He may be a positive or a negative nationalist - that is, he may use his mental energy either in boosting or in denigrating - but at any rate his thoughts always turn on victories, defeats, triumphs and humiliations. “A nationalist is one who thinks solely, or mainly, in terms of competitive prestige. How do we fool ourselves? How do cling to poor ideas or talk ourselves into vices by praising them as virtues whilst condemning others for the same thing? It is an essay I often come back to because Orwell writes compellingly and in this case looks at politics through the lens of cognitive error. Chunks of the essay addressing the politics of his time are dated and also can read as being petty on Orwell’s part (perhaps even Orwell indulging in the very vice he is describing). Orwell is thinking out loud and putting his thoughts on paper to make it easier to examine them. Notes On Nationalism is a flawed essay but it is one that understands its own flaws. But here I must repeat what I said above, that I am only using the word ‘nationalism’ for lack of a better.” Confronted with a phenomenon like Nazism, which we can observe from the outside, nearly all of us would say much the same things about it.
“So long as it is applied merely to the more notorious and identifiable nationalist movements in Germany, Japan, and other countries, all this is obvious enough. Orwell lacked a suitable word and chosen ‘nationalism’ as a kind of generalisation of the traits that could be seen in extreme examples: The key thing to understand about this essay by Orwell is that it is not about nationalism.
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