipling one has to disagree with his conclusions, but almost never feel like he is just lying about how the world is.

Most of his work is not pushing politics though, but describing an experience. It can exist on its own, regardless of the views of the man who wrote it. He does this with great artistic force, which can feel like it expresses us better than we can express ourselves, even if it literally describes a situation we've not known, in a place we've never been.

The video above is from the 70th Victory over Japan Day commemorations, with Charles Dance reading Mandalay, one of Kipling's most famous and beautiful poems, about a Victorian soldier remembering a love he left in Burma. Some of the lines are near perfectly balanced, memorable and vivid. Unlike some poetry Kipling often comes across better heard aloud than on the written page. Charles Dance brings it alive, he doesn't just read it, he acts it out, and the result is like the difference between Shakespeare on the page and seeing it performed live. The music and setting just gently adds to this. It describes a world that no longer exists, but still speaks familiarly of loneliness, loss, love, joy remembered, new places and wonders experienced, and choices or changes we desperately wish we could make not so, but know we can't.

In the text I give below I have changed the semi-phonetic cockney slang Kipling wrote it in to standard English. For me at least, I agree with Orwell, that this makes it yet more beautiful, and easier to absorb and appreciate. Dance's accent in the video gives the sense of how Kipling intended it without needing the phonetic spelling, and the original version with "the aitches carefully dropped and final 'g's omitted" can be found here. (There is also a charming folk song version put to concertina by Peter Bellamy in the 1970s on youtube here.)

By the old Moulmein Pagoda, looking lazy at the sea,

There's a Burma girl a-sitting, and I know she thinks of me;

For the wind is in the palm-trees, and the temple-bells they say:

"Come you back, you British soldier; come you back to Mandalay! "

Come you back to Mandalay,

Where the old Flotilla lay:

Can't you hear their paddles chunking from Rangoon to Mandalay ?

On the road to Mandalay,

Where the flying-fishes play,

And the dawn comes up like thunder out of China across the Bay!

Her petticoat was yellow and her little cap was green,

And her name was Supi-yaw-lat - just the same as Theebaw's Queen,

And I seen her first a-smoking of a whacking white cheroot,

And a-wasting Christian kisses on an heathen idol's foot:

Blooming idol made o' mud

What they called the Great God Budd

Plucky lot she cared for idols when I kissed her where she stood!

On the road to Mandalay,

Where the flying-fishes play,

And the dawn comes up like thunder out of China across the Bay!

When the mist was on the rice-fields and the sun was dropping slow,

She'd get her little banjo and she'd sing "Kulla-lo-lo!

With her arm upon my shoulder and her cheek against my cheek

We used to watch the steamers and the hathis piling teak.

Elephants a-pulling teak

In the sludgy, squdgy creek,

Where the silence hung that heavy you was half afraid to speak!

On the road to Mandalay,

Where the flying-fishes play,

And the dawn comes up like thunder out of China across the Bay!

But that's all shoved behind me - long ago and far away

And there ain't no busses running from the Bank to Mandalay;

And I'm learning here in London what the ten-year soldier tells:

"If you've heard the East a-calling, you won't never heed naught else."

No! you won't heed nothing else

But them spicy garlic smells,

And the sunshine and the palm-trees and the tinkly temple-bells;

On the road to Mandalay,

Where the flying-fishes play,

And the dawn comes up like thunder out of China across the Bay!

I am sick of wasting leather on these gritty paving-stones,

And the blasted English drizzle wakes the fever in my bones;

Though I walks with fifty housemaids out of Chelsea to the Strand,

And they talks a lot of loving, but what do they understand?

Beefy face and grubby and -

Lord! what do they understand?

I've a neater, sweeter maiden in a cleaner, greener land!

On the road to Mandalay,

Where the flying-fishes play,

And the dawn comes up like thunder out of China across the Bay!

Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst,

Where there aren't no Ten Commandments and a man can raise a thirst;

For the temple-bells are calling, and it's there that I would be

By the old Moulmein Pagoda, looking lazy at the sea;

On the road to Mandalay,

Where the old Flotilla lay,

With our sick beneath the awnings when we went to Mandalay!

On the road to Mandalay,

Where the flying-fishes play,

And the dawn comes up like thunder out of China across the Bay!

How many did Communism kill? — 65-70 million people.

This article aims to calculate the total numbers of victims murdered by Communist regimes and movements from 1917 to the present day. It tries to give a comprehensive figure by listing all the specific Communist atrocities that can be identified and adding up the total of victims. This is obviously a question that has been covered before, the canonical work being The Black Book of Communism (The Black Book) published in France in 1997. On the other hand, that book is 700 pages long, so this article tries to summarise the same question in a couple of pages. At the same time it breaks the total figure down as far as reasonably possible, rather than giving one single hand-waving figure. Summing reliable historical estimates for smaller specific crimes hopefully increases the accuracy of the final total.   

Calculating the total victims of Communist governments and movements is a complicated business, more so than calculating the victims of Nazism. While Nazism killed in vast numbers from 1939-45 in a relatively contained part of the world, Communism's crimes have been far more spread out: in time, over a century from 1917 to the present day; and in geography, from Berlin to Korea (to Peru). And while the Second World War is possibly history's most studied episode, Communist atrocities have never received the same attention.

This means we can say with confidence that Nazism had about 30 million victims, of which around 6 million were Jews killed in the Holocaust. But how many victims has Communism had in 100 years? And why should we care? And is it even fair to talk about a single total of victims of Communism?

The individual crimes listed below amount to some 65-70 million victims over 100 years, and though presented rather drily below (for reasons of space) the story they represent is breathtaking. Lenin's Bolsheviks begin the cycle in the Moscow and St Petersburg of 1917 with War, mass shooting, repression and imprisonment by secret police, resulting in a devastating famine caused by their destructive anti-market agricultural policies, altogether leaving five million dead. Following a lull in the late 20's Stalin launches the cycle again on a much larger scale, killing ten to fifteen million through the 1930s and 40s; by dekulakisation, purges, the Gulag, another round of famine, and the largest War in human history. However this time also achieving an expansion of Communist power to eastern Europe, where hopes of democracy and freedom are swiftly and brutally crushed.

Then the poison flows into a China and Korea weakened by a decade of war, on a new and even vaster human stage. The murder of millions and imprisonment of tens of millions in war and 'peace' from the late 40s through to the 70s is punctuated - like night follows day - by the largest and most terrible famine yet - 'The Great Leap Forward', which alone claims some thirty million lives. The third wave in the 60s and 70s, sees Communism spilling over into smaller countries: Vietnam, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, with more than a million dead in each, due to the same brutal methods - mass murder and imprisonment, persistent war and then famine. Smaller Communist revolutions and movements are barely noticeable against the totals of slaughter, but in Cuba, Peru, India, and elsewhere, they still ruin tens of thousands of lives.

Finally in the 1980s the tide begins to retreat as the Soviet and Chinese zones move away from lethal Communist 'economics' and more overt political repression. But still into the 21st Century nominal Communist regimes hang on throughout Asia, ruining lives. Russia, after a brief window of democracy that sadly coincided with a deep post-Soviet recession, has also slid back into dictatorship, now backed by gangster capitalism and nationalism, as in China, rather than Marxist philosophy and state-planning. But Communist regimes still kill, as the hundreds of thousands of Fulan Gong, and very recently, Uigher Muslims, have discovered.

In this article I take a conservative methodology, in every instance hedging my bets in the middle of respectable historical estimates for numbers of victims. My figure can be compared to the 95 million victims suggested by The Black Book, which is at the top end of reasonable, scholarly estimates. I have not seen any thorough historical totals that come to less than 60 million, or over 100 million. This difference is not just a matter of history but one of moral judgement; not just which wars, famines and murders happened, but which were crimes, and which were the responsibility of Communist aggression.

