In All Nations, Raise the Colors, a guest post by Bill Reader
I have written before in this blog about the value of nationalism. But this moment in history has both clarified some points of my argument that I have struggled to articulate, and motivated me to once again attempt to put these points forth so that they can be understood—even if not wholeheartedly adopted— by any good faith reader.
I realize now that I need to begin this article by stating explicitly certain things I consider to be true. If you disagree with these points, you will likely disagree with all I have to say beyond this point. I consider this to be a fair trade off, because if you disagree with these predicates, then from my perspective, your outlook on reality is so warped that reasoned discussion is going to be impossible on a wide range of points.
I believe fundamentally that things which are immoral for an individual to do, do not magically become moral when a group of individuals does them. I believe fundamentally that things that are damaging, dissipative, or foolish, when done by an individual, do not magically become healthy, productive or wise when a group of individuals does them.
I acknowledge there are many ways of successfully existing in the world, but I in no way concede that they are all of equal merit. I explicitly favor those ways of existing that first contribute the most to the survival, both short and long term, of the individual, to their comfort, to their safety; and also to the survival, comfort, and safety of those around them, in descending order of priority beginning from those most cherished by and related to themselves.
Those who maximize the first with no regard to the second trend towards sociopathy and—at any rate— rarely are successful in the long term when the game is iterated long enough. Those who maximize the second, while admirable in their own right, at the logical extreme will do too little to ensure their own survival, and grind the corn to feed the poor today that might be planted to feed a hundred times more people tomorrow. I do concede that the full extent of the best mode of being is not fully understood, and that its expression is in dialogue with the circumstances of a person to some degree (EG- you can be a good Christian in a church and on a battlefield, but what specific actions that belief is instantiated in will differ greatly).
I believe, therefore, that people are due grace regarding their differing approaches, in direct proportion to their good faith and reciprocal good will. And as a final and pragmatic point, I believe that all these truths are intrinsic properties of humanity and the world it inhabits— which is not to say that I believe humans cannot delude themselves, even in large numbers, into treating these points as untrue. It is however to say that when they do, their fundamental opposition to reality will bring them to ruin, fast or slow, but whether they destroy people who recognize the nature of the world and set back the progress of humanity before they destroy themselves is ever an open question.
From this I derive the duty and mission statement of this blog against the opponents of civilization— for in the long run they will always fail, but it is up to us to secure victory so their failure does not take the world with it.
Having laid out these premises I want to turn to my thesis. It has been time, it remains time, and by the grace of heaven I hope there will be yet some time tomorrow, for people of all nations to abandon the mad sickness of globalism and re-embrace nationalism. Not just Americans, the English, the Australians, the Argentinians—people of all places and all creeds.
I have stated before and I will state again that Europe took the very wrongest lesson from World War II in one particular.
In looking at the sins of the National Socialists in Germany, they attributed all of their sins to the Nationalism, and their leaders began to seek, from that moment forth, to eschew nationalism, while embracing socialism.
In this folly they had no small help from propaganda originating in their erstwhile allies from the Soviet Union. The cold war came, pitting these same people against their very way of life. They persisted in foolishness. The Soviet Union collapsed under the weight of its inefficiency, inhumanity and brutality. But its roots had grown too deeply into European hearts and minds for them to regard the implications. The interpretation of “the right wing” as being wholly defined by its nationalism— with socialism not just in name but fully embodied in policy, laughably excepted as inconsequential to the political alignment of a party— was accepted without thought (it could hardly be accepted any other way). Why? Because nationalism was nominally the difference between Stalin and Hitler. But of course, in practice, it was no such thing. Stalin was every inch the nationalist that Hitler was. It’s self-obvious from looking at his modern successor in Putin that the Russian Left is steeped deeply in Nationalism.
Globalism as preached by the USSR was a way of getting other countries to abandon their national identities in favor of a new Russian hegemon. It was always a weapon. They never meant a word of it.
How then can I advocate nationalism, if I begin by stating that two of the world’s most rightly-reviled ideologies were nationalist?
Because their sins did not arise from their nationalism.
Hitler and Stalin seized control of, both directly and indirectly, private industry large and small within their countries. That is the action of a socialist, not a nationalist. Hitler and Stalin disarmed their people and suppressed their speech— you have to do one to effectively do the other. That is the action of the socialist, not a nationalist. Hitler and Stalin confiscated the private property of their people for redistribution to their favored groups. They took from them everything up to their very lives for the primary crime of being effective opposition. They sought to control the people they ruled, and to expand their rule to all people. Every one of these actions is motivated by and wholly justified within the philosophical constraints of socialism, independent of nationalism. Every one of these actions is done today, to a greater or lesser degree, by every socialist country in the modern era, to include the so-called enlightened lands of Europe. Socialism is inextricably an oppressive, totalitarian ideology— and hence as a place becomes more socialist, its leadership becomes more totalitarian.
