Patriotism is a contentious word; a territory disputed by left and right. Those in England who dare to admit to it these days usually qualify their allegiance with a definition that condemns colonialism, largely because patriotism is too readily confused with nationalism – a quite different condition. What makes it trickier is that patriotism is more of a sentiment than it is a concept. George Orwell described it as ‘mystical’, ‘a bridge between the future and the past’. He wrote about it a great deal in his many essays, but it is also present in the background of his fiction and other books. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, it is the absence of any possibility of national affection, the complete estrangement from the society, that underlies the dystopia.

Orwell’s essay ‘My Country Right or Left’ was written in the autumn of 1940, after the retreat from Dunkirk and the respite won at the Battle of Britain. Orwell had returned wounded from Spain in 1937, having fought for the republican government against Franco’s forces. He had faced fascism down the barrel of a rifle and, back in England, there was a widespread feeling that the establishment was not prosecuting the war effectively because of the impediments of an outdated class system – that in order to defeat fascism, fundamental economic and social change was required.

‘Patriotism has nothing to do with conservatism’, Orwell wrote.

‘It is devotion to something that is changing but is felt to be mystically the same, like the devotion of the ex-White Bolshevik to Russia. To be loyal both to Chamberlain’s England and to the England of tomorrow might seem an impossibility, if one did not know it to be an everyday phenomenon. Only revolution can save England…‘

Patriotism was required, but one that looked to a future England as much as it drew on its past. In the same paragraph, he writes of his own reticence and the left’s inability to relate to patriotic instincts:

‘To this day it gives me a faint feeling of sacrilege not to stand to attention during “God Save The King”. That is childish, of course, but I would sooner have had that kind of upbringing than be like the left-wing intellectuals who are so enlightened that they cannot understand the most ordinary emotions.’

Orwell then makes an interesting comparison, establishing a connection between the patriotic poetry of Sir Henry Newbolt and the work of poet and former comrade John Cornford, who was killed fighting in Spain. Cornford, like Orwell, was public-school educated to defend king and country, but gave his life in another country for a different cause. In Newbolt’s There’s a Breathless Hush in the Close Tonight and Cornford’s Before the Storming of Huesca, Orwell can see an emotional content that is ‘almost exactly the same’, despite the differences of period and place. His point is that the spirit of patriotism can be enlisted for the cause of socialism – ‘the possibility of building a socialist on the bones of a Blimp’. One loyalty transmuting itself into another.

It goes on for some time. Very good article and worth reading, or sending to a free text-to-speech website. :D