We should care about this because it is not some dry statistical exercise, but a large part of the history of the 20th Century and the modern world. Of the three great wars that shaped the 20th Century, Communism was born from the chaos of the 1st World War, and defined the 2nd World War and the Cold War. Far more importantly, the reality is that 65 million is not just a 'big number', it is 65 million individual lives destroyed; 65 million fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, husbands, wives, children, loved ones. These people are shrouded in silence, invisible, disappeared, unless we remember them. I hope this article prompts you to read more about the individual crimes listed. And although here I focus on the dead, the dead are only the beginning. Consistently, in country after country, records show that for every person killed three or more were imprisoned, tortured, beaten, or devastated by the loss of dear husband or wife, or family member.

But is it reasonable to calculate a single total of victims of Communism as a phenomenon? I believe so. Yes, Communist regimes covered different countries over 100 years, some of which were even occasionally hostile to each other. But there is a direct and clear line of historical cause and effect from the original Bolsheveik revolution in Russia to each of the Communist regimes that followed it. These subsequent regimes were all created due to direct support from existing Communist states. Each overwhelmingly received military, political, and economic support, and trade, only from other Communist states. And each explicitly declared loyalty to Marxism-Leninism and the 'principles' of the October revolution. Again and again, each instituted a political programme that sought to directly emulate Bolsheveik Russia - one party rule, repression of class enemies, mass nationalisation, militarism, collectivism of agriculture.

One of the key criticisms made of The Black Book was that one could collect a similar book of the crimes of 'Capitalism' or 'Colonialism', to which I say, feel free. But the links between the examples of those phenomena are much weaker and vaguer than the real links: historical, political and ideological, between Communist states, which allows us to talk of a 'Communist' phenomenon as a single entity, if a multi-headed, multi-generational one.

The other major criticism concerns who has been counted as victims. The victims counted below fall roughly into three groups - victims of murder, famine and war, where murder means either direct shooting, or death due to deliberate mistreatment during deportation or in concentration camps. Critics of this kind of approach (used in The Black Book and elsewhere) have claimed in response they could count every person who died 'due to' poverty, or a lack of universal healthcare, or industrial accident, in a capitalist country, and come to an even greater, ghastly total of victims. But this is a false comparison. Communist countries suffered ordinary deaths due to industrial accident, pollution, poor healthcare, etc, as well. Those deaths are not the deaths counted here.

Those counted as murdered are those shot out of hand by Communist regimes, or those who died in scurvy concentration camps, or while being deported thousands of miles in horrific conditions to such places. Those counted as victims of War are not just all the casualties of wars in which Communists were involved, but specifically the casualties of wars caused by Communist aggression. These famine victims are counted because the famines they died in were directly caused by ideological Communist policies of state control and mass collectivisation that devastated farming. These famines were then made worse by the cynical paranoia that labelled any criticism as treason, and any warning of failure as sabotage, and responded with military repression aimed at crushing fictional class enemies and saboteurs. Any similar situations in capitalist countries should be rightly blamed on the governments there too.

This is a matter of historical and moral judgement, particularly in a few instances where I place only a proportion of the victims of a war or crime in the Communist tally. For example, in some wars mentioned I have only included casualties inflicted by the Communists, and not those killed by reckless action of the other side. The most controversial such case would be placing the blame on Stalin for 3 million of the Soviet casualties of the Second World War. I discuss the reasons for this special case in another article linked here.

I have labelled and dated every crime referred to below, and using these labels you can find more information and the sources for these estimates in online encyclopedias, The Black Book itself, and other articles online about the specific crimes. This article contains no original research, it seeks to catalogue a conservative, consensual historic view of the incidents and death tolls listed. I apologise for not being able to source every figure internally here, but doing so would make this article several times longer, and it is already probably too long. Any constructive comments are gratefully received.

Stalin's guilt for Soviet Casualties in the Second World War

Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-B21845 / Wahner / CC-BY-SA 3.0

Among the questions of Communist criminal responsibility, Stalin's culpability for Soviet casualties and German POW losses in WW2 is possibly the most difficult one. Soviet losses were around 25 million, of which 8 million were military in battle, and 3 million were dead POWs. From 700,000 - 1 million German POWs also died in Soviet custody particularly from 1941-1943.

Soviet military losses were horrendous, especially earlier in the War.  In the 2nd half of 1941 alone, a series of huge Nazi encirclements and disastrous Soviet counter-offensives gave more than 3 million Soviet killed or captured, and another 3 million in 1942. German losses over the same 18 months were less than 1 million. In 1943 and 1944 Soviet losses were still 2 to 3 times as high as German losses, due to Soviet tactics and approaches that were incredibly wasteful of human lives.

Despite official Soviet propaganda Stalin bore great responsibility for the losses of the Soviet people. Stalin's insane purges weakened the Red Army in the late 1930s. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact gave Hitler carte blanche to invade Poland, the Balkans and France. The 1939-41 economic pact transported million of tonnes of vital raw materials to Germany without which the invasion of the Soviet Union would probably have been impossible.

Stalin's refusal to believe invasion was imminent, despite repeated intelligence warnings and German reconissance, left the whole Soviet Air Force and over 3 million men helplessly exposed when the Gemans invaded. Almost that entire 3 million would be taken captive and then starved to death by the Nazis over Autumn and Winter 1941. After the invasion through 1941 into early 1942 Stalin ordered repeated counter-attacks that cost millions of further Soviet losses in dead and captured.

Reckless Soviet partisan activity killed large number of civilian 'collaborators' and sparked brutal Nazi repression that killed hundreds of thousands more. Scorched Earth policies ahead of the Nazi advance led to hundreds of thousands more deaths as peasants lost their precious food stores ahead of winter.

German POW losses fall into a different category, while Soviet policies were nothing like the mass extermination carried out by the Nazis from June 1941-Jan 1942, they still led to the death of around 1/3rd of German POWs, up to 1 million people. This was in line with the much higher death toll in the Gulag during the early half of the war.

By Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-L28726 / Markwardt / CC-BY-SA 3.0

The guilt does not just apply to Stalin personally though. It was the Bolsheveik system in its entirety that gave almost no value to human life, on the battlefield or off it. It was Bolsheveik and Stalinist aggression, first against Poland in 1920, then later, that led Stalin to risk using Hitler to allow USSR to absorb Eastern Poland and the Baltics. It was the suspicion and fear of Stalinism that poisoned efforts to form a Polish-British-French-Soviet alliance against Hitler in 1939. It was the Soviet guarantee that gave Nazis freedom to invade Poland and plunge the world into War, it was Soviet trade with Germany that gave them the material resources to be able to invade the Soviet Union in the first place; then it was Stalin's stupidity that left millions of Soviet troops exposed, betraying them to captivity and extermination.

In the 1st World War under the Tsarist govt Russia suffered 3 million dead out of 20 million total losses in the War.  In the 2nd the Soviet Union suffered 25 million dead out of 40 million in the European theatre. In fact the astonishingly higher Soviet death toll accounts for the entire increase in deaths between WW1 and WW2, even given Nazi murderousness in Poland and elsewhere.

It is certain that the blame for some proportion of Soviet losses lies with the idiotic incompetence and aggression of Stalin and the Communist system. Picking a figure however is basically guesswork. How do you turn moral responsibility in such a complex situation into a percentage?

