Links - 25th December 2019 (2) (Nationalism/Patriotism/Liberals hating their countries)

In an age of identity politics, inclusive national identity matters more than ever - "diversity is not an unalloyed good. Syria and Afghanistan are very diverse places, but their diversity has yielded violence and conflict rather than creativity and resilience. In Kenya, where there are sharp divisions between ethnic groups, diversity feeds an inward-looking political corruption based on ethnic ties. Ethnic diversity led to the breakdown of the liberal Austro-Hungarian Empire in the decades prior to the First World War, when the Empire's component nationalities began to rebel against living together in a common political structure. At the fin de siècle, the imperial capital of Vienna was a melting pot that produced such luminaries as Sigmund Freud, novelist and poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal and composer Gustav Mahler. But when the narrower national identities of peoples within the Empire ― Serbs, Bulgarians, Czechs and Austro-Germans ― asserted themselves, the region descended into a paroxysm of violence and intolerance... National identities can be built around liberal and democratic political values, and around the shared experiences that provide the connective tissue allowing diverse communities to thrive. Canada, France, India and the United States are examples of countries that have tried to cultivate national identities along these lines. Such an inclusive sense of national identity remains critical to maintaining a successful modern political order.... national identity is important for the quality of government. Good government ― which entails effective public services and low levels of corruption ― depends on state officials placing the public interest above their own narrow interests. In systemically corrupt societies, politicians and bureaucrats divert public resources to their own ethnic group, region, tribe, family, or political party ― or into their individual pockets ― because they do not feel obligated to serve the wider community's interests... facilitating economic development. If people do not take pride in their country, they will not work on its behalf. The strong national identities in Japan, South Korea and China produced elites who were intensely focused on their countries' economic development rather than on their own personal enrichment, particularly during these countries' early decades of rapid economic growth... In contrast to these examples of identification with the country as a whole, many identity groups based on ethnicity or religion prefer to trade among themselves and, when they have access to state power, use it to benefit their group alone... A fourth function of national identity is to promote a wide radius of trust, which acts as a lubricant facilitating both economic exchange and political participation. Trust is based on what has been called social capital... national identity encourages countries to maintain strong social safety nets that mitigate economic inequality... The final function of national identity is to make possible liberal democracy itself... all liberal democracies are built on top of states, whose jurisdiction is limited by their territorial reach. No state can take on an unlimited obligation to protect people outside its jurisdiction, and it is far from clear that the world would be better off if all states tried to do so. While countries rightly feel a moral obligation to shelter refugees and may welcome immigrants, such obligations are potentially costly both economically and socially, and democracies need to balance them against other priorities.  Democracy means that the people are sovereign, but if there is no way of delimiting who the people are, they cannot exercise democratic choice. Thus political order at both the domestic and the international level depends on the continuing existence of liberal democracies with the right kind of inclusive national identities."
By demonising national identity and promoting identity politics, liberals are destroying democracy

