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To: Louis Foxwell
Outstanding article, and thanks for posting. I think Greenfield has offered us a particularly sharp insight when he identifies the proponents of post-nationalism with megacities and Internet wealth. Small wonder these prefer no borders: for them borders offer no protection, only an impediment. Their wealth offers the protection.

That isn't much of a comfort to those of us who have to do real work and stick to a real budget. The post-nationalist world is one configured to offer the most comfortable living to the fewest people, they just happen to be the ones owning the microphones. And they're very happy with their membership in that "fewest" category.

The problem is that post-nationalism has been tried and it simply doesn't work. People don't think like that and can't be re-educated, i.e. brainwashed, to think like that. Stalin, for example, found that a heavy dose of political indoctrination and the pervasive presence of the commissariat among his troops couldn't make them fight in 1941; removing the commissars and making an appeal to Mother Russia could, and did. There is something ingrained in human psychology working here, something quite a bit more than a malleable social construct. Nor does the Nation map accurately to the State. Hegel was correct about that but wildly incorrect about its significance. Put simply, there is no place for an individual within the State, there is within the Nation.

Building the entire world into one mega-State under the benevolent rule of someone who has managed to sell soap on the Internet is a project doomed to futility, and only someone with a fund of ignorance as large as his ego could imagine otherwise. These are not intellectuals, they're would-be aristocrats and irresponsible ego monsters. They just got bopped on the nose by their inferiors and they don't appear to like it very much.

28 posted on 02/20/2017 3:59:25 PM PST by Billthedrill
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To: Billthedrill
Great line, Bill:

These are not intellectuals, they're would-be aristocrats and irresponsible ego monsters. They just got bopped on the nose by their inferiors and they don't appear to like it very much.

31 posted on 02/21/2017 5:42:38 AM PST by Louis Foxwell (The Left has the temperament of a squealing pig.)
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