My mind returns again and again to 3 million. 3 million was the number that were basically offered up to the Germans at the start of the invasion, then killed en masse. 3 million out of 25 million or 12%, as good a number as any, and so the number I include in my total tally of Communist crimes to represent the horrendous Soviet losses in WW2. The overwhelming blame lies with the Nazis and always must, but Stalinist aggression, stupidity and disregard for human life killed millions of Soviet citizens.

George Orwell - "Notes on Nationalism"

These days everyone is talking about Nationalism. Whether it's Scottish Nationalism, Donald Trump's Nationalism, or European nationalism, nationalism seems to be everywhere. That has reminded me of this brilliant essay by George Orwell, who lived at a time when, whatever problems we have today, nationalism was a much more powerful and dangerous force. In it he skilfully dissects why nationalism is a problem, as a mental approach and emotional contagion. He makes various points often mistaken in our contemporary approach: about the difference between nationalism and patriotism, about the universal risk of nationalism, that 'nationalism' can apply to entities other than nations (in the strict sense), that one can have 'negative nationalism' as much as positive, and that the struggle against nationalism is an individual moral, spiritual, intellectual and linguistic struggle as well as a matter of political choice. It is also a brilliant piece of history, giving one a sense, at least from one perspective, of what it felt like to be facing out into the world as an Englishman in 1945.

Orwell's 'nationalism', in its generalised sense, bears a close relation to what a generalised notion of 'racism' would look like, if we used the term to also cover analogous stereotyping fallacies such as sexism, anti-semitism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, Christianophobia, homophobia, etc, etc. This is particularly in his formulation given in the first underlined sentence below. However, he then focuses on his second formulation given immediately after, which has a very different emphasis, and so I think more work is needed to complete an analogous identification of the form of ur-racism, such as people mean when they say Islamophobic attacks are racist, and which would unite a range of similar moral and intellectual stereotyping fallacies the way Orwell's 'nationalism' does in its overlapping areas. 

Finally, if you do accept Orwell's analysis then it becomes clear that in 2017 almost all our current, British, large-scale political arguments involve nationalism on both sides, generally the more, the more virulent the argument and fundamental the issue, as agreed rational facts dissolve into basic value and tribal commitments. Needless to say the Scottish Independence debate involves enough nationalism to drown us all in, though largely among its fiercer partisans. The majority of ordinary voters, inoculated by their comparative lack of interest in politics, whether formally nationalist or unionist, are probably still largely free of it. The EU question has also clearly become a nationalist issue for both sides, the more rabid Remainers seem to have developed this rapidly, largely since the referendum was called, joining the longer-term, more obvious nationalism of the Ukippy variety. There seems to be something about defeat, or being in the minority that promotes foaming at the mouth. The rise and fall of nationalisms is also obvious from Orwell's essay. Some of the types of nationalism he describes have basically vanished, others are still very much with us, and we could probably add modern types that have emerged since his essay was written. But enough from me, on to Orwell's own words.

Somewhere or other Byron makes use of the French word longeur, and remarks in passing that

though in England we happen not to have the word, we have the thing in considerable profusion. In the same way, there is a habit of mind which is now so widespread that it affects our thinking on nearly every subject, but which has not yet been given a name. As the nearest existing equivalent I have chosen the word ‘nationalism’, but it will be seen in a moment that I am not using it in quite the ordinary sense, if only because the emotion I am speaking about does not always attach itself to what is called a nation — that is, a single race or a geographical area. It can attach itself to a church or a class, or it may work in a merely negative sense, against something or other and without the need for any positive object of loyalty.

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’(1). 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.

So long as it is applied merely to the more notorious and identifiable nationalist movements in Germany, Japan, and other countries, all this is obvious enough. Confronted with a phenomenon like Nazism, which we can observe from the outside, nearly all of us would say much the same things about it. 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.

It is also worth emphasising once again that nationalist feeling can be purely negative. There are, for example, Trotskyists who have become simply enemies of the U.S.S.R. without developing a corresponding loyalty to any other unit. When one grasps the implications of this, the nature of what I mean by nationalism becomes a good deal clearer. A nationalist is one who thinks solely, or mainly, in terms of competitive prestige. He may be a positive or a negative nationalist — that is, he may use his mental energy either in boosting or in denigrating — but at any rate 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. But finally, it is important not to confuse nationalism with mere worship of success. 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 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 — unshakeably certain of being in the right.

Now that I have given this lengthy definition, I think it will be admitted that the habit of mind I am talking about is widespread among the English intelligentsia, and more widespread there than among the mass of the people. For those who feel deeply about contemporary politics, certain topics have become so infected by considerations of prestige that a genuinely rational approach to them is almost impossible. Out of the hundreds of examples that one might choose, take this question: Which of the three great allies, the U.S.S.R., Britain and the USA, has contributed most to the defeat of Germany? In theory, it should be possible to give a reasoned and perhaps even a conclusive answer to this question. In practice, however, the necessary calculations cannot be made, because anyone likely to bother his head about such a question would inevitably see it in terms of competitive prestige. He would therefore start by deciding in favour of Russia, Britain or America as the case might be, and only after this would begin searching for arguments that seemed to support his case. And there are whole strings of kindred questions to which you can only get an honest answer from someone who is indifferent to the whole subject involved, and whose opinion on it is probably worthless in any case. Hence, partly, the remarkable failure in our time of political and military prediction. It is curious to reflect that out of al the ‘experts’ of all the schools, there was not a single one who was able to foresee so likely an event as the Russo-German Pact of 1939(2). And when news of the Pact broke, the most wildly divergent explanations were of it were given, and predictions were made which were falsified almost immediately, being based in nearly every case not on a study of probabilities but on a desire to make the U.S.S.R. seem good or bad, strong or weak. Political or military commentators, like astrologers, can survive almost any mistake, because their more devoted followers do not look to them for an appraisal of the facts but for the stimulation of nationalistic loyalties(3). And aesthetic judgements, especially literary judgements, are often corrupted in the same way as political ones. It would be difficult for an Indian Nationalist to enjoy reading Kipling or for a Conservative to see merit in Mayakovsky, and there is always a temptation to claim that any book whose tendency one disagrees with must be a bad book from a literary point of view. People of strongly nationalistic outlook often perform this sleight of hand without being conscious of dishonesty.

In England, if one simply considers the number of people involved, it is probable that the dominant form of nationalism is old-fashioned British jingoism. It is certain that this is still widespread, and much more so than most observers would have believed a dozen years ago. However, in this essay I am concerned chiefly with the reactions of the intelligentsia, among whom jingoism and even patriotism of the old kind are almost dead, though they now seem to be reviving among a minority. Among the intelligentsia, it hardly needs saying that the dominant form of nationalism is Communism — using this word in a very loose sense, to include not merely Communist Party members, but ‘fellow travellers’ and russophiles generally. A Communist, for my purpose here, is one who looks upon the U.S.S.R. as his Fatherland and feels it his duty t justify Russian policy and advance Russian interests at all costs. Obviously such people abound in England today, and their direct and indirect influence is very great. But many other forms of nationalism also flourish, and it is by noticing the points of resemblance between different and even seemingly opposed currents of thought that one can best get the matter into perspective.