Nationalism Is a Form of Love, Not Hate - The Atlantic - "Critics of nationalism contend that it is a relatively recent phenomenon, a contrivance of modern rulers to control and manipulate their populations, and is therefore inherently illegitimate. The Maid of Orléans tells us otherwise... Whether in the United States or anywhere else, critics of nationalism would be better advised to hone it for their own ends rather than shun it or pretend it will go away. Nationalism, or at least national feeling, isn’t new or manufactured; the idea is quite old and entirely natural. It’s based not on hatred, but on love—on our affection for home and our own people. It is caught up in culture, in the language, manners, and rituals that set off any given country from another. It represents a deep-seated force that can’t be effaced without government coercion, and even then has proved impossible to wipe out. Empires and totalitarian ideologies alike have failed to eradicate it... The great Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini, the 19th-century writer and activist who agitated for the unification of Italy under a republican government, expressed this feeling: “Our country is our home, the home which God has given us, placing therein a numerous family which we love and are loved by, and with which we have a more intimate and quicker communion of feeling and thought than with others.”  His sentiment underlines how loyalty to nation is ultimately built on a foundation of love—for its landscape, arts, traditions, and people; for, in short, what is ours... anyone who thinks that America is immune from nationalism, or that it represents only what’s worst in our history, hasn’t truly grappled with a tradition that runs through Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt, and is inseparable from such high points of our story as the American Revolution and the ratification of the Constitution... Indeed, modern nationalism developed in the 19th century as largely a liberal movement, intimately associated with the rise of popular sovereignty over monarchs who considered nations their personal fiefs. It is not just a coincidence that the era of the modern nation-state has overlapped with the rise of democracy... Undergirding the nation is, most important, a common language and an associated distinct national literature. The spark for nationalist movements has often been historians, writers, lexicographers, and folklorists who celebrated and promoted vernacular languages and excavated a glorious literary past. Poets came to exemplify the national traditions and aspirations of their countries: The Irish had W. B. Yeats, the Poles had Adam Mickiewicz, the Zionists had Haim Bialik, and so on.  When common bonds are missing, it spells trouble. In former colonial territories in the Middle East and Africa, proper nation-states struggled to develop, partly as a function of artificial borders. These places weren’t more enlightened or peaceful for their lack of strong national feeling, but the opposite—often blighted by ruinous tribal and ethnic conflict. Likewise, when a political authority runs against the grain of a nation’s culture and identity, its legitimacy inevitably comes into question. The old multinational empires of Europe—the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Russian empires—all dissolved as their repressive apparatuses gave way and the drive toward national self-determination gained ground. Empires can’t rely on the fellow feeling and social trust that are at the foundation of democracy. John Stuart Mill wrote that such states are beset by “mutual antipathies” and that “none feel that they can rely on others for fidelity in a joint resistance.” He concluded that it is “a necessary condition of free institutions that the boundaries of government should coincide in the main with those of nationalities.” This has been borne out. Azar Gat, a scholar of nationalism, writes, “While there have been many national states without free government, free government has scarcely existed in the absence of a national community.”  National loyalty gives everyone in society a common interest that is deeper than any specific power struggle. It transcends tribe and sect. It establishes the parameters within which a discrete people and its government can arrive at something approximating the social contract imagined by philosophers such as John Locke. It renders a society, as the philosopher Roger Scruton puts it, in the first-person plural we. Only on this basis is it possible to create citizens with equal rights and reciprocal obligations, living together under the rule of law. This arrangement, in turn, makes possible the social trust that lubricates everyday life and the market economy. In short, nationalism isn’t just old, natural, deep-seated, and extremely difficult to suppress. It is also the foundation of a democratic political order. Regardless, anyone who believes that it can be easily repressed in favor of some other, supposedly more broad-minded loyalty is profoundly mistaken."

Make Men Men Again - Posts - "Fun fact: there were more flags on the moon
Than any of the Democrat debates"

