England Your England

Orwell argues that although Britain had many nationalities such as Scots, Welshmen, English, etc..., everyone considered themselves British as soon as a need to defend their land arose. He also theorized that it might be more appropriate to divide Britons by financial classes which would result in two, or maybe even three or four, Britains.^{[citation needed]}

Quotations

• "As I write, highly civilised human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me."
• "They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. They are 'only doing their duty', as the saying goes. Most of them would never dream of committing murder in private life. On the other hand, if one of them succeeds in blowing me to pieces with a well-placed bomb, he will never sleep any the worse for it. He is serving his country, which has the power to absolve him from evil."
• "One gets a better view of this question if one considers the minor point first. It is quite true that the so-called races of Britain feel themselves to be very different from one another. A Scotsman, for instance, does not thank you if you call him an Englishman. You can see the hesitation we feel on this point by the fact that we call our islands by no less than six different names, England, Britain, Great Britain, the British Isles, the United Kingdom and, in very exalted moments,
  Marseilles is a stock joke in Paris. Yet we speak of 'France' and 'the French', recognising France as an entity, a single civilisation, which in fact it is. So also with ourselves. Looked at from the outsider even the cockney and the Yorkshireman
  have a strong family resemblance."
• "And even the distinction between rich and poor dwindles somewhat when one regards the nation from the outside. There is no question about the inequality of wealth in England. It is grosser than in any European country, and you have only to look down the nearest street to see it. Economically, England is certainly two nations, if not three or four. But at the same time the vast majority of the people feel themselves to be a single nation and are conscious of resembling one another more than they resemble foreigners. Patriotism is usually stronger than class-hatred, and always stronger than any kind of internationalism. Except for a brief moment in 1920 (the '
  Local Defence Volunteers
  . He got a quarter of a million men in the first twenty-four hours, and another million in the subsequent month. One has only to compare these figures with, for instance, the number of conscientious objectors to see how vast is the strength of traditional loyalties compared with new ones."
• "The intellectuals who hope to see it Russianised or Germanised will be disappointed. The gentleness, the
  Stock Exchange will be pulled down, the horse plough will give way to the tractor, the country houses will be turned into children's holiday camps, the Eton and Harrow match will be forgotten, but England will still be England,^[2]
  an everlasting animal stretching into the future and the past, and, like all living things, having the power to change out of recognition and yet remain the same."
• "In intention, at any rate, the English intelligentsia are Europeanized. They take their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow. In the general patriotism of the country they form a sort of island of dissident thought. England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during ‘God Save the King’ than of stealing from a poor box."
• "The British ruling class were not altogether wrong in thinking that Fascism was on their side. It is a fact that any rich man, unless he is a Jew, has less to fear from Fascism than from either Communism or democratic Socialism. One ought never to forget this, for nearly the whole of German and Italian propaganda is designed to cover it up."

See also

• Bibliography of George Orwell

References

External links

• Online text