helen goethals
it was the defensive nature of (British) patriotism that made it acceptable in a way
that(German) nationalism was not:
Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism.... 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,notfor
himself but for the nation or unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.^12
E. M. Forster preferred to distinguish between the governmental culture of
Germany and the national culture of England:
Germany is not against culture. She does believe in literature and art. But she has made
a disastrous mistake; she has allowed her culture to become governmental, and from this
mistake proceed all kinds of evils. In England our culture is not governmental. It is national:
it springs naturally out of our way of looking at things, and out of the way we have looked
at things in the past. It has developed slowly, easily, lazily; the English love of freedom,
the English countryside, English prudishness and hypocrisy, English freakishness, our mild
idealism and good-humoured reasonableness have all combined to make something which
is certainly not perfect, but which may claim to be unusual.^13
Both defensive and unusual patriotism needed to be distinguished from the
home-grown variety of jingoism, the belligerent songs which had been born in
the music-hall during the Crimean War and had grown up to taunt the Boers and
the Huns. John Masefield, the Poet Laureate, was careful to title his first public
poem of the War ‘Some Verses to Some Germans’. Behind Herbert Read’s ‘To a
Conscript of 1940’ lay a new and more open variation on the theme of patriotism,
as expressed by George Orwell:
If whole armies had to be coerced, no war could ever be fought. Men die in battle—not
gladly, of course, but at any rate voluntarily—because of abstractions called ‘honour’,
‘duty’, ‘patriotism’ and so forth. All that this really means is: that they are aware of some
organism greater than themselves, stretching into the future and the past, within which they
feel themselves to be immortal. ‘Who dies if England live?’ sounds like a piece of bombast,
but if you alter ‘England’ to whatever you prefer, you can see that it expresses one of the
main motives of human conduct.^14
(^12) Orwell, ‘Notes on Nationalism’, inCollected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, iii:
As I Please, 1943–1945, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 411; italics
original. For an updated, and American, philosophical discussion of the term ‘patriotism’, see Igor
Primoratz (ed.), 13 Patriotism(Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2002).
E. M. Forster, ‘Culture and Freedom’, inTwo Cheers for Democracy(New York: Harvest Books,
1977), 31. But see also Robert Hewison,Culture and Consensus(London: Methuen, 1995), for evidence
of governmental control of culture since 1940.
(^14) Orwell, ‘Notes on the Way’, inCollected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, ii:
My Country Right or Left, 1940–1943, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1970), 32.