my country right or wrong essay

The History of "My Country, Right or Wrong!"

How a Popular Phrase Became a Jingoistic War Cry

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The phrase, "My Country, Right or Wrong!" may seem like a rambling of a drunk soldier, but this phrase has an interesting history behind it. 

Stephan Decatur: Was He the Original Creator of This Phrase?

The story goes back to the early 19th century when a US naval officer and commodore Stephan Decatur was gaining immense admiration and accolades for his naval expeditions and adventures. Decatur was famous for his daredevil acts of valor, especially for the burning of the frigate USS Philadelphia, which was in the hands of pirates from the Barbary states. Having captured the ship with just a handful of men, Decatur set the ship on fire and came back victorious without losing a single man in his army. British Admiral Horatio Nelson remarked that this expedition was one of the boldest and daring acts of the age. Decatur’s exploits continued further. In April 1816, after his successful mission of signing of the peace treaty with Algeria, Stephan Decatur was welcomed home as a hero. He was honored at a banquet, where he raised his glass for a toast and said:

“Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong!”

This toast went on to become one of the most famous lines in history. The sheer patriotism , the blind love for motherland, the egotist zeal of a soldier makes this line a great jingoistic punchline. While this statement has always been contested for its highly narcissistic undertones, you cannot but help the prevailing sense of patriotism that is the hallmark of a great soldier.

Edmund Burke: The Inspiration Behind the Phrase

One cannot say for sure, but perhaps Stephan Decatur was greatly influenced by Edmund Burke’s writing.

In 1790, Edmund Burke had written a book titled "Reflections on the Revolution in France", in which he said,

“To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.”

Now, we need to understand the social conditions prevailing during Edmund Burke’s time. At this point in time, the French Revolution was in full swing. The 18th-century philosopher believed that along with the fall of the French monarchy, there was also a fall of good manners. People had forgotten how to be polite, kind and compassionate, which led to depravity during the French Revolution. In this context, he lamented that the country needs to be lovable, in order for the people to love their own country.

Carl Schurz: The US Senator With a Gift of the Gab

Five decades later, in 1871 a US senator Carl Schurz used the phrase “right or wrong” in one of his famous speeches. Not in the exact same words, but the meaning conveyed was quite similar to that of Decatur’s. Senator Carl Schurz gave a fitting reply to a haranguing Senator Mathew Carpenter, who used the phrase, “My country, right or wrong” to prove his point. In reply, Senator Shurz said,

“My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.”

Carl Schurz's speech was received with a deafening applause from the gallery, and this speech established Carl Schurz as one of the foremost and distinguished orators of the Senate .

Why the Phrase "My Country Right or Wrong!" May Not Be So Right for You

The phrase, “My country right or wrong” has become one of the greatest quotes in American history . It has the ability to fill your heart with patriotic fervor. However, some linguistic experts believe that this phrase could be a bit too potent for an immature patriot. It could foster an imbalanced view of one’s own nation. Misplaced patriotic fervor could sow the seed for self-righteous rebellion or war.

In 1901, British author G. K. Chesterton wrote in his book "The Defendant":

“My country, right or wrong' is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying 'My mother, drunk or sober.'”

He goes on to explain his view: “No doubt if a decent man's mother took to drink he would share her troubles to the last; but to talk as if he would be in a state of gay indifference as to whether his mother took to drink or not is certainly not the language of men who know the great mystery.”

Chesterton, through the analogy of the ‘drunk mother’, was pointing out to the fact that blind patriotism is not patriotism. Jingoism can only bring about the downfall of the nation, just like false pride brings us to a fall.

English novelist Patrick O'Brian wrote in his novel "Master and Commander":

“But you know as well as I, patriotism is a word; and one that generally comes to mean either my country, right or wrong, which is infamous, or my country is always right, which is imbecile.”

How to Use This Famous Quote, "My Country Right or Wrong!"

In the world we live today, with growing intolerance and terror breeding in every dark alley , one has to tread carefully before using jingoistic phrases purely for rhetoric. While patriotism is a desirable quality in every respectable citizen, we must not forget that the first duty of every global citizen is to set right what is wrong in our country.

If you choose to use this phrase to pepper your speech or talk, use it diligently. Make sure to spark the right kind of patriotic fervor in your audience and help to bring about change in your own country.

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A Summary and Analysis of George Orwell’s ‘My Country Right or Left’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘My Country Right or Left’ is a 1940 essay by George Orwell, in which he reflects on his childhood memories of the First World War and outlines why he supports the Second World War, which had broken out the year before. However, as with many of Orwell’s essays, he makes some surprising statements in the course of his analysis of the British attitude to war.

You can read ‘My Country Right or Left’ here before proceeding to our summary and analysis of Orwell’s essay below.

‘My Country Right or Left’: summary

Orwell begins ‘My Country Right or Left’ by recalling his childhood schooldays. A schoolboy during the First World War, Orwell confides that the sinking of the Titanic, two years before the outbreak of the war, left more of an impression on him than anything he heard about during the war itself.

He does, however, recall three vivid memories from the outbreak of the war: an irreverent cartoon of ‘Kaiser’ Wilhelm II of Germany, in late July 1914 shortly before war was declared on Germany; the army commandeering the horses in Orwell’s hometown for the war effort; and a group of young men at a railway station frantically buying newspapers containing the latest reports of the war in France.

