The truth about nationalism and nation-state

What is nationalism? Progressive leftist or regressive right wing state theory? The answer is not that obvious you may think. First of all what does make something left or right wing? Why it is so important to define these? Without any further ado, let’s get started.

There are two approaches that have fundamentally defined human thinking since ancient times: the realistic and the egocentric. An example of the first is two plus two equals four. An example of the second, I play guitar better than anyone else. The first is an irrefutable objective fact, the second is a subjective opinion, or rather a dream of desire. Everyone tends to believe that their culture is the best possible that human ever achieved in history, or almost everyone.

In fact, primates have developed a system of customs that we call culture. This is nothing more than learning by cognitive engraving, that is, socialization. Because human is a social being. For example, when one individual realized something, he made it unnecessary to reinvent it by others. The invention was shared and widespread among others, without having to reinvent it. It requires only imitation, learning to use, and improving. The most sophisticated cultures were created on this basis, inheriting traditions from father to son. In our present days more than a five thousands different cultures evolved with regards to language, dialects, dress and eating habits. This is called civilization, which is always spontaneous and bottom-up, without the need for any central coordinator and active external intervener.

So let’s look at the secular state religion of the modern age, the dogma that sanctifies mass societies: the nation. And its relation to the culture and civilization.

The nation: “An imaginary political community, which is imagined to be delimited and sovereign from within.” As matter of fact it’s imaginary or fictional, since every community which excess its size can be only imaginary (e.g. larger than a tribe or village), because there is no mutual acquaintance or direct connection between its members. Such were the great pre-modern religious communities.

At the same time, the nation is portrayed by ideologues as having existed forever, or at least it’s intertwined with the myth of origin of a particular people, which lost in the obscurity of a mythical past. Nothing could be further from reality.

The following quote summarizes the ideological definition of ‘homeland’ based on theory of Anderson and Gellner:

This explains why the external threat strengthens the power of the ruling elite, as well as the homeland is by no means a random spontaneous manifestation of the spiritual need of the masses, but an ideology consciously organized about the level of power in order to maintain the legislation of its violent territorial monopoly over the masses. The state has unlimited access to all the resources of society, taking advantage of the exclusive monopoly of legislation and implementation. This also means that a virtually infinite number of people can be mobilized against any external or internal enemy on behalf of the state. This benefits the ruling elite, but not the subjects, or not in all cases.

The owners of the state monopoly, called the homeland, are not the citizens, neither in part, nor in whole, nor in any way, as the ruling elite does not serve the citizens but rather rules them. In fact the ordinary citizens serve the ruling elite, and the common owner of the citizens is the state. Property is what I EXCLUSIVELY control, NO ONE ELSE! I can increase it, I can eat it, I can sell it, I can destroy it, I CAN DO WITH IT WHATEVER I WANT! Where these conditions are given I can say that it is actually my property. In the case of the homeland, which is theoretically the common property of the citizens, none of these conditions are given. Moreover the state has an exclusive right to initiate force legally against anyone, in other words the ‘property’ against its ‘owner’. Ownership is therefore reversed, thus the citizens are owned by their own ‘homeland’, if we at least consider the state as homeland. This is true even if the state has no owners, only employees and taxpayers.

The other interesting phenomenon in this case is that the external attack is considered illegitimate act by the masses, even if it does not directly threaten their own private property, but if their own state poses a direct threat to private property, liberties, and their lives, they are for some reason more accepted as legitimate; the result is that your own state can be much more oppressive than even an alien invader. In reality the homeland defense makes sense only in a human scale society, not in a large or mass scale society like the nation-states or mass societies in general. Mass society is crowd oriented, but the base of human civilization is a private property not the mob rule, or state worship. It’s collectivism in practice. In nation-states you are not a proud citizen of your homeland, like in a mini or city states, but a livestock who can be sacrificed and mobilized. This is no longer a patriotism, but a pure state worship.

