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| PATRIOTISM FOR DUMMIES |
one of the fun loving girls who almost brought down a British government - they would say that wouldn't they?
After all, being up to the elbows in the dirty work of dismantling nation states and and winding down national sovereignty, the last thing you'd want would be to be hit in the face by a scalding hot gush of escaping nationalism. The power of what that can do has been witnessed many times through history. The next thing you'd know would be the explosive anger of millions wanting their countries back. And worse! They still have a copious amounts of fire-power. Not enough urgency or creativity was shown in the staging of all those mass shootings to convince gun owners to disarm.
But to get the full flavour of nationalism in all its supposed 'evil' guises, one really need go no further than George Orwell's essay, Notes on Nationalism. It should be noted from the outset that few would have more respect for the great prophet than I, but Orwell like the rest of us was a product of his time. His essay was written in May of the last year of the greatest cataclysm to ever befall mankind, and for which nationalism was held to be the chief culprit. When thinking of nationalism in this time it would have been all but impossible to avoid conjuring up images of dictatorial, goose-stepping, would be world conquering fascism. Now I admit that parallels, indeed similarities between nationalism and fascism exist, but we'll get to that later.
So what exactly did Orwell say? For starters, here's how he defined nationalism: 'By "nationalism I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled "good" or "bad'. It's pretty much down hill from there. For instance: 'Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception. Every nationalist is capable of the most flagrant dishonesty, but is also - since he he is conscious of serving something bigger than himself - unshakably certain of being in the right'. I'll grant the serving something bigger than the individual ('no man being an island') but why should this entail monomania? Nationalism, according to Orwell is a mental disease one must be constantly on guard against being 'infected by'.
The world has changed so much since Orwell wrote this essay, which in the entire thirteen pages he could find not one kind word to say about its subject, it is hopelessly obsolete. In fairness to him, again in his time, the nation state was universally accepted to be, if not perfect, the closest to perfection that a system could be for protecting and promoting the interests of the like-minded individuals (Orwell's insects if you like) contained therein. Orwell of course was an intellectual and the job of intellectuals is to attack the status quo. And some two hundred nation states getting along as peacefully as possible with the embryonic UN being adjudicator and mediator (as soon as Japan could be atom bombed into eventual co-operation) was the crystalising status quo and one that would continue into the future ad infinitum. In fact, it was the only arrangement that could act as a bulwark to the very horrors he himself warned about in 1984.
Reinforcing the global confidence of the assured security of the nation state was the Atlantic Charter, that fed into UN Declaration on Human Rights, one of whose eight basic principles was that 'all people have a right to self determination'. If this right was to mean anything at all the nation state was the only framework in which self determination could be exercised. If the god of 'democracy' was going to be worshipped, the nation state was the natural cathedral in which this could be done.
With the assumption of the sanctity and everlasting future of the nation state as his premise, Orwell was perhaps right to warn of anything that could lead to belligerence and thus upset international harmony as horrendously as he had seen it so dreadfully wounded, and given that recent history, who could blame him for having a tunnel vision view of the type of nationalism that had seemed to be the catalyst?
But one has to wonder if he really believed the world of 1984 would in many ways actually come to pass, as it has, with the world well on its way to global tyranny with the US NSA hoovering up every crumb of an individual's details, vast global blocs forming, and hate sessions targeting the villain de jour, be it Saddam Hussain, Colonel Gaddafi, Bashar al-Assad or Vladamir Putin conducted by the western world's media.
The world has changed so much, Orwell's version of nationalism is not only obsolete but turned on its head. For example, here is his distinction between patriotism (good) and nationalism (bad): 'Patriotism is by its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige...' Although inserting the proviso that nationalism and patriotism are not so easily teased apart and are largely overlapping, I would posit the reverse is true: nationalism is defensive while patriotism, generally the warm fuzzy feeling that fills empty heads, is what needs to be stirred up whenever a government wants to go to war. Without patriotism and concomitant on-side public opinion, waging war can be extremely difficult. The result of the Vietnam war for, example, led many to aver the war was lost not on the battlefield but back on the streets, the campuses and newspapers of America.
Nationalism is what tribalism became when it grew up. Exile from the tribe was a fate worse than death in which it usually ended. Without his tribe the individual was nothing. As a member of a nation it is easier for individualism to be exercised and indeed the sanctity of the individual is a pillar of western civilisation. But the evolutionary instinct for tribalism remains. Being part of something greater is a part of being human. An individual's identity is inextricably interwoven with that something greater. Unlike flag waving patriotism - my country right or wrong - true nationalism, bereft if threat, lies peacefully like a hibernating bear. But when it is aroused by danger its power is titanic. It is self-preservation, the strongest human instinct, multiplied by millions. As Napoleon observed, men will always fight harder to defend their land than men trying to take it away from them.
History is littered with armies destroyed in the path of fully aroused nationalism. It was nationalism and not the erroneously blamed communism that kept a third world people fighting and never doubting ultimate victory while all the while being smashed by the B52s of the worlds most powerful nation.
Nationalism's similarity to fascism, which contains no inherent ideology, is that it is a reaction to dire peril, be it oppression by an external power, national and cultural collapse or military attack. It is true, to give Orwell his due, that nationalism and fascism have at times been harnessed together, the obvious examples being German national socialism and Mussolini's fascism. The latter being the creation of a political buffoon, failing in the first necessity of winning hearts and minds and collapsing like a house of cards at the first gust of adversity, it is probably more instructive to concentrate on the former.
The treaty of Versailles, most fair minded historians will admit, contained within it the seeds of Hitler's fascism and World War Two. It led to Germany being seemingly crushed beyond any hope of ever rising from living death. Could it ever have been resurrected by democracy, especially the decadent Weimar variety? It had as much chance as democracy being able to deliver the US from its economic collapse without recourse to war. But with fascism fueled by nationalism, Germany achieved the seeming impossible in a few short years and without the need for war. By 1938 it was it was the original economic miracle while FDR's New Deal was on life-support. This was what nationalism in lock-step with fascism was capable of.
So what are the lessons to be learnt from this? An extraordinary seismic tension is developing world wide as the tectonic plates of globalism and nationalism drive against each other. The march of seemingly unstoppable globalism is almost evenly matched by outbreaks of nationalism. This it must be hoped is depressingly frustrating to the globalists, particularly the big setbacks of nationalism becoming rampant once released by historical events such as the disintegration of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, the splitting of Czechoslovakia as well as the constant agitation of separatists in Belgium, Spain and the UK.
Globalists must also be alarmed at the growing awareness of their Machiavellian treachery. The great conduit of this is the internet, the development of which is every bit as revolutionary as the upheaval caused by Gutenberg. Hence, the imminent censorship of the net with the curtailment of 'hate speech' of course being the thin edge of the wedge. Globalists may also be regretting that in their smugness and hubris they have been in recent years so open about their planned New World Order. Clinton, George W and Bambi Blair, for instance, spoke about the NWO as though it were as mundane and everyday as just another fiscal policy.
However, make no mistake, as the we enter further into the endgame, totalitarian clamps will be increasingly screwed down. Even the most pathological megalomaniac could not make it in one great leap to world-wide tyranny, and make no mistake, world government (for which the NWO is simply the scaffolding) cannot be anything other than tyranny. It can only be arrived at in increments but as growing awareness and nationalism rise in opposition, a quickening pace must be assumed. We're now in a race, the stakes of which have never been greater in all human history. If nationalism does not win, it truly will be the end of history.
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