" (...) there can be moments when the whole nation suddenly does the same thing, like a herd of cattle facing a wolf. There was such a moment, unmistakably, at the time of the disaster in France. After eight months of vaguely wondering what the war was about, the people suddenly knew what they had to do: first to get away from Dunkirk, and secondly to prevent invasion. It was like the awakening of a giant: Quick! Danger! The Philistines be upon thee, Samson! And then the swift unanimous action - and then, alas, the prompt relapse into sleep. In a divided nation that would have been exactly the moment (after second world war) for a big peace movement to arise. But does this mean that the instinct of the English will always tell them to do the right thing? Not at all, merely that it will tell them to do the same thing. "
(...)
"England is the most class-ridden country under the sun. It is a land of snobbery and privilege, ruled largely by the old and silly. (...)
England is not the jewelled isle of Shakespeare's much quoted message, nor is it the inferno depicted by Dr Goebbels. More than either it resembles a family, a rather stuffy Victorian family. It has rich relations who have to be kow-towed to and poor relations who are horribly sat upon, and there is a deep conspiracy of silence about the source of the family income. It is a family in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles. Still, it is a family. It has its common memories, and at the approach of an enemy it closes its ranks. A family with the wrong members in control - that perhaps is as near as one come to describe England in a phrase."
(...)
Patriotism is usually stronger than class-hatred, and always stronger than any kind of internationalism. (...)
At the time of the Spanish Civil War, anyone with as much political knowledge as can be acquired from a six penny pamphlet on Socialism knew that, if Franco won, the result would be strategically disastrous for England, and yet generals and admirals who had given their lives to the study of war were unable to grasp this fact. This vein of political ignorance runs right through English official life, though Cabinet ministers, ...
(...)
In England patriotism takes different forms in different classes, but it runs like a connecting thread through all nearly all of them. Only the Europeanized intelligentsia are really immune to it. (...)
The insularity of the English, their refusal to take foreigners seriously, is a folly that has to be paid for very heavily from time to time."
Part One "England Your England"
in "The Lion and the Unicorn" by George Orwell
First Published in the Searchlight Books series by Martin Secker & Warburg, 1941
Published in "Volume 2 of the Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell" by Secker & Warburg, 1968
and in Penguin Books, 1970, 1982, 2018
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