Ten or twenty years ago, the form of nationalism most closely corresponding to Communism today was political Catholicism. Its most outstanding exponent — though he was perhaps an extreme case rather than a typical one — was G. K. Chesterton. Chesterton was a writer of considerable talent who whose to suppress both his sensibilities and his intellectual honesty in the cause of Roman Catholic propaganda. During the last twenty years or so of his life, his entire output was in reality an endless repetition of the same thing, under its laboured cleverness as simple and boring as ‘Great is Diana of the Ephesians.’ Every book that he wrote, every scrap of dialogue, had to demonstrate beyond the possibility of mistake the superiority of the Catholic over the Protestant or the pagan. But Chesterton was not content to think of this superiority as merely intellectual or spiritual: it had to be translated into terms of national prestige and military power, which entailed an ignorant idealisation of the Latin countries, especially France. Chesterton had not lived long in France, and his picture of it — as a land of Catholic peasants incessantly singing the Marseillaise over glasses of red wine — had about as much relation to reality as Chu Chin Chow has to everyday life in Baghdad. And with this went not only an enormous overestimation of French military power (both before and after 1914-18 he maintained that France, by itself, was stronger than Germany), but a silly and vulgar glorification of the actual process of war. Chesterton's battle poems, such as Lepanto or The Ballad of Saint Barbara, make The Charge of the Light Brigade read like a pacifist tract: they are perhaps the most tawdry bits of bombast to be found in our language. The interesting thing is that had the romantic rubbish which he habitually wrote about France and the French army been written by somebody else about Britain and the British army, he would have been the first to jeer. In home politics he was a Little Englander, a true hater of jingoism and imperialism, and according to his lights a true friend of democracy. Yet when he looked outwards into the international field, he could forsake his principles without even noticing he was doing so. Thus, his almost mystical belief in the virtues of democracy did not prevent him from admiring Mussolini. Mussolini had destroyed the representative government and the freedom of the press for which Chesterton had struggled so hard at home, but Mussolini was an Italian and had made Italy strong, and that settled the matter. Nor did Chesterton ever find a word to say about imperialism and the conquest of coloured races when they were practised by Italians or Frenchmen. His hold on reality, his literary taste, and even to some extent his moral sense, were dislocated as soon as his nationalistic loyalties were involved.

Obviously there are considerable resemblances between political Catholicism, as exemplified by Chesterton, and Communism. So there are between either of these and for instance Scottish nationalism, Zionism, Antisemitism or Trotskyism. 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 the principal characteristics of nationalist thought:

Obsession. 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. The smallest slur upon his own unit, or any implied praise of a rival organization, fills him with uneasiness which he can relieve only by making some sharp retort. If the chosen unit is an actual country, such as Ireland or India, he will generally claim superiority for it 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(4). Nomenclature plays a very important part in nationalist thought. Countries which have won their independence or gone through a nationalist revolution usually change their names, and any country or other unit round which strong feelings revolve is likely to have several names, each of them carrying a different implication. The two sides of the Spanish Civil War had between them nine or ten names expressing different degrees of love and hatred. Some of these names (e. g. ‘Patriots’ for Franco-supporters, or ‘Loyalists’ for Government-supporters) were frankly question-begging, and there was no single one of the which the two rival factions could have agreed to use. All nationalists consider it a duty to spread their own language to the detriment of rival languages, and among English-speakers this struggle reappears in subtler forms as a struggle between dialects. Anglophobe-Americans will refuse to use a slang phrase if they know it to be of British origin, and the conflict between Latinizers and Germanizers often has nationalists motives behind it. Scottish nationalists insist on the superiority of Lowland Scots, and socialists whose nationalism takes the form of class hatred tirade against the B.B.C. accent and even the often gives the impression of being tinged by belief in symphatetic magic — a belief which probably comes out in the widespread custom of burning political enemies in effigy, or using pictures of them as targets in shooting galleries.

Instability. The intensity with which they are held does not prevent nationalist loyalties from being transferable. To begin with, as I have pointed out already, they can be and often are fastened up on some foreign country. One quite commonly finds that great national leaders, or the founders of nationalist movements, do not even belong to the country they have glorified. Sometimes they are outright foreigners, or more often they come from peripheral areas where nationality is doubtful. Examples are Stalin, Hitler, Napoleon, de Valera, Disraeli, Poincare, Beaverbrook. The Pan-German movement was in part the creation of an Englishman, Houston Chamberlain. For the past fifty or a hundred years, transferred nationalism has been a common phenomenon among literary intellectuals. With Lafcadio Hearne the transference was to Japan, with Carlyle and many others of his time to Germany, and in our own age it is usually to Russia. But the peculiarly interesting fact is that re-transference is also possible. A country or other unit which has been worshipped for years may suddenly become detestable, and some other object of affection may take its place with almost no interval. In the first version of H. G. Wells's Outline of History, and others of his writings about that time, one finds the United States praised almost as extravagantly as Russia is praised by Communists today: yet within a few years this uncritical admiration had turned into hostility. The bigoted Communist who changes in a space of weeks, or even days, into an equally bigoted Trotskyist is a common spectacle. In continental Europe Fascist movements were largely recruited from among Communists, and the opposite process may well happen within the next few years. What remains constant in the nationalist is his state of mind: the object of his feelings is changeable, and may be imaginary.

But for an intellectual, transference has an important function which I have already mentioned shortly in connection with Chesterton. It makes it possible for him to be much more nationalistic — more vulgar, more silly, more malignant, more dishonest — that he could ever be on behalf of his native country, or any unit of which he had real knowledge. When one sees the slavish or boastful rubbish that is written about Stalin, the Red Army, etc. by fairly intelligent and sensitive people, one realises that this is only possible because some kind of dislocation has taken place. In societies such as ours, it is unusual for anyone describable as an intellectual to feel a very deep attachment to his own country. Public opinion — that is, the section of public opinion of which he as an intellectual is aware — will not allow him to do so. Most of the people surrounding him are sceptical and disaffected, and he may adopt the same attitude from imitativeness or sheer cowardice: in that case he will have abandoned the form of nationalism that lies nearest to hand without getting any closer to a genuinely internationalist outlook. 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. God, the King, the Empire, the Union Jack — all the overthrown idols can reappear under different names, and because they are not recognised for what they are they can be worshipped with a good conscience. Transferred nationalism, like the use of scapegoats, is a way of attaining salvation without altering one's conduct.

Indifference to Reality. All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India 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 — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side. The Liberal News Chronicle published, as an example of shocking barbarity, photographs of Russians hanged by the Germans, and then a year or two later published with warm approval almost exactly similar photographs of Germans hanged by the Russians(5). It is the same with historical events. History is thought of largely in nationalist terms, and such things as the Inquisition, the tortures of the Star Chamber, the exploits of the English buccaneers (Sir Francis Drake, for instance, who was given to sinking Spanish prisoners alive), the Reign of Terror, the heroes of the Mutiny blowing hundreds of Indians from the guns, or Cromwell's soldiers slashing Irishwomen's faces with razors, become morally neutral or even meritorious when it is felt that they were done in the ‘right’ cause. If one looks back over the past quarter of a century, one finds that there was hardly a single year when atrocity stories were not being reported from some part of the world; and yet in not one single case were these atrocities — in Spain, Russia, China, Hungary, Mexico, Amritsar, Smyrna — believed in and disapproved of by the English intelligentsia as a whole. Whether such deeds were reprehensible, or even whether they happened, was always decided according to political predilection.

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. Many English people have heard almost nothing about the extermination of German and Polish Jews during the present war. Their own antisemitism has caused this vast crime to bounce off their consciousness. In nationalist thought there are facts which are both true and untrue, known and unknown. A known fact may be so unbearable that it is habitually pushed aside and not allowed to enter into logical processes, or on the other hand it may enter into every calculation and yet never be admitted as a fact, even in one's own mind.

Every nationalist is haunted by the belief that the past can be altered. He spends part of his time in a fantasy world in which things happen as they should — in which, for example, the Spanish Armada was a success or the Russian Revolution was crushed in 1918 — and he will transfer fragments of this world to the history books whenever possible. 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 left unmentioned and ultimately denied(6). In 1927 Chiang Kai Shek boiled hundreds of Communists alive, and yet within ten years he had become one of the heroes of the Left. The re-alignment of world politics had brought him into the anti-Fascist camp, and so it was felt that the boiling of the Communists ‘didn't count’, or perhaps had not happened. The primary aim of propaganda is, of course, to influence contemporary opinion, but those who rewrite history do probably believe with part of their minds that they are actually thrusting facts into the past. When one considers the elaborate forgeries that have been committed in order to show that Trotsky did not play a valuable part in the Russian civil war, it is difficult to feel that the people responsible are merely lying. 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.

