My Country Right Or Left revisited.

Jeremy Corbyn would do well to have a look at George Orwell’s celebrated essay, My Country Right Or Left. Orwell argued in all his works that socialism was and should be a visceral sentiment. In this work, written in 1940 just as world war two threatened to overwhelm the country, he also asserted that without a sense of passion, socialists will simply not have the guts to carry through their ideas into practice. More controversially he argued that patriotism is a vital emotion even for socialists. If one does not have pride in one’s own country, how can one have sufficient motivation to establish socialism in it? This is how he puts it : ....but I would sooner have that kind of upbringing [with patriotic ideals] than be like left wing intellectuals who are so ‘enlightened’ that they cannot understand the most ordinary emotions. It is exactly the people whose hearts have never leapt at the sight of a union jack who will flinch from revolution. Orwell is careful to point out that patriotism is not the same as conservatism, though the two are often hand maidens. The desire to preserve those things that make us feel ‘British’ (Orwell preferred the term, ‘English’) is not necessarily reactionary, it can simply be the product of our upbringing or a desire to improve the lot of our fellow citizens. Even international socialists (and Orwell was one of these too) can justify patriotic feelings, provided, of course they involve pride in values that we would wish to see adopted throughout the world, values such as social justice, tolerance and a love of liberty. Though these may not be associated with Britain’s colonial history, they have certainly become part of our post colonial identity. In his many warnings about the dangers of totalitarianism, Orwell has also reminded us that, without patriotic feeling, love of one’s country becomes love of the state and that road leads to the dystopia he describes in Nineteen-Eighty-Four. Jeremy Corbyn and his cohort may well be falling into the trap of failing to distinguish between country and state.