In defence of patriotism - "  ‘Patriotism has nothing to do with conservatism’, Orwell wrote.  ‘It is devotion to something that is changing but is felt to be mystically the same, like the devotion of the ex-White Bolshevik to Russia. To be loyal both to Chamberlain’s England and to the England of tomorrow might seem an impossibility, if one did not know it to be an everyday phenomenon'... ‘To this day it gives me a faint feeling of sacrilege not to stand to attention during “God Save The King”. That is childish, of course, but I would sooner have had that kind of upbringing than be like the left-wing intellectuals who are so enlightened that they cannot understand the most ordinary emotions.’... we see how much we have changed over the past 80 years, but also how some traits march on.
‘England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings.’ ...
I spent many years among the leftist intelligentsia and I can report that it was considered blasphemous to support the England football team during World Cups – it even appeared as an agenda item at Socialist Workers’ Party branch meetings. Should England actually ever win the World Cup, it was believed that it would necessarily feed the right in British politics.  Culturally, the left locate their tastes overseas, which they consider a mark of sophistication. When Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was asked about his reading habits, he naturally spoke about Nigerian novelists. One couldn’t imagine him, or anyone in the current Labour leadership, citing Evelyn Waugh, and I can well remember being at an SWP meeting in the 1980s when the speaker, journalist Paul Foot, said he thought Brideshead Revisited was a great novel. Almost the entire room booed him... In 2014, Emily Thornberry, now a Labour leadership candidate, tweeted a photograph of a house in Rochester with flags of St George outside. She was canvassing ahead of the Rochester and Strood by-election, and the inference of course was derogatory. She was rightfully accused of snobbery, but there is another question here. Why did she assume that the people who lived there would not be Labour supporters? That this marked Rochester out as infertile territory for socialists? Because being patriotic is now considered to be incompatible with the left. Incompatible because the left believe it to be veiled racism, and when expressed by the working class, a whisper away from fascism... Instead of despairing and posting a photograph of the front of the house online, Thornberry would have been better knocking on the door and opening a dialogue. As Orwell puts it: ‘An intelligent Socialist movement will use [people’s] patriotism instead of merely insulting it.’ In ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’, Orwell extols what he considers to be the innate, natural anti-authoritarianism of ordinary people in England, summed up as an attachment to liberty and to privacy... Orwell would despair at the England of today, where people are reported and even arrested for what they have written online, for expressing an opinion, for refusing to write something on a wedding cake. He would recognise it as befitting the totalitarian regimes he satirised in his fiction... English literature, he writes, ‘like other literature, is full of battle-poems, but it is worth noticing that the ones that have won for themselves a kind of popularity are always a tale of disasters and retreats. The most stirring battle-poem in English is about a brigade of cavalry which charged in the wrong direction.’ Eighty years and numerous wars later, I think this is still the case — we have remembrance rather than glorification. Yet the left’s antipathy towards patriotism in England is more exaggerated than ever. It is at the heart of their reaction to Brexit. The Leave vote can usefully be described as intrinsically patriotic since it expresses a desire for national sovereignty; characteristically, the left defamed the vote as racist and did all they could to block the implementation of the result.  Indeed, during the General Election, Labour engaged in Orwellian doublethink, by talking about ‘the many, not the few’ while campaigning against the will of the majority. It made Labour increasingly sound like an Eastern European Communist Party, and a major part of its problem is its growing remoteness from ordinary people... At the risk of sounding patriotic, [Orwell] is among the greatest of Englishmen, a patriot and an internationalist – and that is a perfectly possible and admirable thing to be."

'Oikophobia': Our Western Self-Hatred - "she could never speak ill of another culture. Not only was she unable to do so, but in fact she emphasized that she did not even have the right to do so. When I asked her, alluding to her own Austrian roots, what she might say of a culture that produced, say, Adolf Hitler, she replied that she as an Austrian European may criticize European and Austrian culture, and consequently that brutal dictator.My follow-up question, whether then by her logic a non-Austrian or non-European should not be allowed to criticize Nazism, did not receive a clear reply. But my fellow diner continued to insist that we should only criticize our own cultures, never others. I thus had one of my frequent meetings with the intellectually bankrupt posture of oikophobia, the hatred or dislike of one’s own cultural home... This exchange was similar to many that I have had in countries all around the Western world. They reveal a civilization that has stopped believing in itself, that hates itself, and that is therefore unwilling to defend the values of individual freedom, democracy, and scientific and scholarly skepticism that have been handed down to us since antiquity... the San Francisco School Board voted to remove a mural of George Washington from one of its public schools because of its purported racism; the group leader of American volunteer teachers in Africa some years ago informed the volunteers that residing in a foreign culture had taught her that the United States deserved the 9/11 terrorist attacks because of U.S. foreign policy (I know this because I was one of the volunteers). Actions and statements of this kind have become perfectly commonplace by now, and we all know about them, but most people cannot explain why things are this way. How can it have come to such cultural self-hatred? The answer lies in an oft-repeated historical process that takes a society from naïve and self-promoting beginnings to self-contempt and decline. The simplest way of defining oikophobia is as the opposite extreme of xenophobia... The reason why we are experiencing oikophobia in the United States today is that we are in about the same phase of historical development now as England was after World War II, or a little earlier: a great power, but on the decline... Diverse interests are created that view each other as greater enemies than they do foreign threats. Since the common civilizational enemy has been successfully repulsed, it can no longer serve as an effective target for and outlet of people’s sense of superiority, and human psychology generally requires an adversary for the purpose of self-identification, and so a new adversary is crafted: other people in the same civilization. Since this condition of leisure and empowerment, as well as a perception of external threats as non-existential, are the results of a society’s success, success is, ironically, a prerequisite for a society’s self-hatred. What Freud has called the “narcissism of small differences” (in Civilization and Its Discontents)—the urge to compete against others even through minor distinctions like a virtuous action or the newest gadget—becomes one motivation through which a particular interest expresses its superiority over others. This “domestic” competition means that by rejecting one’s culture as backward, one automatically sets oneself above all the other interests that are parts of that culture"
So much for it being a myth that liberals hate their countries and their culture
This is a much more sophisticated and well-supported version of "Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times"