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 a genuine doubt about the most enormous events. For example, it is impossible to calculate within millions, perhaps even tens of millions, the number of deaths caused by the present war. The calamities that are constantly being reported — battles, massacres, famines, revolutions — tend to inspire in the average person a feeling of unreality. One has no way of verifying the facts, one is not even fully certain that they have happened, and one is always presented with totally different interpretations from different sources. What were the rights and wrongs of the Warsaw rising of August 1944? Is it true about the German gas ovens in Poland? Who was really to blame for the Bengal famine? 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 either for swallowing lies or failing to form an opinion. The general uncertainty as to what is really happening makes it easier to cling to lunatic beliefs. Since nothing is ever quite proved or disproved, the most unmistakable fact can be impudently denied. Moreover, although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge, the nationalist is often somewhat uninterested in what happens in the real world. What he wants is to feel that his own unit is getting the better of some other unit, and he can more easily do this by scoring off an adversary than by examining the facts to see whether they support him. 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.

I have examined as best as I can the mental habits which are common to all forms of nationalism. The next thing is to classify those forms, but obviously this cannot be done comprehensively. Nationalism is an enormous subject. The world is tormented by innumerable delusions and hatreds which cut across one another in an extremely complex way, and some of the most sinister of them have not yet impinged on the European consciousness. In this essay I am concerned with nationalism as it occurs among the English intelligentsia. In them, much more than in ordinary English people, it is unmixed with patriotism and therefore can be studied pure. Below are listed the varieties of nationalism now flourishing among English intellectuals, with such comments as seem to be needed. It is convenient to use three headings, Positive, Transferred, and Negative, though some varieties will fit into more than one category:

Positive Nationalism

(i) Neo-toryism. Exemplified by such people as Lord Elton, A. P. Herbert, G. M. Young, Professor Pickthorn, by the literature of the Tory Reform Committee, and by such magazines as the New English Review and the Nineteenth Century and After. The real motive force of neo-Toryism, giving it its nationalistic character and differentiating it from ordinary Conservatism, is the desire not to recognise that British power and influence have declined. Even those who are realistic enough to see that Britain's military position is not what it was, tend to claim that ‘English ideas’ (usually left undefined) must dominate the world. All neo-Tories are anti-Russian, but sometimes the main emphasis is anti-American. The significant thing is that this school of thought seems to be gaining ground among youngish intellectuals, sometimes ex-Communists, who have passed through the usual process of disillusionment and become disillusioned with that. The anglophobe who suddenly becomes violently pro-British is a fairly common figure. Writers who illustrate this tendency are F. A. Voigt, Malcolm Muggeridge, Evelyn Waugh, Hugh Kingsmill, and a psychologically similar development can be observed in T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, and various of their followers.

(ii) Celtic Nationalism. Welsh, Irish and Scottish nationalism have points of difference but are alike in their anti-English orientation. Members of all three movements have opposed the war while continuing to describe themselves as pro-Russian, and the lunatic fringe has even contrived to be simultaneously pro-Russian and pro-Nazi. But Celtic nationalism is not the same thing as anglophobia. Its motive force is a belief in the past and future greatness of the Celtic peoples, and it has a strong tinge of racialism. The Celt is supposed to be spiritually superior to the Saxon — simpler, more creative, less vulgar, less snobbish, etc. — but the usual power hunger is there under the surface. One symptom of it is the delusion that Eire, Scotland or even Wales could preserve its independence unaided and owes nothing to British protection. Among writers, good examples of this school of thought are Hugh McDiarmid and Sean O'Casey. No modern Irish writer, even of the stature of Yeats or Joyce, is completely free from traces of nationalism.

(iii) Zionism. This the unusual characteristics of a nationalist movement, but the American variant of it seems to be more violent and malignant than the British. I classify it under Direct and not Transferred nationalism because it flourishes almost exclusively among the Jews themselves. In England, for several rather incongruous reasons, the intelligentsia are mostly pro-Jew on the Palestine issue, but they do not feel strongly about it. All English people of goodwill are also pro-Jew in the sense of disapproving of Nazi persecution. But any actual nationalistic loyalty, or belief in the innate superiority of Jews, is hardly to be found among Gentiles.

Transferred Nationalism

(i) Communism.

(ii) Political Catholicism.

(iii) Colour Feeling. The old-style contemptuous attitude towards ‘natives’ has been much weakened in England, and various pseudo-scientific theories emphasising the superiority of the white race have been abandoned(7). Among the intelligentsia, colour feeling only occurs in the transposed form, that is, as a belief in the innate superiority of the coloured races. This is now increasingly common among English intellectuals, probably resulting more often from masochism and sexual frustration than from contact with the Oriental and Negro nationalist movements. Even among those who do not feel strongly on the colour question, snobbery and imitation have a powerful influence. Almost any English intellectual would be scandalised by the claim that the white races are superior to the coloured, whereas the opposite claim would seem to him unexceptionable even if he disagreed with it. Nationalistic attachment to the coloured races is usually mixed up with the belief that their sex lives are superior, and there is a large underground mythology about the sexual prowess of Negroes.

(iv) Class Feeling. Among upper-class and middle-class intellectuals, only in the transposed form — i. e. as a belief in the superiority of the proletariat. Here again, inside the intelligentsia, the pressure of public opinion is overwhelming. Nationalistic loyalty towards the proletariat, and most vicious theoretical hatred of the bourgeoisie, can and often do co-exist with ordinary snobbishness in everyday life.

(v) Pacifism. The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to the taking of life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists whose real though unadmitted motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration of totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writings of younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States. Moreover they do not as a rule condemn violence as such, but only violence used in defence of western countries. The Russians, unlike the British, are not blamed for defending themselves by warlike means, and indeed all pacifist propaganda of this type avoids mention of Russia or China. It is not claimed, again, that the Indians should abjure violence in their struggle against the British. Pacifist literature abounds with equivocal remarks which, if they mean anything, appear to mean that statesmen of the type of Hitler are preferable to those of the type of Churchill, and that violence is perhaps excusable if it is violent enough. After the fall of France, the French pacifists, faced by a real choice which their English colleagues have not had to make, mostly went over to the Nazis, and in England there appears to have been some small overlap of membership between the Peace Pledge Union and the Blackshirts. Pacifist writers have written in praise of Carlyle, one of the intellectual fathers of Fascism. All in all it is difficult not to feel that pacifism, as it appears among a section of the intelligentsia, is secretly inspired by an admiration for power and successful cruelty. The mistake was made of pinning this emotion to Hitler, but it could easily be retransfered.

Negative Nationalism

(i) Anglophobia. Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell ore when the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a remarkable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, ‘enlightened’ opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.

(ii) Anti-Semitism. There is little evidence about this at present, because the Nazi persecutions have made it necessary for any thinking person to side with the Jews against their oppressors. Anyone educated enough to have heard the word ‘antisemitism’ claims as a matter of course to be free of it, and anti-Jewish remarks are carefully eliminated from all classes of literature. Actually antisemitism appears to be widespread, even among intellectuals, and the general conspiracy of silence probably helps exacerbate it. People of Left opinions are not immune to it, and their attitude is sometimes affected by the fact that Trotskyists and Anarchists tend to be Jews. But antisemitism comes more naturally to people of Conservative tendency, who suspect Jews of weakening national morale and diluting the national culture. Neo-Tories and political Catholics are always liable to succumb to antisemitism, at least intermittently.

