http://www.george-orwell.org/Notes_o...onalism/0.html
A few excerpts:
INDIFFERENCE TO REALITY. All nationalists have the power of not seeing
resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend
self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of
inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own
merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of
outrage--torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations,
imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of
civilians--which does not change its moral colour when it is committed
by 'our' side.
Indifference to objective truth is encouraged by the sealing-off of one
part of the world from another, which makes it harder and harder to
discover what is actually happening. There can often be a genuine doubt
about the most enormous events. For example, it is impossible to
calculate within millions, perhaps even tens of millions, the number of
deaths caused by the present war. The calamities that are constantly
being reported--battles, massacres, famines, revolutions--tend to
inspire in the average person a feeling of unreality.(v) PACIFISM. The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure
religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to the taking of
life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there
is a minority of intellectual pacifists whose real though unadmitted
motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration of
totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that
one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writings
of younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any
means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely
against Britain and the United States. Moreover they do not as a rule
condemn violence as such, but only violence used in defence of western
countries.