Nationalism in the French Revolutionary sense - a derivation of 'fraternité', implies people have the right to rebel against a foreign monarch or ruler. It is something I certainly reject. It leads to all sorts of bad things like the American revolution and other insurrections. It leads to people like Gandhi, Nehru, the Stern Gang, etc. People sometimes nowadays seem to confuse nationalism, a revolutionary doctrine, with putting the nation in first place in one's list of political priorities, something all patriots do.
Most nationalist patriots I meet are either jingoists or simply chancers looking for a shortcut route to the reins of power. Not that they have any idea to do with them once in their hands.
ReplyDeleteSo people to should (strenuously) object to non-natives coming to their countries as immigrants, but should feel fine about non-natives establishing dominion over them on their own land, or what they think of as their own land. Is this inconsistent approach pro-colonialist or simply naive?
ReplyDeleteIt's simply Christian. We are to be submissive to our superiors, as the old Mass book put it. There are some exceptions as when the authorities are illegitimate as the Bolsheviks were.
DeleteIt is curious that someone who sets as much stock in national identity as you do -- national identity often embodied in religious or dynastic structures -- could believe that large groups of people would willingly set aside their national identity and allow themselves to be ruled by "superior" outsiders with a different and likely inimical national identity.
DeleteI side with the British against the English in the time of King Arthur and the Red Indians against the English colonists but am proud of England and our conquest of North America and much else.
DeleteI side with Llewellyn the Great and Owen Glendower but not the modern Welsh nationalists.
DeleteIt's ultimately about legitimism, obeying the law. Did the end of the Ottoman, Austrian or Tsarist empires do any good?
DeleteI think England was entirely in the wrong in both Boer wars.
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