He also remembers the appearance of the artillerymen during the war itself, and, towards the end of the war, how food shortages impacted his family and what they ate. He was largely oblivious to the mass carnage of the war happening across the English Channel.

Orwell recalls that, after the war, those young soldiers who had fought in the conflict resented their slightly younger peers who hadn’t fought, because they saw the non-combatant youths as soft. Many children of Orwell’s age had ‘one-eyed pacifism’: an opposition to war that was largely founded on ignorance and an inability to see the bigger picture. But as the years passed, Orwell’s generation came to feel that they had ‘missed’ out on something in being too young to experience the war themselves.

Indeed, he believes that this partly drove his own generation’s enthusiasm to participate in the Spanish Civil War in the second half of the 1930s – a war which was, Orwell observes, often markedly similar in its trench warfare to the Great War of 1914-18.

Orwell concludes by stating why he supports the current war against Hitler and the Axis powers. He sees resistance as the only option, drawing parallels with the Republican resistance to Franco during the Spanish Civil War and the Chinese resistance to Japan during the Sino-Japanese War (two conflicts which preceded the outbreak of the Second World War by several years).

Orwell pierces the widely held belief that patriotism is more or less synonymous with conservatism: Orwell, no conservative, and someone who had little time for Neville Chamberlain’s Tory government, states baldly that ‘Patriotism has nothing to do with conservatism.’

Conservatism applies belief in something that remains constant, but patriotism is actually, Orwell argues, ‘a devotion to something that is changing’; it is merely ‘felt to be mystically the same’, but this is merely a feeling rather than the reality.

To prove this point, Orwell asserts that his own patriotic devotion to England is bound up with his belief that ‘Only revolution can save’ it, and he believes the revolution has already started. Orwell returns to his early childhood experiences, of ‘an atmosphere tinged with militarism’ and the ‘sound of bugles’.

He would rather have such a devotion to his country than be one of the modern ‘left-wing intellectuals’ who are incapable of feeling such things.

‘My Country Right or Left’: analysis

‘My Country Right or Left’: the title is a play on the patriotic slogan ‘my country, right or wrong’, which has its origins in the United States.

The American Stephen Decatur used a slightly different version of this phrase in an after-dinner toast in the early 1800s (‘Our Country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right; but right or wrong, our country!’) but it later became abridged to ‘My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.’

Orwell takes this well-known expression of unthinking patriotism – jingoism, even – and plays on the double meaning of ‘right’ as both ‘morally correct’ and ‘right-wing’ or conservative, in order to argue that he will be loyal to England, his own country, regardless of political beliefs in either left- or right-wing causes.

Throughout ‘My Country Right or Left’, Orwell explores his own patriotic sense of devotion to England, while also acknowledging the complex and often conflicted nature of this patriotism. In order to save England – subtly different from the idea of preserving it as it is – revolution, even bloody revolution, may be necessary, he asserts. He feels it is almost an act of ‘sacrilege’ not to stand up when he hears the national anthem, yet acknowledges that such a patriotic impulse is ‘childish’ of him.

Such an impulse is instinctive, and Orwell’s patriotism is instinctive: it reaches beyond rational discourse. But precisely because it goes beyond the intellectual, it enables him to connect with other English people who feel a similar sense of pride in their country.

Indeed, Orwell is glad he was raised to have such a love and respect for his country, since it enables him to ‘understand the most ordinary emotions’ which other people feel. In other words, patriotism binds together a group of people who belong to that country, and the emotional power of such a connection is important, especially at such a time as 1940 when the very survival of England is under threat thanks to Hitler.

These days especially, it is so easy to equate ‘patriotic’ with ‘conservative’ or ‘right-wing’, but Orwell pushes against the idea that the two should be conflated. In one of many intriguing paradoxes associated with Orwell’s political beliefs, ‘My Country Right or Left’ offers a portrait of a writer who is that rare thing: both a revolutionary longing for change and a man in love with his country’s rich past.

Like the old philosophical adage that ‘nothing is permanent except change’, it may be that England can only be saved through being changed in a dramatic and significant way.

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my country, right or wrong

• 1.1 Etymology
• 1.2.1 Usage notes
• 1.3 References

English [ edit ]

Etymology [ edit ].

Originally Stephen Decatur , in an after-dinner toast of 1816–1820:

Often attributed to Carl Schurz , who in a speech in 1872 [1] amended it as

Phrase [ edit ]

my country , right or wrong

• an expression of patriotism .

Usage notes [ edit ]

Frequently used either as an expression of jingoism (extreme patriotism), in the sense “I will stand by my country whether it be right or wrong”, or to attack such patriotism as unthinking:

"...that patriotism which shouts 'our Country right or wrong,' regardless alike of God and his eternal laws..." -- James Fenimore Cooper [2]

“‘My country, right or wrong,’ is a thing that no patriot would think of saying. It is like saying, ‘My mother, drunk or sober.’” — G. K. Chesterton [3]

References [ edit ]

• ^ Schurz, Carl, remarks in the Senate, February 29, 1872, The Congressional Globe, vol. 45, p. 1287, cited in Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations. , # 1641
• ^ Jack Tier (1848), Chapter 10
• ^ The American Chesterton Society The line is from Chesterton’s first book of essays, The Defendant (1901) from the chapter, “A Defence of Patriotism”

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Zora Neale Hurston, “How It Feels to be Colored Me,” 1928

Guiding Question: To what extent did Founding principles of liberty, equality, and justice become a reality for African Americans in the first half of the twentieth century?

