Nationalism is a Poison

Reason Magazine ^ | February 8, 2015 | Sheldon Richman

[Hugin]

Liberty can only exist under the protection of a strong nation.

[Fred Hayek]

They are usually not this crazy, yet Reason seems to have gone ‘round the bend of late. Some libertarians seem to have latched on to the same moral equivalence expressed by Party Secretary Obama at the National Prayer Breakfast. Have even the small l libertarians been lately coopted by the Left?

[Yardstick]

That kind of love does not ignite hate for the Other or create admiration for the warrior who enjoys killing the Other on order.

This dude sounds like a leftist. Who but lefties use phrases like "the Other"?

[SWAMPSNIPER]

He should be encouraged to leave!

[wjcsux]

This duckweed doesn’t get it! We love fight for and love our country because of our love for God, our Constitution, our people and liberty. Our oath is to defend the Constitution, not politicians!

[The_Reader_David]

Indeed, nationalism is toxic and tends to cause wars, but so is its opposite, internationalism, which has motivated quite a lot of wars and murder in several of its guises down the years.

As in all things in the fallen world, striking the right balance and falling off the royal road neither on the left nor on the right is tricky.

[Nuc 1.1]

Concur. The author thinks himself a great thinker..

[griswold3]

Weird how the Progressives take issue with one’s sense of duty and sacrifice to protect and defend, yet demand duty and sacrifice to provide for common good.
It’s getting to the point where they are not worthy of any sense of duty and sacrifice for their cause. They will not know how to provide for themselves. Pity

[Verginius Rufus]

How about this poem instead?

"Breathes there a man with soul so dead
Who never to himself hath said:
'This is my own, my native land'?
Whose heart hath ne'er within him burned
As home his footsteps he hath turned,
From wandering on a foreign strand?
If such there breathe, go mark him well;
For him no minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim;
Despite those titles, power and pelf,
The wretch concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust from whence he sprung,

[Pajamajan]

BARF ALERT!!!!!!!!!!

Yet another parasite crapping on our nation and those who defend us.

[IronJack]

All right, douche. You hate your country. You hate the men and women who stand their watches on the wall and defend your pathetic ass. That’s OK. You’re free to do that. But a lot of us — millions, judging by the success of the movie — don’t. And just as you’re free to hate it and run it down, we’re free to stand and salute it.

So shut your whiny, sniveling, chickensh-t blowhole and let us go about our business. Or risk getting a fist pushed down your throat when you shoot your mouth off to the wrong guy at the wrong time.

[Forward the Light Brigade]

Lets see how nationalistic the author is when the enemy is at the gates? lets see how patriotic this clown is when IS is on American soil?

[yefragetuwrabrumuy]

Nationalism *may* indeed be a poison, but internationalism is decay and death itself.

Nations exist for reasons. Internationalism is unnatural, and is forced on people to their detriment. Internationalists are scoundrels and tyrants who hate the very idea of nations.

[wjcsux]

I saw American Sniper last night. What a fantastic movie! It was about strong families, love of God, love of country, strong fathers mentoring and loving thier wives and children. It also showed dads hunting with thier kids and exhibiting loving disclipline. It showed strong self-sacrifice for others. In other words, it was everything libs hate about us. Clint Eastwood did a fantastic job!

[The Duke]

Regarding nationalism...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Cq7hf4ylvY

[philoginist]

“Liberty can only exist under the protection of a strong nation.”

You mean like China? What exactly is a “strong nation?” Sounds distinctly totalitarian to me.

The only threat to anyone’s liberty is government, especially a, “strong,” one.

[Yardstick]

The writer is a self described “left-libertarian”:

http://sheldonfreeassociation.blogspot.com/2006/07/why-left-libertarian.html

These guys are an especially far out and conflicted breed of libertarian. Other notable left-libertarians include Noam Chomsky. So yes, this is unusually crazy stuff.

BTW, something that’s not spoken of very often but that’s important for understanding libertarianism is that it has a left and a right wing.

[Pelham]

There have always been plenty of left-libertarians. They share the distaste for Christian mores that you find on the left. Ayn Rand demonstrated it in her writings and especially in how she ran her little Manhattan cult.

But Murray Rothbard was a right-libertarian, and while Rothbard was still alive Lew Rockwell was one as well.

[Billthedrill]

Great heavens - I haven't seen that many abstractions thrown around with such passion since the last freshman dorm room discussion I had 45 years ago. In point of fact, the author never bothers to define his conception of "nationalism" and so we must attempt to visualize it ourselves. It's apparently a bad thing because it led him to being yelled at for making some particularly bone-headed assertions in his previous article, one of which, IIRC, was that the Bush administration either directly accused Saddam Hussein of participating in 9/11 or "allowed" people to believe it, neither of which is true. In fact Bush declared himself that Saddam was not involved nor was he being accused of it. With that howler behind him, the author is already more than a little suspect, and he walks that back to the assertion that people who criticized him over the American Sniper movie "apparently" believe it, with not a shred of supporting evidence that they do so. Frankly, you can't take a fellow that vacuous seriously.

There are many interpretations of the topic even in Enlightenment times, Locke to Hegel, but it was no secret to the ancients. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, for example, Horace's summation that was bitterly mocked by Wilfred Owen (before he did end up dying for his country), was a notation of a widely-held Roman ideal. Certain of the Greek demagogues invoked something like it with respect to the city/state. It defeated Marx - his insistence that class solidarity across the international proletariat would trump nationalistic identifications was crushed during the first World War, when German and Russian working classes slaughtered one another instead of rising up against their ruling class masters. Ironically - the author would deny it furiously - we get more of a whiff of Marx in this incoherent bit:

Kyle was a cog in an imperial military machine that waged a war of aggression on behalf of the ruling elite's geopolitical and economic interests...

Ruling elite, check. Only within the space of two sentences we have:

Someone who swears an oath that in practical terms obliges him to kill whomever the current White House occupant tells him to kill, "asking nothing about the justice of [the] cause," would be called a cold-blooded contract killer rather than a hero.

That oath was, in fact, to protect and defend the Constitution, not to blindly obey an office-holder, and suddenly the author spins 180 degrees:

Nationalism, to judge by how nationalists conduct themselves, is an unswerving religious-like devotion to the nation, construed as a quasi-mystical entity — "America" — that cannot be wrong and so has the authority to command reverence and obedience. The nation transcends particular political officeholders...

You really can't have it both ways. Kyle can't simultaneously be a cold-blooded contract killer working for Bush II and a devotee to a quasi-mystical entity whose authority sanctions killing. He could, of course, be a very confused fellow but I would gently suggest that it's much more likely that the author is.

The real difficulty is that the author can't make up his mind which abstraction really applies: an "imperialist" war is not a "nationalist" one, there were no colonies, no imperium, the United States' stake in the thing bore no national advantage at all and was a very expensive commitment to another abstraction named collective security, and, on the other end of the philosophical scale, cold-blooded contract killers are the opposite of nationalists, whatever definition he's using at the moment. Perhaps if the author suspended his attempts to intellectualize the matter and bothered actually to meet a few military members to discover what motivates them, he might spare us and himself such nonsense.

[Yardstick]

Ayn Rand wasn’t a left-libertarian. Her outlook was too self-centered and egoistic. Left-libertarians are collectivistic bleeding hearts who have improbably latched onto anarcho-capitalism as a way of fighting their great enemy, the corporations. They would be standard statist-collectivists like the rest of their lefty comrades except they believe the state has been hopelessly corrupted by the corporations and exists only to serve corporate interests. So they’re stuck trying to implement their leftist utopia without a state. It’s weird stuff but it’s not Ayn Rand.