1984 Foreword: Racism

[jbor]

> On the other hand, Orwell did not foresee such
> exotic developments as the religious wars with which
> we have necome all too familiar, involving various
> sorts of fundamentalism.  Religious fanaticism is in
> fact strangely absent from Oceania, except in the form
> of devotion to the Party. Big Brother's regime
> exhibits all the elements of fascism - the single
> charismatic dictator, the total control of behavior,
> the absolute subordination of the individual to the
> collective - except for racial hostility, in
> particular, anti-Semitism, which was such a prominent
> feature of fascism as Orwell knew it. This is bound
> to strike the modern reader as puzzling. The only
> Jewish character in the novel is Emmanuel Goldstein,
> and maybe only because his original, Leon Trotsky, was
> Jewish too....
> Much has been made recently of Orwell's own
> attitude toward Jews, some commentators going so far
> as to call it anti-Semitic. If one looks in his
> writing of the time for overt references to the topic,
> one finds relatively little - Jewish matters did not
> seem to command much of his attention--what published
> evidence there is indicates either a sort of numbness
> before the enormity of what had happened in the camps
> or a failure at some level to appreciate its full
> significance. There is some felt reticence, as if,
> with so many other deep issues to worry about, Orwell
> would have preferred that the world not be presented
> the added inconvenience of having to think much about
> the Holocaust. The novel may even have been his way
> of redefining a world in which the Holocaust did not
> happen.
> As close as 1984 gets to an anti-semitic moment is
> in the ritual practice of the Two Minutes Hate ....
> But the exhibition of anti-Goldsteinism described here
> with such toxic immediacy is never generalized into
> anything racial. The strategy of pitting race against
> race does not seem to be found in the Party's tool
> kit. "Nor is there any racial discrimination", as
> Emmanuel Goldstein himself confirms, in the
> book - "Jews, Negroes, South Americans of pure Indian
> blood are to be found in the highest ranks of the
> Party...."  
>    As nearly as one can tell, Orwell considered
> anti-Semitism "one variant of the great modern disease
> of nationalism", and British anti-Semitism in
> particular as another form of British stupidity. He
> may have believed that by the time of the tripartite
> coalescence of the world imagined for 1984, the
> European nationalisms that he was used to somehow no
> longer exist, perhaps because nations, and hence
> nationalities, would have been abolished and absorbed
> into more collective identities. Amid the novel's
> general pessimism, this might strike us, knowing what
> we know today, as an unwarrantedly chirpy analysis.
> The hatreds Orwell never found much worse than
> ridiculous have determined too much history since 1945
> to be dismissed quite so easily. (pp. xvii-xviii)

This last sentence about those "hatreds" which have determined "too much
history since 1945" refers to racism ("religious wars", "racial hostility",
anti-Semitism, "pitting race against race") as an attribute of
"nationalism", rather than nationalism per se. Doesn't it?

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