Orwell begins this mighty-slim volume by proposing a comparison of ‘patriotism’, with ‘nationalism’, by which Orwell means—well, I’ll just let the Man himself take it away:

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’. 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 recognizing 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 upon other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.

While I am not sure that such a binary division truly holds in practice, such distinctions can be useful analytically, aiding in the identification of a concept’s key components. In this sense, the nationalist imputes onto the nation a peculiar agency, which the mere patriot might not, seeing that larger unit as a person who acts not so much in, but on the world in a mercantilist, ‘zero-sum’ sense in which if England advances, it must be at the expense of some other unit (say, Ireland?), which is quite the obverse of how a neoliberal, say, views the world (as a wished-for ‘level playing field’ on which corporations, not nations might compete—borders, etc. being pesky ‘trade barriers’.

With the nationalist, though,

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 up-grade and some hated rival on the down-grade. 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.

If such nationalism feels like a throwback to the more cosmopolitan-minded among us today (as sure it must have felt to those Remain-voting Brits who were flummoxed by their Leave-voting compatriots—and for Canadians stymied by their expatriate, Republican-voting family members ;)), it would be well worth reading Richard Seymour’s essential, if melancholy anatomy of recent times…

…(of which I wrote an ‘Appreciation’ here).

Yet concerning how almost no G-20 nation seems immune to reinfection by that constantly mutating and spreading nationalist virus, its well worth quoting Orwell on one particular trait which all strains propagate, traceable back to that first lab leak in 1914 (if not still further back to that Rumble in the Jungle, mid-late 19th century colonial imperialism!), and that involves a certain optical illusion produced by the above lens through which the nationalist insists upon viewing his/her world, inducing an

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.

I’d say that passage is not only self-explanatory, but also explains quite a lot in terms of how contemporary geopolitics is so marked by what the ancient Greeks called agon…

Of the two other essays contained herein, ‘The Sporting Spirit’ is too brief to really sustain its argument (that international sporting events are but a mere analogue for geopolitical struggle and even war, and that its fans are the perhaps unwitting, perhaps not, victims of a causality whose roots might be traced to the rise of nationalism he discusses elsewhere).

If the argument the much lengthier ‘Antisemitism in Britain’, on the other hand, is therefore a bit more involved, it also seems to be as accurate as unfortunately all-too-familiar (and thus dispiriting) an assessment of prejudice both past and present, alas—and not just in Britain…such that reading it is like deja-vu all over again, I’m afraid…

I might only venture to add two things: (1): that it cannot be easily separated from the will-to-nationalism

Anti-semitism is only one manifestation of nationalism, and not everyone will have the disease in that particular form. A Jew, for example, would not be antisemitic: but then many Zionist Jews seem to me to be merely antisemites turned upside-down, just as many [nationalist] Indians and Negroes display the normal colour prejudices in an inverted form. The point is that something, some psychological vitamin, is lacking in modern civilization, and as a result we are all more or less subject to this lunacy of believing that whole races or nations are mysteriously good or mysteriously evil.

—and that (2) if that will-to-nationalism exists, at least latently or in embryo, inside all of us (as what Richard Seymour calls ”the fascist inside you”), pretty much all of what Orwell writes here about anti-semtism as a concept and a practice of actually-existing anti-semites (that truly, thoughtless, incorrigibly hidebound, and perhaps irredeemable group of people) also applies to Islamophobes today, since as both the quotation directly above and the one quoted at the very beginning of this review suggests, this is all something whose roots plumb the deepest recesses of our psyches, and emerges into consciousness as an irrational, but ultimately self-protective need to label the heterogenaeity of entire populations of Other People with facile and offensive pigeon-holing inanities…

One question remains: can this be cured/prevented?
Dr. Orwell responds:

To study any subject scientifically one needs a detached attitude, which is obviously harder when one’s own interests or emotions are involved. Plenty of people who are quite capable of being objective about sea urchins, say, or the square root of 2, become schizophrenic if they have to think about the sources of their own income. What vitiates nearly all that is written about antisemitism is the assumption in the writer’s mind that he himself is immune to it. ‘Since I know that antisemitism is irrational,’ he argues, ‘it follows that I do not share it.’ He thus fails to start his investigation in the one place where he could get hold of some reliable evidence – that is, in his own mind.

In the end, this particular slim volume of three essays is not likely worth your consumer dollars, especially since it is really the one long, title essay that comprises the bulk of its few, scant pages, with two shorter pieces padding it out to attempt to give it the form of a book (one which might certainly line a stocking or two for a Fox News-addicted uncle and/or auntie, say, by way of not-so-gentle instruction, perhaps, or whatevs…)

But it is the title essay that this review is concerned with (and which is also included in the much more bang-for-buck Penguin edition of selected Essays…

…which is really the one volume of Orwell’s non-fiction that everyone should have on their shelves, if one must have only one…