6 ideas
Orwell defines patriotism as devotion to a particular place and way of life that one believes best but has no wish to force on others, making it defensive by nature. Nationalism is inseparable from the desire for power: the nationalist's aim is to secure more prestige and power for the unit into which he has sunk his own individuality. The distinction turns on whether attachment seeks to protect or to dominate.
Nationalism here means the habit of identifying oneself with a single unit, placing it beyond good and evil, and recognising no duty except advancing its interests. The unit need not be a nation: it can be a church, class, party, or ideology such as Communism, political Catholicism, Zionism, antisemitism, or pacifism. Loyalty can also be transferred to a foreign country, which lets intellectuals indulge chauvinism they would be ashamed to feel toward their own.
Orwell names three marks of the nationalist mind. Obsession means the adherent thinks and writes almost exclusively about the superiority of his unit and grows touchy over trivial slights. Instability means the object of loyalty can shift abruptly while the intensity of feeling stays constant. Indifference to reality means he can ignore facts, hold contradictory beliefs, and remain unaware of resemblances between similar events.
For the nationalist, actions are good or bad not on their own merits but according to who does them. Torture, hostage-taking, forced labour, and the bombing of civilians change moral colour when committed by 'our' side. The nationalist fails to condemn his own side's atrocities, and often fails to hear about them at all.
Some nationalism is organised around hostility to an enemy rather than love of a unit, as with Anglophobia, antisemitism, and Trotskyism. Seeing loyalties in this light shows that a person's convictions can be explained more by what they oppose than by any positive program. It also exposes how the hostility can outlast or switch between the causes used to justify it.
The nationalist believes the past can be altered and spends part of his time in fantasy worlds where history has gone as it should. He transfers fragments of that fantasy into history books, suppressing inconvenient facts and changing dates so that his loyalties never face their contradictions. The only remedy Orwell names is moral effort: recognising one's own nationalist feelings and refusing to let them corrupt one's thinking.