(iii) Trotskyism. This word is used so loosely as to include Anarchists, democratic Socialists and even Liberals. I use it here to mean a doctrinaire Marxist whose main motive is hostility to the Stalin regime. Trotskyism can be better studied in obscure pamphlets or in papers like the Socialist Appeal than in the works of Trotsky himself, who was by no means a man of one idea. Although in some places, for instance in the United States, Trotskyism is able to attract a fairly large number of adherents and develop into an organised movement with a petty fuerher of its own, its inspiration is essentially negative. The Trotskyist is against Stalin just as the Communist is for him, and, like the majority of Communists, he wants not so much to alter the external world as to feel that the battle for prestige is going in his own favour. In each case there is the same obsessive fixation on a single subject, the same inability to form a genuinely rational opinion based on probabilities. The fact that Trotskyists are everywhere a persecuted minority, and that the accusation usually made against them, i. e. of collaborating with the Fascists, is obviously false, creates an impression that Trotskyism is intellectually and morally superior to Communism; but it is doubtful whether there is much difference. The most typical Trotskyists, in any case, are ex-Communists, and no one arrives at Trotskyism except via one of the left-wing movements. No Communist, unless tethered to his party by years of habit, is secure against a sudden lapse into Trotskyism. The opposite process does not seem to happen equally often, though there is no clear reason why it should not.

In the classification I have attempted above, it will seem that I have often exaggerated, oversimplified, made unwarranted assumptions and have left out of account the existence of ordinarily decent motives. This was inevitable, because in this essay I am trying to isolate and identify tendencies which exist in all our minds and pervert our thinking, without necessarily occurring in a pure state or operating continuously. It is important at this point to correct the over-simplified picture which I have been obliged to make. To begin with, one has no right to assume that everyone, or even every intellectual, is infected by nationalism. Secondly, nationalism can be intermittent and limited. An intelligent man may half-succumb to a belief which he knows to be absurd, and he may keep it out of his mind for long periods, only reverting to it in moments of anger or sentimentality, or when he is certain that no important issues are involved. Thirdly, a nationalistic creed may be adopted in good faith from non-nationalistic motives. Fourthly, several kinds of nationalism, even kinds that cancel out, can co-exist in the same person.

All the way through I have said, ‘the nationalist does this’ or ‘the nationalist does that’, using for purposes of illustration the extreme, barely sane type of nationalist who has no neutral areas in his mind and no interest in anything except the struggle for power. Actually such people are fairly common, but they are not worth the powder and shot. In real life Lord Elton, D. N. Pritt, Lady Houston, Ezra Pound, Lord Vanisttart, Father Coughlin and all the rest of their dreary tribe have to be fought against, but their intellectual deficiencies hardly need pointing out. Monomania is not interesting, and the fact that no nationalist of the more bigoted kind can write a book which still seems worth reading after a lapse of years has a certain deodorising effect. But when one has admitted that nationalism has not triumphed everywhere, that there are still peoples whose judgements are not at the mercy of their desires, the fact does remain that the pressing problems — India, Poland, Palestine, the Spanish civil war, the Moscow trials, the American Negroes, the Russo-German Pact or what have you — cannot be, or at least never are, discussed upon a reasonable level. The Eltons and Pritts and Coughlins, each of them simply an enormous mouth bellowing the same lie over and over again, are obviously extreme cases, but we deceive ourselves if we do not realise that we can all resemble them in unguarded moments. Let a certain note be struck, let this or that corn be trodden on — and it may be corn whose very existence has been unsuspected hitherto — and the most fair-minded and sweet-tempered person may suddenly be transformed into a vicious partisan, anxious only to ‘score’ over his adversary and indifferent as to how many lies he tells or how many logical errors he commits in doing so. When Lloyd George, who was an opponent of the Boer War, announced in the House of Commons that the British communiques, if one added them together, claimed the killing of more Boers than the whole Boer nation contained, it is recorded that Arthur Balfour rose to his feet and shouted ‘Cad!’ Very few people are proof against lapses of this type. The Negro snubbed by a white woman, the Englishman who hears England ignorantly criticised by an American, the Catholic apologist reminded of the Spanish Armada, will all react in much the same way. One prod to the nerve of nationalism, and the intellectual decencies can vanish, the past can be altered, and the plainest facts can be denied.

If one harbours anywhere 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. I list below five types of nationalist, and against each I append a fact which it is impossible for that type of nationalist to accept, even in his secret thoughts:

BRITISH TORY: Britain will come out of this war with reduced power and prestige.

COMMUNIST: If she had not been aided by Britain and America, Russia would have been defeated by Germany.

IRISH NATIONALIST: Eire can only remain independent because of British protection.

TROTSKYIST: The Stalin regime is accepted by the Russian masses.

PACIFIST: Those who ‘abjure’ violence can only do so because others are committing violence on their behalf.

All of these facts are grossly obvious if one's emotions do not happen to be involved: but to the kind of person named in each case they are also intolerable, and so they have to be denied, and false theories constructed upon their denial. I come back to the astonishing failure of military prediction in the present war. It is, I think, true to say that the intelligentsia have been more wrong about the progress of the war than the common people, and that they were more swayed by partisan feelings. The average intellectual of the Left believed, for instance, that the war was lost in 1940, that the Germans were bound to overrun Egypt in 1942, that the Japanese would never be driven out of the lands they had conquered, and that the Anglo-American bombing offensive was making no impression on Germany. He could believe these things because his hatred for the British ruling class forbade him to admit that British plans could succeed. There is no limit to the follies that can be swallowed if one is under the influence of feelings of this kind. I have heard it confidently stated, for instance, that the American troops had been brought to Europe not to fight the Germans but to crush an English revolution. One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool. When Hitler invaded Russia, the officials of the MOI issued ‘as background’ a warning that Russia might be expected to collapse in six weeks. On the other hand the Communists regarded every phase of the war as a Russian victory, even when the Russians were driven back almost to the Caspian Sea and had lost several million prisoners. There is no need to multiply instances. 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 as one has condemned in some other case, even if one admits in an intellectual sense that it is unjustified — still one cannot feel that it is wrong. Loyalty is involved, and so pity ceases to function.

The reason for the rise and spread of nationalism is far too big a question to be raised here. It is enough to say that, in the forms in which it appears among English intellectuals, it is a distorted reflection of the frightful battles actually happening in the external world, and that its worst follies have been made possible by the breakdown of patriotism and religious belief. If one follows up this train of thought, one is in danger of being led into a species of Conservatism, or into political quietism. It can be plausibly argued, for instance — it is even possibly true — that patriotism is an 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; and this is often advanced as a reason for keeping out of politics altogether. I do not accept this argument, if only because in the modern world no one describable as an intellectual can keep out of politics in the sense of not caring about them. I think one must engage in politics — using the word in a wide sense — and that one must have preferences: that is, one must recognise that some causes are objectively better than others, even if they are advanced by equally bad means. As for the nationalistic loves and hatreds that I have spoken of, they are part of the make-up 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 that 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, what one's own feelings really are, and then of making allowance for the inevitable bias. If you hate and fear Russia, if you are jealous of the wealth and power of America, if you despise Jews, 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 are perhaps even necessary to political action, should be able to exist side by side with an acceptance of reality. But this, I repeat, needs a moral effort, and contemporary English literature, so far as it is alive at all to the major issues of our time, shows how few of us are prepared to make it.