• I can interpret primary sources related to Founding principles of liberty, equality, and justice in the first half of the twentieth century.
• I can explain how laws and policy, courts, and individuals and groups contributed to or pushed back against the quest for liberty, equality, and justice for African Americans.
• I can create an argument using evidence from primary sources.
• I can analyze issues in history to help find solutions to present-day challenges.

Building Context

Zora Neale Hurston was a celebrated author and anthropologist who grew up in the all-Black town of Eatonville, Florida. After her mother’s death, Hurston moved to Jacksonville, a segregated Florida town. It was then, she writes, that “I was not Zora of Orange County any more, I was a little colored girl.” In 1925, Hurston received a scholarship to Barnard College in New York City. While in the city, she befriended other writers such as Langston Hughes and became an artist of the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston’s work focused on Black culture and Black Americans in the South. In this essay, she explores her discovery of her identity as a Black American and celebrates her self-pride.

Zora Neale Hurston, “How It Feels to be Colored Me,” 1928

Source link: https://www.casa-arts.org/cms/lib/PA01925203/Centricity/Domain/50/Hurston%20How%20it%20Feels%20to%20Be%20Colored%20Me.pdf

. . . I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all but about it. Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more or less. No, I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife. . . .   At certain times I have no race, I am me. When I set my hat at a certain angle and saunter down Seventh Avenue, Harlem City, feeling as snooty as the lions in front of the Forty-Second Street Library, for instance. . . . I belong to no race nor time. I am the eternal feminine with its string of beads.   I have no separate feeling about being an American citizen and colored. I am merely a fragment of the Great Soul that surges within the boundaries. My country, right or wrong.   Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me.

Comprehension and Analysis Questions

• What does Hurston mean by saying she is not “tragically colored”?
• What is Hurston’s attitude toward race, based on her writing in this excerpt?
• How does Hurston build on Hughes’ views in “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”?

More from this Category

Zora Neale Hurston with Patricia Brown | Black Intellectuals Series #4

How did Zora Neale Hurston, noted African-American writer during the Harlem Renaissance, contribute to understanding the Black experience in America? In this episode of our Scholar Talk series "Black Intellectuals and the African American Experience," BRI Senior Teaching Fellow Tony Williams is joined by Patricia Brown, professor of English at Azusa Pacific University, to discuss Hurston's unique examination and celebration of Black expression, creativity, and resiliency. How did Hurston's book "Their Eyes Were Watching God" convey a message of Black women's freedom and self-discovery?

( continued in Part I ) -->

Notes 1. It is estimated that the number of victims who fell in this war, by pestilence and the sword, were eighty thousand. Of these, thirty thousand were Americans, and fifty thousand Mexicans. - back 2. [2] The Seminole War. See Volume VIII, Chapter VI Source: - back Further Reading Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States . New York: Harper, 2003/2010. (pp. 149-69). Ethan Allen Hitchcock (author), William Augustus Croffut (ed.). Fifty Years in Camp and Field: Diary of Major-General Ethan Allen Hitchcock G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1909. (See Chs. 15, 27-29f.) Home · Psychology and Religion · Peace · [My Country, Right or Wrong] Last updated: 10 Mar 2011 This edition copyright � 2011 John S. Uebersax - May be used freely for noncommercial purposes.

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My Country Right or Left

This material remains under copyright in some jurisdictions, including the US, and is reproduced here with the kind permission of  the Orwell Estate . The Orwell Foundation is an independent charity – please consider making a donation or becoming a Friend of the Foundation to help us maintain these resources for readers everywhere. 

Contrary to popular belief, the past was not more eventful than the present. If it seems so it is because when you look backward things that happened years apart are telescoped together, and because very few of your memories come to you genuinely virgin. It is largely because of the books, films and reminiscences that have come between that the war of 1914-18 is now supposed to have had some tremendous, epic quality that the present one lacks.

But if you were alive during that war, and if you disentangle your real memories from their later accretions, you find that it was not usually the big events that stirred you at the time. I don’t believe that the Battle of the Marne , for instance, had for the general public the melodramatic quality that it was afterwards given. I do not ever remember hearing the phrase ‘Battle of the Marne’ till years later. It was merely that the Germans were twenty-two miles from Paris — and certainly that was terrifying enough, after the Belgian atrocity stories — and then for some reason they had turned back. I was eleven when the war started. If I honestly sort out my memories and disregard what I have learned since, I must admit that nothing in the whole war moved me so deeply as the loss of the Titanic had done a few years earlier. This comparatively petty disaster shocked the whole world, and the shock has not quite died away even yet. I remember the terrible, detailed accounts read out at the breakfast table (in those days it was a common habit to read the newspaper aloud), and I remember that in all the long list of horrors the one that most impressed me was that at the last the Titanic suddenly up-ended and sank bow foremost, so that the people clinging to the stern were lifted no less than three hundred feet into the air before they plunged into the abyss. It gave me a sinking sensation in the belly which I can still all but feel. Nothing in the war ever gave me quite that sensation.