Mass society gives man the illusion that there is no difference between ruler and subordinate, what is more in democracies the ‘people govern themselves’. This nonsense absurdity gives legitimacy to the ruling elite in a seemingly classless society, unlike the serfs of the medieval feudums, who knew well that they were serfs, servants, slaves. Modernism did not, in fact, liberate serfs, on the contrary. The nationalism and all kind of collectivist ideology and state theory turned every ordinary citizen into serfs to dedicate their lives to the elite of an oligarchic fascistoid rulers. If we ever let the collectivism prevail, we are no longer a human beings, (at least we shall not be treated that way) but a livestock, a breeding, producing, and working machines.

It is worth recalling the greatest lie of the twentieth century, according to which a whole generation of fertile young men were sent to trenches to die: “Extreme freedom threatens social stability and national unity and even leads to anachy.” A whole generation of people has grown up in lie that no one has the right to live their own life, deal with own business, because the common good and social stabilization, national unity are paramount. The individual is therefore in all cases subordinated to the state. The truth, however, is that there is no such thing as ‘extreme’ freedom. It’s just a game of words because there are no degrees of freedom. Someone is either free or not, it’s that simple. There is no middle or third way around. Just like, you can be either a passenger or a driver in a moving car. There’s no middle or third way around. Because who will decide until which point the freedom is not extreme and when becomes extreme? Nature has already decided. The freedom of every man can extend as long as he does not endanger the freedom of another man. This is neither liberalism, nor individualism, but a basic moral principle, which even a little child understands. But according to some ideologues it’s extreme. Which is an arbitrary category, because the morality is not man made. Ideologists, on the other hand, created an alternative moral system where everything is up to them.

Let me illustrate this with an absurd example: About two thirds of the countries in the world drive on the right as we know, but if everyone drives on the right is ‘extreme’, which is not good. So let’s turn the trucks for instance to left to equalize the system. Well, it is not difficult to predict the disaster it would cause in traffic. Similarly, liberties do not tolerate arbitrary categories, as the nature does not tolerate them either. I mean about arbitrary, if the freedom of speech is granted but, you have no freedom in economic terms, or you have no right to self-defense, your freedom is conditional, thus isn’t really granted. You can’t be partly free only, as you can’t be partly slave at the same way. Liberty has no degree as freedom cannot be divided.

As the leftists are not true liberals, the nationalists are not true conservatives, they are all modernists, who believe in mass society, statism, forced integration, moral relativism, and social conformity, not in individual freedom, human dignity, private property, and civilization. The last conservatives, like the last liberals, disappeared one hundred and fifty years ago. Nationalists are no different from globalists, because nationalism is also a globalist ideology. This is the reality they strive to conceal.

What makes someone modernist is easy to define. According to any modernist ideology, all problems can be solved globally by proper law making, government decisions, and legislation. According to this the world would be a wonderful utopia, with proper ideologies. But the modernists, reformers, and global maniacs ignore a very obvious Machiavellistic fact: The purpose of power is power itself. It means if you strive to make the world better place by power, you inevitably make it worse. Because we are just humans. And no human can handle with power. The road to hell is paved by good intentions. Therefore, countries larger than Liechtenstein should not exist either, and in that case the world really can be saved, as the civilization, and the planet either. The fact alone that countries larger than Liechtenstein exist proves that the human is not capable handling with power.

About what collectivist ideologues call an individualistic social approach, I have to say, human is an individualistic race in both the good and the bad sense of the word. This fact is not in dispute. The reason for this is that we have free will and independent consciousness. Individualism is not only characteristic of individualistic societies, but of all due to human nature, including the most oppressive, authoritarian, corrupt regimes. Only in those regimes is human individualism manifested in the worst form, in the oppression of others. The very fact that power exists in the world, and anyone can have power over another human being, proves the individualistic nature of man. Where no one has power over others, or only to a negligible extent, there is the best possible kind of human individualism. Because human is an individualistic being, shouldn’t have power. There is no man who could ever handle with power, and there has never been such a thing in history. The power by nature provokes abusing power. The assumption that there could be a utopia that never existed by the way, where the fewer people have the more power over more people, would not be more corrupt, oppressive, is simply nonsense, both empirically and logically false.

What can we say about nation-states that are based on this modernist approach? As we can see the current right-wing is not conservative, rather socialist nationalist, national communist, or national socialist, which phrase is not used for obvious reasons, but I name them, simply rightist proletarians. There are historical reasons for this.