1945

_____

1) Nations, and even vaguer entities such as Catholic Church or the proleteriat, are commonly thought of as individuals and often referred to as ‘she’. Patently absurd remarks such as ‘Germany is naturally treacherous’ are to be found in any newspaper one opens and reckless generalization about national character (‘The Spaniard is a natural aristocrat’ or ‘Every Englishman is a hypocrite’) are uttered by almost everyone. Intermittently these generalizations are seen to be unfounded, but the habit of making them persists, and people of professedly international outlook, e.g., Tolstoy or Bernard Shaw, are often guilty of them. [back]

2) A few writers of conservative tendency, such as Peter Drucker, foretold an agreement between Germany and Russia, but they expected an actual alliance or amalgamation which would be permanent. No Marxist or other left-wing writer, of whatever colour, came anywhere near foretelling the Pact. [back]

3) The military commentators of the popular press can mostly be classified as pro-Russian or anti-Russianm pro-blimp or anti-blimp. Such errors as believing the Mrginot Line impregnable, or predicting that Russia would conquer Germany in three months, have failed to shake their reputation, because they were always saying what their own particular audience wanted to hear. The two military critics most favoured by the intelligentsia are Captain Liddell Hart and Major-General Fuller, the first of whom teachs that the defence is stronger that the attack, and the second that the attack is stronger that the defence. This contradiction has not prevented both of them from being accepted as authorities by the sme public. The secret reason for their vogue in left-wing circles is that both of them are at odds with the War Office. [back]

4) Certain Americans have expressed dissatisfaction because ‘Anglo-American’ is the form of combination for these two words. It has been proposed to submite ‘Americo-British’.[back]

5) The News Chronicle advised its readers to visit the news film at which the entire execution could be witnessed, with close-ups. The Star published with seeming approval photographs of nearly naked female collaborationists being baited by the Paris mob. These photographs had a marked resemblance to the Nazi photographs of Jews being baited by the Berlin mob. [back]

6) En example is the Russo-German Pact, which is being effaced as quickly as possible from public memory. A Russian correspondent informs me that mention of the Pact is already being omitted from Russian year-books which table recent political events. [back]

7) A good example is the sunstroke superstition. Until recently it was believed that the white races were much more liable to sunstroke that the coloured, and that a white man could not safely walk about in tropical sunshine without a pith helmet. There was no evidence whatever for this theory, but it served the purpose of accentuating the difference between ‘natives’ and Europeans. During the war the theory was quietly dropped and whole armies manoeuvred in the tropics without pith helmets. So long as the sunstroke superstition survived, English doctors in India appear to have believed in it as firmly as laymen. [back]

THE END

____BD____
George Orwell: ‘Notes on Nationalism’
First published: Polemic. — GB, London. — May 1945.

Reprinted:

— ‘England Your England and Other Essays’. — 1953.

Text copied with thanks from http://orwell.ru/library/essays/nationalism/english/ 

© 1999-2015 www.orwell.ru

Stories of Resistance to the Holocaust

Between 1939 and 1945 the Nazi German state murdered 5.5 - 6 million Jews in occupied Europe, as well as another five million gentiles by the same methods of mass gassing, extermination through labour, starvation and mass shooting. This was itself only part of the 30-40 million killed in the European section of the 2nd World War. Many Jews fought and resisted by every means possible, but the Jews of Europe were never alone in their struggle. In the darkest night the light shines out the brightest, and in every country in Europe there were individuals and organisations who risked their lives to save their Jewish brothers and sisters. They were a scattered and spontaneous army of rescuers and resistors, though most fought without violence. In the worst period of human history they produced some of humanity's most noble heroism.

It feels almost wrong to talk too much about resistance to the Holocaust, as though doing so could give the impression the Holocaust 'wasn't so bad after all'. But it is also wrong to just say the rescuers failed because millions still died. They saved hundreds of thousands of lives, they saved all they could. But this resistance was horribly outnumbered and outgunned, facing political and military power they could not match, and divided and thinly scattered over an entire continent. Both Jews and non-Jews struggled to save lives during the Holocaust. This article focuses on the non-Jews, who could have stood aside, but chose to put themselves at risk to save lives. It would take a whole other article to begin to describe the remarkable Jewish struggle for survival against the darkness engulfing them.

Yad Vashem, the official Israeli museum for the Holocaust operates a program to recognise 'Righteous Among the Nations', non-Jews who risked their lives during the War to save Jewish lives. They have so far officially recognised over 26,100 people from 51 countries after submission of applications and evidence. This number is obviously less than the true number, even of those who directly risked their lives, but nobody can accurately say by how much. Certainly many times this must have been involved in rescuing, sheltering, protesting, or just remaining silent about hidden Jews at grave risk of Nazi reprisal, whilst constantly overcoming the shortages, poverty and want endured by almost all citizens of the occupied countries. And many heroes were caught and killed during the war, with no-one then left to testify to their resistance later.

Every Holocaust Memorial Day, January 27th, I feel the stories of those who risked everything to save lives should be better known. Oskar Schindler, is perhaps the only name of a rescuer that will be immediately familiar to most people, and yet he was one of tens of thousands. For years I've been put off by the sheer complexity of trying. Even to give a thin, representative sample of stories would take many pages, and anything else risks giving an inaccurate impression. But I feel it better to share some stories, and hope it encourages you to investigate further yourself. So here I give just a few examples of the incredible courage of both whole countries, towns and villages, and remarkable individuals, taken from Poland, the country with the most recognised Righteous Gentiles. These examples are deliberately fragmentary, even so this makes for a long article. I implore you to read further on your own, explore the links in this article or on Wikipedia's section on Holocaust rescuers, or the wonderful website for Yad Vashem itself.

Resistance took many forms, both Jewish and Gentile, collective and individual, from whole countries to single individuals. It defies easy categorisation, due to the sheer breadth of experiences that made up the genocide. The Holocaust is unique among genocides in the sheer diversity of the area and people who were destroyed, united only by all being of Jewish ancestry. It affected European countries from France to Russia, and Greece to Norway. Its victims differed in language, nationality, appearance, politics, social integration, wealth, and religion. It destroyed poor, isolated, religious communities in rural, Ukrainian villages, and integrated, secularised, wealthy individuals in Dutch cities. It killed followers of Orthodox and Reform Judaism, Christians, and secular, non-religious people. Victims were stripped from every European community and equally the scattered resistance came from every corner and circumstance in Europe.

Amidst the general darkness a few whole countries saved almost all their Jews. Bulgaria was a Nazi ally, but when the Germans demanded Bulgaria deport its Jewish population to occupied Poland a campaign by the Orthodox Church, leading writers and intellectuals and the Royal Family forced the government to refuse the order. Bishop Kiril of Plovdiv reportedly stood on the tracks in front of the transport train in Plovdiv himself to stop it from starting the journey to the concentration camps. Bulgaria was lucky in that it was small and distant, and so unlike Hungary or Romania, attempts to refuse the deportation of their Jews were not met with immediate occupation by German troops. All Bulgaria's 50,000 Jewish citizens survived.

In Denmark more than 90% of the small Jewish population, around 8,000 people, was successfully spirited away to neutral Sweden by the Danish resistance. After the Germans threatened deportations the Resistance, with the collusion of some in the government, organised to move thousands through a series of hiding places to distant north-east fishing ports, and then across the sea to safety in Sweden. The Nazis occupied Denmark in 1940 without firing a short, in theory to 'protect' it from Allied aggression. The result was the Danish government was left largely intact, rather than being replaced by Nazi or collaborationist fascist officials. This combined with the strong sense of shared national identity and the deep historical integration of the Jewish community into Danish society, to encourage the successful effort to save them.

