“The world is to the writer
As mouths are to a dentist
A million things to observe--
Nearly all of them to cure.”
— From The Gospel of Satya Rum Baba by Bachchoo
As I write, highly civilized human beings are plotting to beggar me and my children.
They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. They are only “following the dictates of the democratic will of the people”, as they insist time and again. Most of them, I have no doubt, are kind-hearted, law-abiding men and women who would never dream of willfully taking away anyone’s livelihood or plotting to impoverish a nation. On the other hand, if they achieve this goal, they will never sleep any worse for it. They are following the democratic will of a majority who voted in a referendum in their country, which absolves them from blame for any disaster that follows.
One cannot see the modern world as it is unless one recognises the overwhelming strength of patriotism, national loyalty. In certain circumstances it can break down, at certain levels of civilisation it does not exist, but as a positive force there is nothing to set beside it. Christianity and international socialism are as weak as straw in comparison with it. Donald Trump and now Boris Johnson have risen to power in their own countries very largely because they could grasp this fact and their opponents could not…
I must now confess, gentle reader, that the above paragraphs are stolen from an essay entitled England Your England by George Orwell writing during the Second World War.
His first sentence was not as above but reads as “…civilized human beings are flying overhead trying to kill me”.
I've substituted changes to apply them to Britain today where a new Johnson government and its supporters are determined to drag the United Kingdom out of the European Union and over the economic, social and political cliff. I have substituted the names Trump and Johnson for Orwell's ‘Hitler and Mussolini’. I am not saying that Trump and Johnson are fascists, though some have characterised their words and actions as dictatorial and racist. I substituted their names because I recognise, as Orwell did, that Trump and Johnson are trading on the forces of patriotism and nationalism eighty decades after Adolf and Benito did the same in Germany and Italy.
Orwell saheb, pranaam! (Note the Urdu-Hindi conflation — fd. Yes, yes, get on with it! — Ed.)
The Nazis, Brown Shirts and imperial Japanese came to rule their countries though hard-core patriotic appeal. Deutschland Uber Alles is perhaps closer to “Britannia Rules the Waves” than it is to Boris Johnson’s campaign slogan of “Take Back Control”. It is nevertheless an appeal to British separatism. The rhetoric of the campaign to leave the European Union was based on this patriotic separatism and a nostalgia for the past when “the wogs began at Callais and Broadstairs men were suspect”.
In Orwellian terms, this may qualify as a natural and universal instinct, but in today's Britain and its relationship with Europe, the slogans for autonomy overlay a nasty undercurrent of xenophobia and racism. Johnson and his very “ethnic-liberal” cabinet are cynically aware of the xenophobic sentiment which won the Leave EU campaign with a 51-to-52 per cent victory for keeping the immigrants out. All the plausible rhetoric of opposing the European Union's oppressive, “undemocratic”, restrictive laws and the slogans of “take back control” were the burkhas hiding the ugly face of xenophobia.
There is no way of knowing what an individual thinks when putting a voting slip into a ballot box, but in the sense that Orwell “knew” what impelled the German pilot to fly over London to kill him, I “know” from listening over years to bigotry that keeping immigrants out of Britain was the one and only reason for the majority of Leave voters.
In several polls, on several radio and TV programmes, the Leave voters were asked which regulations that the EU had imposed on Britain were burdensome and had to be shaken off. There were in 99 per cent of cases no answers. Most of those interviewed couldn't identify one regulation of the EU to which they objected or which they found tyrannical. Very few of them wanted to face the mic or camera and say that they didn't want "foreigners" living in their town or anywhere in their country. Caution in hypocrisy.
Johnson, in the weeks before the referendum, was a loyal supporter of David Cameron, the then Prime Minister. He wrote a column wondering which way he should vote in the referendum and, in conformity with Orwell's assessment of Hitler and Mussolini knowing that patriotism trumps all other considerations, he broke with Cameron and campaigned for leaving the European Union. The campaign couldn’t say “we used to be a world power and don’t want to join with these lesser European breeds”, “keep the wogs out!” or any such manifest crudity. The campaign literally hired people to coin slogans which would shroud these motives in passable terms such as “restore the supremacy of our own parliament”.
That patriotism, that rank nationalist sentiment is in today’s world an anachronism. Great Britain “crashing out” of the European Union, its chief market and ally as a voice in the world, will become a satrap of the United States. And there may be no UK left if Scotland, as it threatens, holds a referendum and leaves to become an independent country.
British patriotism is exposed for what it is — the Xenophobe megalomania of some of its racist population and the opportunism of politicians who ride on this watery wave.
Orwell’s assessment of otherwise decent people subscribing to forms of supposed nationalism and patriotism, willing to kill or excuse the murder of the supposed “other” and destroy the 21st century liberal character of their country, may apply to nations other than Britain such as Hungary or Austria.
I wonder to which other!