Of the outbreak of war I have three vivid memories which, being petty and irrelevant, are uninfluenced by anything that has come later. One is of the cartoon of the ‘German Emperor’ (I believe the hated name ‘Kaiser’ was not popularized till a little later) that appeared in the last days of July. People were mildly shocked by this guying of royalty (‘But he’s such a handsome man, really!’) although we were on the edge of war. Another is of the time when the army commandeered all the horses in our little country town, and a cabman burst into tears in the market-place when his horse, which had worked for him for years, was taken away from him. And another is of a mob of young men at the railway station, scrambling for the evening papers that had just arrived on the London train. And I remember the pile of peagreen papers (some of them were still green in those days), the high collars, the tightish trousers and the bowler hats, far better than I can remember the names of the terrific battles that were already raging on the French frontier.

Of the middle years of the war, I remember chiefly the square shoulders, bulging calves and jingling spurs of the artillerymen, whose uniform I much preferred to that of the infantry. As for the final period, if you ask me to say truthfully what is my chief memory, I must answer simply — margarine . It is an instance of the horrible selfishness of children that by 1917 the war had almost ceased to affect us, except through our stomachs. In the school library a huge map of the Western Front was pinned on an easel, with a red silk thread running across on a zig-zag of drawing-pins. Occasionally the thread moved half an inch this way or that, each movement meaning a pyramid of corpses. I paid no attention. I was at school among boys who were above the average level of intelligence, and yet I do not remember that a single major event of the time appeared to us in its true significance. The Russian Revolution , for instance, made no impression, except on the few whose parents happened to have money invested in Russia. Among the very young the pacifist reaction had set in long before the war ended. To be as slack as you dared on O.T.C. parades , and to take no interest in the war was considered a mark of enlightenment. The young officers who had come back, hardened by their terrible experience and disgusted by the attitude of the younger generation to whom this experience meant just nothing, used to lecture us for our softness. Of course they could produce no argument that we were capable of understanding. They could only bark at you that war was ‘a good thing’, it ‘made you tough’, ‘kept you fit’, etc. etc. We merely sniggered at them. Ours was the one-eyed pacifism that is peculiar to sheltered countries with strong navies. For years after the war, to have any knowledge of or interest in military matters, even to know which end of a gun the bullet comes out of, was suspect in ‘enlightened’ circles. 1914-18 was written off as a meaningless slaughter, and even the men who had been slaughtered were held to be in some way to blame. I have often laughed to think of that recruiting poster, ‘What did you do in the Great War, daddy?’ (a child is asking this question of its shame-stricken father), and of all the men who must have been lured into the army by just that poster and afterwards despised by their children for not being Conscientious Objectors.

But the dead men had their revenge after all. As the war fell back into the past, my particular generation, those who had been ‘just too young’, became conscious of the vastness of the experience they had missed. You felt yourself a little less than a man, because you had missed it. I spent the years 1922-7 mostly among men a little older than myself who had been through the war. They talked about it unceasingly, with horror, of course, but also with a steadily growing nostalgia. You can see this nostalgia perfectly clearly in the English war-books. Besides, the pacifist reaction was only a phase, and even the ‘just too young’ had all been trained for war. Most of the English middle class are trained for war from the cradle onwards, not technically but morally. The earliest political slogan I can remember is ‘We want eight (eight dreadnoughts) and we won’t wait’ . At seven years old I was a member of the Navy League and wore a sailor suit with ‘H.M.S. Invincible ’ on my cap. Even before my public-school O.T.C. I had been in a private-school cadet corps. On and off, I have been toting a rifle ever since I was ten, in preparation not only for war but for a particular kind of war, a war in which the guns rise to a frantic orgasm of sound, and at the appointed moment you clamber out of the trench, breaking your nails on the sandbags, and stumble across mud and wire into the machine-gun barrage. I am convinced that part of the reason for the fascination that the Spanish Civil War had for people of about my age was that it was so like the Great War. At certain moments Franco was able to scrape together enough aeroplanes to raise the war to a modern level, and these were the turning-points. But for the rest it was a bad copy of 1914-18, a positional war of trenches, artillery, raids, snipers, mud, barbed wire, lice and stagnation. In early 1937 the bit of the Aragon front that I was on must have been very like a quiet sector in France in 1915. It was only the artillery that was lacking. Even on the rare occasions when all the guns in Huesca and outside it were firing simultaneously, there were only enough of them to make a fitful unimpressive noise like the ending of a thunderstorm. The shells from Franco’s six-inch guns crashed loudly enough, but there were never more than a dozen of them at a time. I know that what I felt when I first heard artillery fired ‘in anger’, as they say, was at least partly disappointment. It was so different from the tremendous, unbroken roar that my senses had been waiting for for twenty years.

