Politics & Power Quote by George Orwell

Orwell’s genius here is that he makes moral failure sound less like villainy and more like a sensory glitch. The nationalist isn’t just someone who shrugs at atrocity; he’s someone whose attention itself has been conscripted. “Not only does not disapprove” is coldly legalistic, as if Orwell is drafting an indictment, then he twists the knife: the “remarkable capacity” isn’t rage or loyalty but selective deafness. Nationalism, in this framing, doesn’t argue you out of ethics; it edits the evidence before ethics even gets a chance.

The intent is diagnostic, not merely accusatory. Orwell is mapping a psychological mechanism: identity converts facts into threats, and threats get denied entry. The subtext is that propaganda doesn’t always need to invent lies; it can simply manage what counts as “heard.” Atrocity becomes background noise if acknowledging it would fracture the story a nation tells about itself.

Context matters. Orwell wrote in the shadow of mass politics, wartime censorship, and ideological fanaticism, having watched people excuse Stalinist terror, fascist brutality, and colonial violence depending on whose flag was involved. His target isn’t patriotism as affection; it’s nationalism as a totalizing team sport where moral judgment is outsourced to “our side.” The line still lands because it’s unnervingly contemporary: the modern feed doesn’t just polarize opinions, it filters perception. Orwell understood that the most dangerous atrocity is the one rendered inaudible.