It has never been otherwise, because it cannot be otherwise. To build a government large enough to tabulate in detail the output and need of every citizen is to build a surveillance state. To justify the taking of a majority of the fruits of a person’s labor by the state, with or without their consent, is to make peace with theft. To justify the state control of their business is to make peace with slavery, howsoever gilded the cage that results.
To return to the premises we began with, what would we say of a man who spied on his neighbor’s every move; stole his neighbor’s wallet and took half its contents; helped himself to half the contents of his neighbors house or bank account; who inserted himself into the running of his neighbor’s affairs against their express consent? These actions do not become moral because a government does it, they merely become harder to oppose. Left wing thought always begins and ends, as I argued in one of my first essays for this blog, in the fundamental proposition that might makes right.
Countries that cast their lot in with socialism become evil even if they do not start obviously evil, because only evil men and women are comfortable with the mode by which socialism operates.
Moreover their conditions quickly worsen as the sensible citizen does not tolerate their idiocy. This is why every socialist country hemorrhages its best and brightest. Socialists raid their luminaries for their treasures, take a substantial cut for administration of their theft, and pass an inadequate pittance to their poor, with a promise to improve upon the pittance if re-elected. So the latter happens—but the prior, never. In consequence they end up inevitably with many more poor and dependent and many fewer rich and capable, and such rich as they do have must either not be the brightest (so as to not realize how badly they are robbed) or be so loyal to the country as to endure it out of love for it.
Only, of course, the latter is not allowed under the globalist regime, so perhaps you can work out what happens. The hangers on who believe in freedom but lack the means to leave endure oppression of every flavor from governments that, bit by bit, recapitulate every sin of totalitarianism in the name of defending against it. Europe’s final form, on the path it’s walking, is a man in a uniform, standing vigilant guard for any signs of a rising dictator… at the door of a dictatorship.
And what of nationalism? Nationalism is nothing more than the belief that your country’s ways are the best.
It is an earnest belief in one’s own language, culture, arts, priorities, morals, modes of thought. It has been a hallmark of every successful country in world history, whatever their moral valance. The Aztecs and the Spaniards were both nationalists of their own kinds. So too were the very people who actually fought the Nazis. Europe might have tried with some success to sell America on the idea of fighting on the side of “the allies”, but said allies were very much fighting on behalf of themselves. The French resistance was first and foremost a French resistance. It is not some inconsequential accident that the “Keep Calm and Carry On” sign is headed by the crown.
Europe didn’t have the luxury of being so stupid about this point until after the shooting stopped. Truly, how even does one articulate the desire of European powers to oppose Nazi Germany without acknowledging their justifiable fear that the Germans would wipe out their local customs in favor of their own? And what a tragicomic turn it is, therefore, that they went through all the effort of opposing the depredations of Berlin only to be willingly ravished in the selfsame manner by Brussels within the century (a tip that the Europeans would have done well to heed, and one well substantiated by the historical record, is that if you are going to be colonized by any country in Europe, pray to all the saints in the heavens that that country isn’t Belgium. They ought to have fought to the bitter end what they willingly acquiesced to.).
Why is this treated as some shock or surprise? Anti-nationalists are the kinds of people who would ask a man take a spouse but carefully never express any love for her.
They want the behavior of good citizenship while erasing the rights, duties and responsibilities of citizens. The individual version of the globalist philosophy is a person wracked by self-hatred not only at their own sins but at the sins of people they are merely descended from, sometimes so remotely that the sins of their fathers are practically the sins of everyone’s fathers. It’s a person incapable of asserting themselves to defend the most obviously innocent from the most transparently evil because some unspecified person somewhere in the dusty past with whom they might share a fragment of genetic code committed sins, and who then are they to stop a Muslim man from raping their countrymen’s children? No evil he can commit can ever make him not “oppressed” and no virtue of their own can ever make them fit to confront him.
You need not imagine this man, he is out in force applying his boot to his fellow’s face because unlike the people actually causing pain and distress in his country, he know his own countrymen will not fight back. What long term goal could he imagine himself to be serving except his own country’s extinction? And isn’t this, he thinks, in its final estimation, such an improvement on Nazism, to have all the horror of totalitarianism but turned entirely inward? For truly that was the problem with the Nazis, yes, the fact they believed in themselves, think the members of their police as they busily defend the violent third world antisemites who do to their citizens in peacetime what any European would be reviled for opportunistically doing in war.
But now at long last St. George’s cross is once again rising above England, and the southern cross over Australia. And while the destination is far from certain, in these embers lies a chance of rekindling the health and well being of these countries. In fact, on long enough time scales, nationalism taken to its logical conclusion could overthrow even socialism itself. The global Left, of course, believes that to be its intrinsic threat, but as discussed above, the global left fears the right thing for very much the wrong reason. Many of the “right wing” movements they revile are still heavily laced with Left Wing thought. They’re simply falling for old soviet propaganda. And yet, though they’ve done the math wrong, in a way they have come to the right answer in one particular.