In the XVIII. and XIX Centuries the proponents of forced integration have all been left-wing, and the right were followers of the old order, the traditional status quo. There is a huge difference between the ancient and modern societies, which will be discussed in detail later on. But at the time, the egalitarian ideologies that dominate everything today, such as nationalism and democracy were considered subversive and extreme political views, which threaten social stability. Social stabilization was based on private property and status, not on popular rule as it is today. Civilization, therefore, has evolved over the centuries between ecclesiastical and secular powers, and is not the product of the greatest possible national unity. This natural structure guaranteed that Western Civilization could avoid totalitarianism and the monumentalism characterized of other cultures all the way to the modern age.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, however, this structure collapsed and the traditional elite disappeared, thus disappeared what was traditionally called the right side, the aristocracy, the priesthood. The new right formed from the right wing of the left. In practice, this meant representing the new bourgeois middle class, while the left represented the working class. However, because right-wing parties also need votes, they had to address the working class, thus, they took on an increasingly leftist character, especially nationalists. They became the national liberals and then the national socialists. They differed from the left in that they envisioned social justice within a given nation (ingroup preference over outsiders). The best evidence for this process is that nowhere are the following concepts precisely defined: right, left, conservative, liberal.

After all, there is only one ideology in practice today, forced integration for social stability and national unity. The debate is only about the extent of achieving this between the parties. Today, there is national and international socialism similary than was a hundred years ago, only today they are not labeled as communists and fascists, but globalists and nationalists. The real demarcation line, then, is not between these arbitrary fabricated ideological cliches, but between the individual and the masses, as it was in the time of Socrates.

Nationalism is NOT conservative. It cannot be conservative that is not timeless, and it cannot be timeless, which cannot be traced back to the ancient past, like modern mass societies and nation-state. Nationalism as well as democracy has not stood the test of time, just as nothing that is crowd oriented, because we as humans are all individuals. It is irrational and immoral to treat people as a crowd. Whoever doubts this, show a nation-state, or democracy, that is older than one hundred and one hundred and fifty years.

In fact, both nation-states and democracies are doomed to fail, as everything that justified the existence of mass societies and mob rule, because they carry within their egalitarian and hedonistic nature the seeds of their fall. And this is nothing more than living up to the reserves of the future for the present.

But why is it important for the ruling elite to brainwash masses ideologically everywhere in the world, making societies an intellectual wasteland? Because without ideological legislation there’s no state in modern term. The state religion allows the ruling elite to maintain a violent territorial monopoly, which is today the nationalism. The legislation of authority does not come from divine will, as in medieval times, but from the people, hence they are arbitrary and man-made in all cases. However, it matters which type of nationalism we are talking about.

The scientific approach distinguishes two types of nationalism based on Sand’s masterpiece: inclusive political nationalism, and exclusionary ethnic nationalism. In the agrarian societies the ethnic type of nationalism evolved, in turn the trader and industrial societies the political type of nationalism evolved. Why? Because there is a direct connection between people’s lifestyles and attitudes. Peasant communities are generally xenophobic and do not tolerate even those from neighboring villages. This was due in part to a chronic lack of resources in generally poor peasant communities. Traders and craftsmen are generally more opportunistic and accustomed to doing business with strangers.

The little states of German Empire were federated by the superpower Prussia, which was the most despotic nation-state of the time. But the Prussian nationalism has evolved in giant agricultural areas, starting to expand from the little duchary near the Baltic sea at the dawn of the new age. The small states along the German Rhine, however, have been industrial and trading societies since the Middle Ages. Like northern Italy, they were the cradle of early capitalism and civilization, in a Holy-Roman Empire. Since Italy was united by the North, a different type of nationalism has evolved there, the political. When Germany was defeated at the end of WWII, the allies strived to demilitarize the German society, starting with dissolution of the dominant province of Germany, Prussia. Partly because the nazism is a direct product of the famous Prussian iron discipline. Prussia was inseparable from militarism. There’s no Prussia today as province of Germany, but this wasn’t the case before 1945, as you can see on the map above. The German provinces regained their old medieval names and even their administrative traditions developed in the Middle Ages. But one thing still remained from Prussia, the ethnic nationalism.

