To illustrate this upturned nationalist, Orwell brings up the English left-wing intellectuals during WWII.
Here it was, everything I had been vaguely pondering about, laid out in shining detail by one of the greats. Negative Nationalism – a old-style subtitle in an essay called Notes on Nationalism. I tried my luck – googled “Negative nationalism”, and whoosch!. So wasn’t there a parallel here? Couldn’t you frame it as a “negative” type of nationalism where everything was reiterated with a minus in front of it? Brown sauce and mashed potatoes? Are you serious! The countryside was too flat and “uneventful”, our traditions “silly”, and our newspapers filled with “boring” political discussions.īut they were equally obsessed by their own culture nevertheless, and as emotional and one-sided about it. What about the left-liberal establishment? What did they say? Of course, they said the opposite things, didn’t they? They did not bother much about their own cooking, in fact they made fun of it. So it went, on and on until your ears fell off.Īnd yet, I felt I had spotted something else, something different and yet similar. Nationalism! Your country is so lovely, and the tradition – ah! was it not higher and deeper than anything else? And our cuisine, and our countryside! How rich, how genuine! How saturated with life. There was something about it, I simply couldn’t figure out.
I was sitting on the terrasse at Ras Hotel in Addis Ababa, thinking about nationalism. The Communist and the Catholic are not saying the same thing, in a sense they are even saying opposite things, and each would gladly boil the other in oil if circumstances permitted but from the point of view of an outsider they are very much alike.
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