I don’t quite know in what year I first knew for certain that the present war was coming. After 1936, of course, the thing was obvious to anyone except an idiot. For several years the coming war was a nightmare to me, and at times I even made speeches and wrote pamphlets against it. But the night before the Russo-German pact was announced I dreamed that the war had started. It was one of those dreams which, whatever Freudian inner meaning they may have, do sometimes reveal to you the real state of your feelings. It taught me two things, first, that I should be simply relieved when the long-dreaded war started, secondly, that I was patriotic at heart, would not sabotage or act against my own side, would support the war, would fight in it if possible. I came downstairs to find the newspaper announcing Ribbentrop’s flight to Moscow. [1] So war was coming, and the Government, even the Chamberlain Government, was assured of my loyalty. Needless to say this loyalty was and remains merely a gesture. As with almost everyone I know, the Government has flatly refused to employ me in any capacity whatever, even as a clerk or a private soldier. But that does not alter one’s feelings. Besides, they will be forced to make use of us sooner or later.

If I had to defend my reasons for supporting the war, I believe I could do so. There is no real alternative between resisting Hitler and surrendering to him, and from a Socialist point of view I should say that it is better to resist; in any case I can see no argument for surrender that does not make nonsense of the Republican resistance in Spain, the Chinese resistance to Japan, etc. etc. But I don’t pretend that that is the emotional basis of my actions. What I knew in my dream that night was that the long drilling in patriotism which the middle classes go through had done its work, and that once England was in a serious jam it would be impossible for me to sabotage. But let no one mistake the meaning of this. Patriotism has nothing to do with conservatism. It is devotion to something that is changing but is felt to be mystically the same, like the devotion of the ex-White Bolshevik to Russia. To be loyal both to Chamberlain’s England and to the England of tomorrow might seem an impossibility, if one did not know it to be an everyday phenomenon. Only revolution can save England, that has been obvious for years, but now the revolution has started, and it may proceed quite quickly if only we can keep Hitler out. Within two years, maybe a year, if only we can hang on, we shall see changes that will surprise the idiots who have no foresight. I dare say the London gutters will have to run with blood. All right, let them, if it is necessary. But when the red militias are billeted in the Ritz I shall still feel that the England I was taught to love so long ago for such different reasons is somehow persisting.

I grew up in an atmosphere tinged with militarism, and afterwards I spent five boring years within the sound of bugles. To this day it gives me a faint feeling of sacrilege not to stand to attention during ‘God save the King’. That is childish, of course, but I would sooner have had that kind of upbringing than be like the left-wing intellectuals who are so ‘enlightened’ that they cannot understand the most ordinary emotions. It is exactly the people whose hearts have never leapt at the sight of a Union Jack who will flinch from revolution when the moment comes. Let anyone compare the poem John Cornford wrote not long before he was killed ( ‘Before the Storming of Huesca’ ) with Sir Henry Newbolt’s ‘There’s a breathless hush in the Close tonight’ . Put aside the technical differences, which are merely a matter of period, and it will be seen that the emotional content of the two poems is almost exactly the same. The young Communist who died heroically in the International Brigade was public school to the core. He had changed his allegiance but not his emotions. What does that prove? Merely the possibility of building a Socialist on the bones of a Blimp, the power of one kind of loyalty to transmute itself into another, the spiritual need for patriotism and the military virtues, for which, however little the boiled rabbits of the Left may like them, no substitute has yet been found.

Folios of New Writing , Autumn 1940

On 21 August 1939 Ribbentrop was invited to Moscow and on 23 August he and Molotov signed the Russo-German Pact.

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My Country, Right Or Wrong

As defenses of patriotism go, I tend to incline more toward Daniel Larison's rejoinder to George Kateb's essay than toward the response to Kateb offered by Walter Berns. Berns takes the view that "the decisive issue in an appropriate analysis of patriotism" is the sort of government that a patriot is asked to love. But I'm with Larison : It's a mistake to conflate a country and its regime, and a patriot who ceases to love his country because it happens to be governed by a despot is no patriot at all. This doesn't mean that the patriot has to love the despot, or follow his commands. Love of country does not require absolute obedience to its government (indeed, it often requires the opposite ), any more than love of family requires absolute obedience to one's parents, or absolute support for whatever one's children or siblings decide to do with themselves. This is what Chesterton meant with his famous dictum that "'My country, right or wrong,' is a thing that no patriot would think of saying. It is like saying, 'My mother, drunk or sober.'" (Though I would add that if you read them slightly differently - as statements of abiding love in bad times, rather than blanket endorsements of bad conduct - "my country, right or wrong" and "my mother, drunk or sober" are potentially admirable sentiments.) And it's a distinction that's missing from both Kateb's and Berns's essays, both of which seem to assume that the regime is the country, and vice versa, and that to love one is to love the other. The only complicating factor occurs in a case like the United States, where the character of the regime and the character of the people are bound together so tightly that it's hard to imagine one without the other. The government-country distinction is easier to make in countries where regimes change willy-nilly, and while obviously our regime isn't identical to the one founded in 1789, our democratic temper - both institutional and cultural - has endured through the transition from a decentralized republic to a mass democracy with a sizable administrative state. So whereas France would still be France if the current Republic were dissolved and a monarchy or a dictatorship took its place, there's a sense in which imagining an America governed by an emperor or a military junta is a little like imagining a France whose inhabitants no longer speak French.