Albania was the only country in occupied Europe to end the war with more Jews than it started. From some 300 before the war there were around 1800 Jews in the country by the war's end. Jews in Albania were protected by the fact the country fell under Italian rather than German occupation until late 1943, and that the Albanian and Yugoslav partisans liberated much of the area by late 1944. Meanwhile many hundreds were hidden in remote mountain villages under strict local customs of hospitality dating back centuries.

In other countries scattered across Europe whole communities rallied to refuse Nazi demands for the deportation of their Jewish citizens. In France the Protestant town of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon worked as one, under the leadership of its local church minister, to shelter and protect over a thousand Jews. They were housed in homes throughout the town, fed, and hidden in the forests nearby whenever German soldiers came searching. Local people continued to protest the persecution of the Jews in open defiance of the authorities, once handing a petition opposing the deportations directly to a Vichy minister. Townspeople were arrested and murdered in the concentration camps, including the Church Minister's cousin, Daniel Trocmé, and his children.

In the Netherlands the small village of Nieuwlande came together to agree that every house and family would hide at least one Jew, binding the whole population of the village to a common effort and reducing the risk of any traitor giving them away. Arnold Douwes, the son of the village's Reformed Church pastor worked tirelessly through the war years, encouraging villagers to hide Jews on the run from the Nazis and support them with food, official documents and money, as far as they possibly could, saving around three hundred lives.

In Greece, the island of Zakynthos, refused to hand over its Jews for deportation. In 1944 Mayor Loukas Karrer was ordered at gunpoint to hand over a list of Jews residing on the island. The list, presented to the Germans by the island's Bishop Chrysostomos, contained only two names: the Mayor and the Bishop. The Bishop told the Germans, “Here are your Jews. If you choose to deport the Jews of Zakynthos, you must also take me, and I will share their fate.” Meanwhile all the Jews of the island were safely hidden in mountain villages. The Germans backed down and not one of the 275 Jews living on the island were lost. After the war in 1953 the island was struck by a terrible earthquake that destroyed almost every structure. The first boat to arrive with aid was from Israel, with a message that read, “The Jews of Zakynthos have never forgotten their Mayor or their beloved Bishop and what they did for us.”

Poland has the highest number of recognised 'Righteous Gentiles'. Over 6,600 gentile Poles have received this award from Yad Vashem for risking their lives to save Jews. Poland was the country occupied longest by the Nazis, with the largest Jewish population, and both the most ferocious implementation of the Holocaust and the harshest regime of occupation for gentile Poles. Three million Jewish Poles and three million gentile Poles were killed during the war, and the punishment for offering any aid to Jews, even selling food or giving a lift in a vehicle, was the immediate death of the rescuer and their entire family. Nonetheless 50,000-100,000 Polish Jews were aided by Catholic Poles and it is estimated that each person received help in one form or another from at least several people, if not many more. Władysław Szpilman, Polish musician and author of The Pianist, on which the film of the same title was based, identified no fewer than 30 Poles who helped him survive the War.

Zegota was a branch of the Polish underground government dedicated to helping Jews. A joint

enterprise of Catholic activists and Jewish organisations, it provided money, food and hiding places to more than nine thousand Jews hiding with gentile Poles. Irena Sendler headed the Zegota children's section responsible for smuggling Jewish children out of the ghetto and placing them with families, orphanages and Catholic convents. Facing the most extreme danger her group of 30 volunteers physically smuggled 2,500 children out of the Warsaw ghetto however they could, in ambulances, prams, packages and suitcases. She buried jars with the children's information in the hope they could be reconnected with their families after the war. In 1943 she was even arrested by the Gestapo, tortured and sentenced to death, but luckily escaped and continued her work. After the war she was arrested again by the Communists along with many members of Zegota, imprisoned, interrogated and tortured but eventually released.

Rescuing people involved huge personal ingenuity, quick thinking and sacrifice. Eugeniusz Lazowski was a medical doctor who saved thousands by generating a fake typhus epidemic in eight villages. He discovered that injecting someone with dead typhus bacteria would generate a positive typhus result on a test without harming the person. He injected enough people to persuade the Germans to quarantine an 'infected' area covering several towns rather than risk a widespread typhus outbreak, thus saving several thousand people from being deported to the death camps. Irena Gut was a nurse, she was employed a housekeeper for a German Major and hid twelve Jews in the basement of the house, where every day they emerged to help her clean the place. After several months she was discovered by the Major but struck an agreement to become his mistress for the rest of the War in return for his silence, thus saving the twelve lives. Jan Zabinski was the director of Warsaw's Zoo before the War. All the animals had been killed during and shortly after the Nazi bombardment and occupation of Warsaw so the Zoo with its grounds was deserted. Taking advantage of this with the help of his wife Antonina he temporarily hid hundreds of Jews in abandoned animal cages, supplying them with food and money, before Zegota could smuggle them to more permanent hiding places. He also hid two dozen people through the War within the grounds of his own house in the Zoo.

In outlying towns and villages it was sometimes possible to hide whole families on farms and estates. Franciszek and Magdalena Banasiewicz constructed a bunker underneath their farm where they eventually gathered and hid fifteen people for over three years. Once one of their rescuees was caught by the Germans, but they managed to bribe the guard to release him and he escaped back to hide on the farm. Many others hid Jews in a similar way, but this was astonishingly dangerous. In a nearby village to the Banasiewicz's a farmer called Kurpiel was caught sheltering 27 Jews and killed with his entire family and all their fugitives. In another nearby town over 500 Poles were killed, in that town alone during the war, for attempting to help the Jewish population.

I could go on for days. To even try to discuss this topic without mentioning the heroism and tragic end of Witold Pilecki, one of my personal heroes, seems dishonourable, but this article is long enough already. I encourage you to find out about him for yourselves. I want to briefly consider one final question though: Just how many people were involved with resistance and rescue across Europe? As I said, Yad Vashem credits over 26,000 people as proven Righteous Gentiles, those who directly risked their lives to save Jews. It recognises that this is a dramatic under-estimate. Even within this list the hundreds of people involved in the Danish resistance are listed as one entry, as per their own request. In Poland over 50,000 Jews were saved, and estimates suggest each would've been helped by multiple people during the course of the war, but there are only 6,600 recognised Righteous.

700 of Poland's recognised Righteous Gentiles were killed during the war for their efforts, but many estimates put the total number of Poles killed for aiding Jews in the thousands. Italy, for example, has only 700 Righteous recorded by Yad Vashem, but in Rome alone over 4,500 Jews were hidden almost overnight when deportation was threatened in 1943, largely in Church buildings and institutions, and tens of thousands more were protected around Italy. The true figure of rescuers must be many times higher. While there were some mass rescues, like Oscar Schindler and a few others effectively saving a thousand lives, in a great number of other cases such as in Poland or Italy, it would have taken many people to protect and hide only a few Jews. Other groups are not eligible for Righteous Gentile status, because although they campaigned against the Holocaust they did not directly aid specific Jews, but were involved in broader resistance, like the general strike in Amsterdam against the treatment of Jews, or reading out a declaration in every church in that same city protesting the treatment of Jews.

A true reckoning cannot be accurately calculated or even estimated without a huge further amount of painstaking historical work.  But I think it highly likely that at least a hundred thousand people met the criteria of Yad Vashem. And many times that number, hundreds of thousands at least, were directly involved in hiding, feeding, transporting, or otherwise assisting Jews, and in actively protesting the Holocaust under the threat of deadly reprisal and amidst all the other dangers of the War. If anything these guesses may still be conservative, across Europe the number of people in the second category could easily pass over a million. Their example deserves to be remembered for its own sake, but also to remind us that even in the darkest times opposition to evil is possible in very many ways.