Notes on Nationalism
1945 essay by George Orwell / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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'Notes on Nationalism' is an essay completed in May 1945 by George Orwell and published in the first issue of the British magazine Polemic in October 1945.[1] Political theorist Gregory Claeys has described it as a key source for understanding Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.
In the essay, Orwell uses the term nationalism to pick out a tendency to think in terms of 'competitive prestige' and argues that it causes people to disregard common sense and become more ignorant towards facts. He specifies that this is not a standard use of the term 'nationalism', but is instead a placeholder for a term that would better characterise this unreflective partisanship. The essay was soon translated into French and Dutch, Italian and Finnish.[2] The article was abridged in the translated versions by omitting details of particular relevance to British readers. A short introduction, based on material supplied by Orwell, preceded the translated abridgements.[3]