Nationalism is rising at the moment because the leaders of nations are trying explicitly to destroy the health, happiness, and future of their own subjects. Where the USSR and 3rd Reich were homicidal, Europe is suicidal. It happens, however, that many of the good people of England are not particularly interested in committing suicide. So too in the US, hence Trump. So too in Argentina, hence Milei. But so strong is the cultish fervor for suicide among the global Left that mere belief in one’s own country now evokes the ghost of Hitler (nobody inform them of Hitler’s flagrant habits of drinking water, eating, and sleeping; or actually, perhaps do inform them, but film it for me).
The Left is committed to putting down its marker as the people devoted to sinking the ships aboard which the whole world floats, and they will tar all who oppose them as every -ist, they will censor, fire, and slander anyone who tries to pry the axe from their hands. And of all the things we could ask for at this moment, perhaps that is the best.
Because, at the heart of nationalism lies a belief that one’s nation is good and is worth supporting. That implies in turn a belief that the long-term well being of one’s nation is good. And the people turning explicitly against the well being of their own nations are taking an opportunity at every breath to declare fealty to socialism. Even if it were not the fundamental reason for their totalitarian behaviors, the fact that it’s the preferred draught of these fevered madmen will, I hope and pray, make its toxicity obvious if only by pure association. Europe’s socialists held a gun to their own people’s heads, and there is some small, faltering chance that having been the people to do so brings the wisdom of their other ideas into question.
But I will make even bolder, because I want to make a further point.
Right now, I believe the world is suffering more greatly than is fully reckoned for lack of nationalism. Iran in particular is being oppressed under Islam, which a bit like if a stone-age madman came up independently with all the worst parts of socialism but imagined them through the lens of a crazed desert raider. In fact Islam is subjugating much of the world under its banner and making huge chunks of the world unlivable Hellholes in consequence.
The result of this is two-fold—people flee the unlivable Hellholes and bring the source of their misery with them. It would be better, much better, certainly in Persia at least, for them to reclaim the history that preceded this madness. The Arab world at large, meanwhile, could use a different variety of nationalism. Rather than the arbitrary lines that keep warring factions bound within artificial countries, they could use borders that reflect actual coherent groups interested in self-determination. While they would still undoubtedly engage in constant tiresome warfare, at the very least they would have less built in internal conflict. Even a soupçon of an improvement in stability, combined with a sterner immigration policy on the part of the Western world, might do much to quell the relentless torrent of third world predators washing up on our doorstep. The history of this influx is, it must be remembered, relatively recent, and the conditions under which it did not happen, not so terribly remote.
South and Central America have much to offer the world in culture and resources, but they must spit out the poison pill of socialism. Argentina has lead the way, giving hope I never thought I would see in my lifetime on this front. Will the rest of the continent be wise enough to learn the lesson presented by their neighbors? Will they take anything away from the predictions of doom that fizzled, from the material improvements where the experts promised a deepening of the destruction (as if that was even possible after decades of socialists looting the ever-diminishing treasury)? Will any of them get a glimmer that when a man says what he’s doing, how and why he’s doing it, predicts what its effects will be, and then turns out to be entirely correct, that that is not a miracle, a trick, a fluke, a magic trick, but the man with two eyes coming to the fore in the land of the blind to don the crown? A cynic would say no, but an empty stomach, and an empty future, are as powerful of an inducement for change as any man in history has ever had. Call me a fool, but I harbor some little hope.
And last but not least, how much better could China be if instead of Communism with Chinese Characteristics, it were Chinese with Chinese characteristics? The great con game of the CCP, to make their own knock off of Marx’s work and tie it by pretzel knot logic into their own national identity, has lead to misery, market distortion and stupidity of a scale perhaps never before seen in world history. China wants to be dangerous, and it certainly is. China wants to be ascendant, but it never will be, because in the current of history it tied itself to the boat anchor of socialism. The best it could have hoped for was to temporarily be the top of the heap as the other countries suffering under the benighted political theory fell. Now I’m not even sure I give them that much credit. How much better might it be if West Taiwan gave it a rest already, for everybody’s sake, and rightfully shucked the fundamentally European sickness they’ve contracted, stopped pretending Marxism was somehow perfected by China (behold, my perfectly polished cowpie!). I grant you Chinese history is a frustrating ring of déjà vu all over again up until such time as the Mongols beat some sense into them, but even that morass of slow learning couldn’t possibly be worse than what they have currently.
Let the world’s people once again believe in themselves, pick back up the threads of their histories and begin to act again in their own self interest. We have tried the alternative. Nowhere has it succeeded. It has failed the people of every nation, and left a power vacuum which has been invaded by collectivist and stone-aged ideologies whose first draft might as well have been written in the seventh ring of Hell. Enough. Enough. Enough.
To all people, of all places—abandon these unworthy nightmares, turn your thoughts back to the lands your fathers built before you fell into this dreadful sleep, and as the Brits are doing now—raise the colors!
According To Hoyt 