Free Republic

Chosen Peoples: Sacred Sources of National Identity "Germans - think with your blood!" Bismarck's exhortation goes far to explain why liberal thinkers have often had difficulties with nationalism. It exalts the visceral above the intellectual and conformity above individuality, it is suspicious of internationalism, and neurotic about "foreigners", and its bottom line always seems to be the use of force to secure the national way of life or "national identity" - what German pioneers of nationalism called the Volksgeist. The era of nationalism, launched by the French Revolution, has been the era of "total" world wars, in which nation-states have...