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In whatever shape England emerges from the war it will be deeply tinged with the characteristics that I have spoken of earlier. The intellectuals who hope to see it Russianized or Germanized will be disappointed. The gentleness, the hypocrisy, the thoughtlessness, the reverence for law and the hatred of uniforms will remain, along with the suet puddings and the misty skies. It needs some very great disaster, such as prolonged subjugation by a foreign enemy, to destroy a national culture. The Stock Exchange will be pulled down, the horse plough will give way to the tractor, the country houses will be turned into children's holiday camps, the Eton and Harrow match will be forgotten, but England will still be England, an everlasting animal stretching into the future and the past, and, like all living things, having the power to change out of recognition and yet remain the same. (George Orwell, 1941)
I've been curious since reading it a few years ago... how are those suet puddings doing?
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Remember that he was deliberately writing propaganda because he believed that the war would create conditions for a communist revolution in the UK.
The essay series was literally crafted to sell Ingsoc to tories worried about the war. It's as exploitive as any other communist propaganda.
It's the same basic thing as a Democrat telling you "vote Biden to cool down the culture war," barely hiding his utter contempt for the rube he's manipulating. Or "if you like your health care plan, you can keep it"
Lying to people that nothing they love is going to change is the first step in destroying every they love.
It does, however, characterize 'rural poor people indulging in thoughtless behavior' as essentially conservative behavior, without sneer, as early as 1941.
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Tangential, but either George Orwell is a believer in the magic soil hypothesis or didn't realize that mass immigration could ever be a thing.
As I mentioned a couple weeks ago, foreign conquest doesn't necessarily change a country. But wholesale replacement of its population does. The Norman invasion didn't change the fundamental character of England. It merely replaced the ruling class. But the Saxon invasion did change England and made it what it is today. It did so by extirpating the prior residents and replacing them.
What emerges after 100 more years of mass immigration will be far less English than if the Germans had conquered it in WWII.
Orwell died in 1950, a full 18 years before Enoch Powell’s much-maligned “Rivers of Blood” speech. So my money is on the latter.
That's my view as well.
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