The same rules apply to an Austro-Hungarian Empire with two differences, this empire was multiethnic and the dominant German-speaking population was in the minority. Austria and Czech Republic followed a different path than the rest of the empire. But the ethnic nationalism turned against each other the culturally identical Hungary and Slovakia, and the linguistically identical Croatia and Serbia. Both Auschwitz and Srebrenica are located in the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, and both areas are characterized by ethnic nationalism. We all know the result of ethnic nationalism there, but the forced multiculturalism is also to blame in provoking ethnic tension, especially in the former Yugoslavia.

While someone may ask, why talking about these stuffs is so important today? Knowing the historical background is still very important today to understand the reality of our society, because in different countries there are different interpretations of concepts such as conservative, liberal, right, left, based on social innervation. In one country it means something else e.g. to be liberal as in the other. And there are differences among countries in handling the current flow of refugees and migrant crisis based on type of nationalism. Not less important talking about why the forced multiculturalism provoked genocide in some countries and causes not as much trouble in others. However if something is forced, which is based on initiate of violence by definition, is always causing trouble. And it is also true that other factors also play a role, such as colonial empires in the West, and the Russian and Ottoman oppression in East.

After that, the question arises especially with regards to ethnic nationalism: How a mother tongue as natural phenomenon fits into an artificial ideological scheme, actually an empty cliché like the nation. The ideological approach is dodging: the feeling makes someone a member of x nation. Which is absurd, because a Siberian aboriginal, for example, even though he feels Russian, will not be considered an ethnic Russian by any means. That is why the ethnic approach is exclusionary, treating the minorities not as members, regardless of whether they are citizens in the legal sense. This approach associates virtue with a particular ethnic and linguistic state, but the overlaps are huge. Where do we list the children of mixed marriages to? However, this is not all, because there are competing ideologies such as traditional religions that nationalism is trying to incorporate into itself. But only one lord can be served, which for a Christian is not the state. In other words when Jesus says love your neighbor as yourself, he does not add to it, love your fellow national better, but you should love even your enemy as neighbor, at least of course if we consider other nationals enemies or at least aliens.

The very skillful and educated intelligentsia of power sought to resolve this contradiction, but they failed fixing issue so far. If someone is born as member of a particular nation, will not become a nationalist automatically.

But a Christian, a Muslim, a communist, a liberal, on the other hand, can be anyone who is committed to a given ideology.

In any case, the nation is not so much a linguistic, ethnic, cultural, or public law category as it is an ideological one. Not to mention that ethnicity is actually a myth. There are some anthropological differences from region to region, but this is not related to language, citizenship, emotion or ideology. In fact, nationalism is waging a war against what it justifies its own existence, the culture.

Ideology is not interested in cultural diversity and dialectal differences within a given nation, but in unification, and standardization. What is achieved with forced integration.

The forced integration is a weapon of mass destruction in culture. The effect is devastating if we learn how many linguistic differences existed in German language before the 1871 unification. But the forced standardization destroyed them all. This was the first attempt of cancelation of culture in action, but not the last.

Power does everything it can to cut the cultural roots of its own citizens, and alienate them from each other in order to make them an ideological slaves of the state. This is the nationalism for. Micro-communities based on traditional family-friend-kinship ties were dismantled on behalf of an imaginary community, the national. In fact, they went even further and created a “classless” society with cancelation of culture, actually an urban rootless proletarian mob’s society. In a country where you are at home everywhere, you are not at home anywhere.

This is what basically the rulers want, and this is the sole purpose of political ideologies, taming and domesticating the people from their childhood, with comformization, uniformization, standardization. Making them love their servitude, and fear of freedom, critical thinking, and real life. And then harvesting profit, like in every case of livestock.

Without the structure created by nation-states the globalists would have not even a slimmest chance to expand their influences globally, which is an inconvenient fact to both ideologies. But in reality there is only one ideology behind the concealed truth, the statism. The ruling elite survived the collapse of the Western Civilization, our freedom did not.

This topic was a little bit pessimistic and dystopical, but anyways thanks for reading me!