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My Country Right or Left 1940 - 1943: Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Volume, 2 Paperback – February 1, 1971

• Print length 477 pages
• Language English
• Publisher HBJ Book
• Publication date February 1, 1971
• ISBN-10 0156186217
• ISBN-13 978-0156186216
• See all details

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Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ HBJ Book (February 1, 1971)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 477 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0156186217
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0156186216
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.1 pounds
• #229,681 in Reference (Books)

About the author

George orwell.

George Orwell is one of England's most famous writers and social commentators. Among his works are the classic political satire Animal Farm and the dystopian nightmare vision Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell was also a prolific essayist, and it is for these works that he was perhaps best known during his lifetime. They include Why I Write and Politics and the English Language. His writing is at once insightful, poignant and entertaining, and continues to be read widely all over the world.

Eric Arthur Blair (George Orwell) was born in 1903 in India, where his father worked for the Civil Service. The family moved to England in 1907 and in 1917 Orwell entered Eton, where he contributed regularly to the various college magazines. From 1922 to 1927 he served with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, an experience that inspired his first novel, Burmese Days (1934). Several years of poverty followed. He lived in Paris for two years before returning to England, where he worked successively as a private tutor, schoolteacher and bookshop assistant, and contributed reviews and articles to a number of periodicals. Down and Out in Paris and London was published in 1933. In 1936 he was commissioned by Victor Gollancz to visit areas of mass unemployment in Lancashire and Yorkshire, and The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) is a powerful description of the poverty he saw there.

At the end of 1936 Orwell went to Spain to fight for the Republicans and was wounded. Homage to Catalonia is his account of the civil war. He was admitted to a sanatorium in 1938 and from then on was never fully fit. He spent six months in Morocco and there wrote Coming Up for Air. During the Second World War he served in the Home Guard and worked for the BBC Eastern Service from 1941 to 1943. As literary editor of the Tribune he contributed a regular page of political and literary commentary, and he also wrote for the Observer and later for the Manchester Evening News. His unique political allegory, Animal Farm was published in 1945, and it was this novel, together with Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), which brought him world-wide fame.

It was around this time that Orwell's unique political allegory Animal Farm (1945) was published. The novel is recognised as a classic of modern political satire and is simultaneously an engaging story and convincing allegory. It was this novel, together with Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), which finally brought him world-wide fame. Nineteen Eighty-Four's ominous depiction of a repressive, totalitarian regime shocked contemporary readers, but ensures that the book remains perhaps the preeminent dystopian novel of modern literature.

Orwell's fiercely moral writing has consistently struck a chord with each passing generation. The intense honesty and insight of his essays and non-fiction made Orwell one of the foremost social commentators of his age. Added to this, his ability to construct elaborately imaginative fictional worlds, which he imbued with this acute sense of morality, has undoubtedly assured his contemporary and future relevance.

George Orwell died in London in January 1950.

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NPR defends its journalism after senior editor says it has lost the public's trust

David Folkenflik

NPR is defending its journalism and integrity after a senior editor wrote an essay accusing it of losing the public's trust. Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

NPR is defending its journalism and integrity after a senior editor wrote an essay accusing it of losing the public's trust.

NPR's top news executive defended its journalism and its commitment to reflecting a diverse array of views on Tuesday after a senior NPR editor wrote a broad critique of how the network has covered some of the most important stories of the age.

"An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don't have an audience that reflects America," writes Uri Berliner.

A strategic emphasis on diversity and inclusion on the basis of race, ethnicity and sexual orientation, promoted by NPR's former CEO, John Lansing, has fed "the absence of viewpoint diversity," Berliner writes.

NPR's chief news executive, Edith Chapin, wrote in a memo to staff Tuesday afternoon that she and the news leadership team strongly reject Berliner's assessment.

"We're proud to stand behind the exceptional work that our desks and shows do to cover a wide range of challenging stories," she wrote. "We believe that inclusion — among our staff, with our sourcing, and in our overall coverage — is critical to telling the nuanced stories of this country and our world."

NPR names tech executive Katherine Maher to lead in turbulent era

She added, "None of our work is above scrutiny or critique. We must have vigorous discussions in the newsroom about how we serve the public as a whole."

A spokesperson for NPR said Chapin, who also serves as the network's chief content officer, would have no further comment.

Praised by NPR's critics

Berliner is a senior editor on NPR's Business Desk. (Disclosure: I, too, am part of the Business Desk, and Berliner has edited many of my past stories. He did not see any version of this article or participate in its preparation before it was posted publicly.)

Berliner's essay , titled "I've Been at NPR for 25 years. Here's How We Lost America's Trust," was published by The Free Press, a website that has welcomed journalists who have concluded that mainstream news outlets have become reflexively liberal.

Berliner writes that as a Subaru-driving, Sarah Lawrence College graduate who "was raised by a lesbian peace activist mother ," he fits the mold of a loyal NPR fan.

Yet Berliner says NPR's news coverage has fallen short on some of the most controversial stories of recent years, from the question of whether former President Donald Trump colluded with Russia in the 2016 election, to the origins of the virus that causes COVID-19, to the significance and provenance of emails leaked from a laptop owned by Hunter Biden weeks before the 2020 election. In addition, he blasted NPR's coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict.

On each of these stories, Berliner asserts, NPR has suffered from groupthink due to too little diversity of viewpoints in the newsroom.