Nationalism vs. patriotism: Trump’s “nationalism” is not what makes him radical. - "Donald Trump finally came out as a nationalist last month. The president thrilled the crowd at a Ted Cruz rally by declaring, “You know what I am? I’m a nationalist, OK? I’m a nationalist. Nationalist! Use that word! Use that word!” Reactions were predictable. Liberals gnashed their teeth, Breitbart cheered, and white supremacists called it the greatest thing since Birth of a Nation.America’s European allies have condemned Trump’s embrace of nationalism. French President Emanuel Macron declared on Nov. 11 that “nationalism is a betrayal of patriotism.” To Macron, nationalism, exemplified by Trump’s “America First” slogan, means “pursuing our own interests first, with no regard to others.” The proper attitude of loyalty to one’s nation, Macron said, is patriotism, which he said is “the exact opposite of nationalism.”... Patriotism is generally understood to mean citizens’ love and loyalty to their country. How it differs from nationalism is not altogether clear, in part because nationalism has no agreed meaning"... The distinction between patriotism and nationalism has a Goldilocks quality. It suggests that nationalists have too much devotion to their nation, while patriots have just the right amount. But how much devotion to one’s nation is too much?"

British army officers are told soldiers calling themselves 'patriots' could be extremists - "A guide to help high-ranking British officers spot right-wing extremists in their ranks has been leaked - and the signs include people calling themselves 'patriots' and making 'inaccurate generalisations about the Left'.The leaflet, made in 2017, is titled 'Extreme Right Wing (XRW) Indicators & Warnings' - and advises senior army staff to look out for people who 'use the term Islamofacism' [sic] and call people who challenge their 'XRW' views 'indoctrinated'... It is not known whether similar literature has been produced on how to spot left-wing extremists or Islamists...
Extreme right-wing indicators and warnings, according to the army:
Become increasingly angry at perceived injustices or threats to so called 'National Identity'
Refer to individuals ready to challenge their XRW views as being 'indoctrinated'
Make generalisations about Muslims and Jews
Involve colleagues in closed social media groups
Refer to Political Correctness as some left wing or communist plot
Make inaccurate generalisations about 'the Left' or Government
Actively seek out impressionable individuals to indoctrinate or recruit"
Looks like the Overton Window moves awfully fast
Presumably making inaccurate generalisations about the Right is a good thing
Presumably if you challenge this pamphlet, you are 'indoctrinated'

