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Kind of a tangent, but Orwell wasn't an anarchist (maybe he was briefly, but I haven't read anything that confirms that), though he had a lot of respect for the anarchists he during the Civil War.

Notes on Nationalism is quite different from 1984, more focused on its effects on the individual (obsession, self-deception, etc.) than tyranny per se. He makes the distinction between nationalism and patriotism and his use of term is a bit unconventional (for example he includes pacifist rhetoric as an example of what he calls nationalism).

I think defining the nation as simply "the decisions of a group" loses a lot of subtlety. E.g. what separates the term nation from country or corporation? Drawing on Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, I think identity, community, and mass communication play a big part in this.

An interesting contemporary example of the development of nationhood, was posted here a while back about the transformation of Taiwanese identity, from majority Chinese in the 80s to majority Taiwanese in the 10s.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21080305



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