The essay ricocheted Tuesday around conservative media , with some labeling Berliner a whistleblower . Others picked it up on social media, including Elon Musk, who has lambasted NPR for leaving his social media site, X. (Musk emailed another NPR reporter a link to Berliner's article with a gibe that the reporter was a "quisling" — a World War II reference to someone who collaborates with the enemy.)

When asked for further comment late Tuesday, Berliner declined, saying the essay spoke for itself.

The arguments he raises — and counters — have percolated across U.S. newsrooms in recent years. The #MeToo sexual harassment scandals of 2016 and 2017 forced newsrooms to listen to and heed more junior colleagues. The social justice movement prompted by the killing of George Floyd in 2020 inspired a reckoning in many places. Newsroom leaders often appeared to stand on shaky ground.

Leaders at many newsrooms, including top editors at The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times , lost their jobs. Legendary Washington Post Executive Editor Martin Baron wrote in his memoir that he feared his bonds with the staff were "frayed beyond repair," especially over the degree of self-expression his journalists expected to exert on social media, before he decided to step down in early 2021.

Since then, Baron and others — including leaders of some of these newsrooms — have suggested that the pendulum has swung too far.

Author Interviews

Legendary editor marty baron describes his 'collision of power' with trump and bezos.

New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger warned last year against journalists embracing a stance of what he calls "one-side-ism": "where journalists are demonstrating that they're on the side of the righteous."

"I really think that that can create blind spots and echo chambers," he said.

Internal arguments at The Times over the strength of its reporting on accusations that Hamas engaged in sexual assaults as part of a strategy for its Oct. 7 attack on Israel erupted publicly . The paper conducted an investigation to determine the source of a leak over a planned episode of the paper's podcast The Daily on the subject, which months later has not been released. The newsroom guild accused the paper of "targeted interrogation" of journalists of Middle Eastern descent.

Heated pushback in NPR's newsroom

Given Berliner's account of private conversations, several NPR journalists question whether they can now trust him with unguarded assessments about stories in real time. Others express frustration that he had not sought out comment in advance of publication. Berliner acknowledged to me that for this story, he did not seek NPR's approval to publish the piece, nor did he give the network advance notice.

Some of Berliner's NPR colleagues are responding heatedly. Fernando Alfonso, a senior supervising editor for digital news, wrote that he wholeheartedly rejected Berliner's critique of the coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict, for which NPR's journalists, like their peers, periodically put themselves at risk.

Alfonso also took issue with Berliner's concern over the focus on diversity at NPR.

"As a person of color who has often worked in newsrooms with little to no people who look like me, the efforts NPR has made to diversify its workforce and its sources are unique and appropriate given the news industry's long-standing lack of diversity," Alfonso says. "These efforts should be celebrated and not denigrated as Uri has done."

After this story was first published, Berliner contested Alfonso's characterization, saying his criticism of NPR is about the lack of diversity of viewpoints, not its diversity itself.

"I never criticized NPR's priority of achieving a more diverse workforce in terms of race, ethnicity and sexual orientation. I have not 'denigrated' NPR's newsroom diversity goals," Berliner said. "That's wrong."

Questions of diversity

Under former CEO John Lansing, NPR made increasing diversity, both of its staff and its audience, its "North Star" mission. Berliner says in the essay that NPR failed to consider broader diversity of viewpoint, noting, "In D.C., where NPR is headquartered and many of us live, I found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans."

Berliner cited audience estimates that suggested a concurrent falloff in listening by Republicans. (The number of people listening to NPR broadcasts and terrestrial radio broadly has declined since the start of the pandemic.)

Former NPR vice president for news and ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin tweeted , "I know Uri. He's not wrong."

Others questioned Berliner's logic. "This probably gets causality somewhat backward," tweeted Semafor Washington editor Jordan Weissmann . "I'd guess that a lot of NPR listeners who voted for [Mitt] Romney have changed how they identify politically."

Similarly, Nieman Lab founder Joshua Benton suggested the rise of Trump alienated many NPR-appreciating Republicans from the GOP.

In recent years, NPR has greatly enhanced the percentage of people of color in its workforce and its executive ranks. Four out of 10 staffers are people of color; nearly half of NPR's leadership team identifies as Black, Asian or Latino.

"The philosophy is: Do you want to serve all of America and make sure it sounds like all of America, or not?" Lansing, who stepped down last month, says in response to Berliner's piece. "I'd welcome the argument against that."

"On radio, we were really lagging in our representation of an audience that makes us look like what America looks like today," Lansing says. The U.S. looks and sounds a lot different than it did in 1971, when NPR's first show was broadcast, Lansing says.

A network spokesperson says new NPR CEO Katherine Maher supports Chapin and her response to Berliner's critique.

The spokesperson says that Maher "believes that it's a healthy thing for a public service newsroom to engage in rigorous consideration of the needs of our audiences, including where we serve our mission well and where we can serve it better."

Disclosure: This story was reported and written by NPR Media Correspondent David Folkenflik and edited by Deputy Business Editor Emily Kopp and Managing Editor Gerry Holmes. Under NPR's protocol for reporting on itself, no NPR corporate official or news executive reviewed this story before it was posted publicly.

Talking to Americans reveals the diversity behind the shared opinion ‘the country is on the wrong track’

Director, American Communities Project, Michigan State University

Manager, American Communities Project, Michigan State University

Disclosure statement

Dante Chinni receives funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for his work on the American Communities Project and is a contributor to the Wall Street Journal.

Ari Pinkus receives funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for the American Communities Project.

Michigan State University provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation US.

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If you pay any attention to politics and polling, you have likely heard that your friends and neighbors are not very happy with the direction of the country. You might not be, either.

One ABC News/Ipsos survey in November 2023 showed three-quarters of Americans believed the country was on the “wrong track.” Only 23% believed it was headed in the “right direction.”

And the survey was not an outlier. Poll after poll shows a sizable majority of the nation’s residents disapprove of its course.

Have Americans – long seen as upbeat, can-do optimists – really grown dour about the state of the nation and where it’s headed?

The answer, we think, is yes and no. Or, to be more direct, as the researchers who run the American Communities Project , which explores the differences in 15 different types of community in the United States, we believe the surveys are asking a question with no real meaning in the United States in 2024 – a question that may have outlived its usefulness.

An ‘astonishing finding’

“Do you feel things in the country are generally going in the right direction, or do you feel things have gotten off on the wrong track?”

That question or one very much like it is well known to anyone who has glanced at a poll story or studied the data of a survey in the past 50 years.

These public opinion surveys, often sponsored by news organizations, seek to understand where the public stands on the key issues of the day. In essence, they tell the public about itself. Political parties and candidates often conduct their own surveys with a version of the “right direction/wrong track” question to better understand their constituencies and potential voters.

The American Communities Project , based at Michigan State University, uses demographic and socioeconomic measures to break the nation’s 3,100 counties into 15 different types of communities – everything from what we label as “big cities” to “aging farmlands.” In our work with the project, we’ve found a strong reason to be skeptical of the “right direction/wrong track” question. Simply put, the divisions in the country have rendered the question obsolete.

In 2023, we worked with Ipsos to survey more than 5,000 people across the country in all those community types. We asked the survey participants what issues they were concerned about locally and nationally. How did they feel about the Second Amendment? About gender identity? About institutional racism? We found a lot of disagreement on those and other controversial issues.

But there were also a few areas of agreement. One of the big ones: In every community we surveyed, at least 70% said the country was on the “wrong track.” And that is an astonishing finding.

Agreement for different reasons

Why was that response so surprising?

The community types we study are radically different from each other. Some are urban and some are rural. Some are full of people with bachelor’s degrees, while others have few. Racially and ethnically, some look like America as it is projected to be in 30 years – multicultural – and some look like the nation did 50 years ago, very white and non-Hispanic. Some of the communities voted for President Joe Biden by landslide numbers in 2020, while others did the same for Donald Trump.

Given those differences, how could they be in such a high level of agreement on the direction of the country?

To answer that question, we visited two counties in New York state in January that are 3½ hours and several worlds away from each other: New York County, which is labeled a “big city” in our typology and encompasses Manhattan, and Chenango County, labeled “rural middle America” in our work, located in the south-central part of the state.

In 2020, Biden won 86% of the vote in big metropolitan Manhattan, and Trump won 60% in aging, rural Chenango.

When we visited those two counties , we heard a lot of talk of America’s “wrong track” in both places from almost everyone. More important, we heard huge differences in “why” the country was on the wrong track.

“If something don’t change in the next election, we’re going to be done. We’re going to be a socialist country. They’re trying to tell you what you can do and can’t do. That’s dictatorship, isn’t it? Isn’t this a free country?” said James Stone, 75, in Chenango County.

Also in Chenango County, Leon Lamb, 69, is concerned about the next generation.

“I’m worried about them training the kids in school,” he said. “You got kids today who don’t even want to work. They get free handouts … I worked when I was a kid … I couldn’t wait to get out of the house. I wanted to be on my own.”

In New York City, meanwhile, Emily Boggs, 34, a theater artist, bartender and swim instructor, sees things differently as she struggles to make ends meet.

“We’ve been pitched since we were young, that like, America is the best country in the world. Everyone wants to be here, you’re free, and you can do whatever you want,” Boggs said. “And it’s like, well, if you have the money … I’ve got major issues with millionaires and billionaires not having to pay their full share of taxes, just billionaires existing … It’s the inequality.”

A lifelong New York City resident, Harvey Leibovitz, 89, told us: “The country is on the wrong direction completely. But it’s based upon a very extreme but significant minority that has no regard to democracy, and basically, in my opinion, is racist and worried about the color of the population.”

Opposite views in same answer

To be clear, we are not saying that asking people about the direction of the country is completely worthless. There may be some value in chronicling Americans’ unhappiness with the state of their country, but as a stand-alone question, “right direction/wrong track” is not very helpful. It’s the beginning of a conversation, not a meaningful measure.

It turns out that one person’s idea about the country being on the wrong track may be completely the opposite of another person’s version of America’s wrong direction.

It’s easy to grasp the appeal of one broad question aimed at summarizing people’s thoughts. But in a complicated and deeply fragmented country, a more nuanced view of the public’s perceptions of the nation would help Americans understand more about themselves and their country.

• political parties
• US politics
• Public opinion
• 2024 US election

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