These Left-wing slurs on Churchill are part of a bigger war on British history - "The campaign against Winston Churchill is becoming unhinged. Consider this complaint from the popular Corbynite website The Canary: “On the 14 February edition of the BBC‘s Question Time, Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg attempted to defend Churchill’s use of concentration camps during the Boer War.”Seriously, comrades? His use of concentration camps? The main connection Churchill had with camps in the Boer War is that he was interned in a PoW camp – by the Boers. He escaped, made it back to Britain and was elected to Parliament where, in a startlingly magnanimous maiden speech in 1901, he called on his countrymen to deal generously with the enemy who were, he said, simply fighting for their homes. Of course, the Leftist attempt to blacken Churchill’s name isn’t really about Churchill. It begins with its conclusion, namely that Britain is always and everywhere in the wrong, and then casts around for any argument, however absurd, to sustain that conclusion. Here’s a handy rule of thumb. Anyone who claims that Britain invented concentration camps is more interested in name-calling than in historical accuracy. The use of that loaded phrase is meant to make us think of the horrors of Auschwitz and Treblinka.But the camps set up during the Boer War were there to contain Afrikaner non-combatants driven from their homesteads. They were not there to work people to death, let alone to murder them en masse... The Momentum numpties currently repeating this claim might be surprised to learn that it originated with Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda chief. It shouldn’t need saying that it is bunkum. Internment camps are as old as war itself.Extermination camps, by contrast, were a Nazi speciality – though Stalin’s gulags were also used deliberately to work inmates to death. Even the name “concentration camps” did not originate in the South African war. It had been used, for example, by Spain to describe its detention centres in the Cuban war. Goebbels would have recognised what the contemporary Left is doing, namely snatching at any historical myths that might serve its purpose. The anti-Churchill campaign, which has now been sanctioned by the shadow chancellor, who calls Churchill a “villain”, is a case in point. It is possible to construct a case against Churchill. He could be self-absorbed, inconsiderate and vain. He could be a bully. His obsession with his reputation was unusual, even in a politician. But pointing out these mundane flaws is no fun. If you want kudos in today’s public sphere, you have to adopt the angry, monotonous tone of the identitarian Left. “Churchill was a racist! Churchill was an imperialist! Churchill was a white supremacist!” These accusations are not primarily about Churchill. They’re primarily about the people making them. What they are really saying is: “Look at me! I’m so perceptive! I can see the flaws in a national hero! That means I must be more sensitive than the rest of you! In fact, it makes me a better person than Churchill!”To repeat, Churchill should not be beyond criticism. But criticisms that are primarily a form of virtue-signalling are, almost by definition, bad history. If I were constructing a case against the cigar-chomping aristocrat, I would include the following: his defection to and from the Liberal Party on largely careerist grounds (“ratting and re-ratting” as he himself described it); the Gallipoli fiasco; his decision, as Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1925, to rejoin the Gold Standard at the pre-war rate, thus prompting a recession; and the melancholy, long, withdrawing roar of his second ministry, after 1951, when he was no longer fully capable, but would not stand aside.To be clear, a defence can be made of him in each of these cases, as Andrew Roberts shows in his definitive new biography. But let’s agree that a case can at least be made.Making that case, though, is no fun. It doesn’t raise your status in woke circles. So Churchill is instead attacked for being too Right-wing and, in particular, for not sharing our generation’s obsession with anti-racism... The Bengal famine was caused by a cyclone and exacerbated by the Japanese invasion of Burma. It is true Churchill prioritised feeding the Indian army. Given what had happened elsewhere in Asia, can we say with confidence that he would have been wiser to let the soldiers go hungry and risk a Japanese conquest? Of all the fashionable attacks on Churchill, only one has force. He was, by the standards of his own age, an outlier in his opposition to Indian self-government."
More on the "myth" that liberals hate their countries

Is The American Flag Offensive? Harvard University Students Sure Think So — Hear The Story That Made Megyn Kelly Burst Into Laughter - "a Harvard student who hung an American flag in his dorm room was asked by his roommate to remove said flag. Why? The flag “represented a political statement” the roommate was “not willing to make.”... '“I used to believe that open discourse was a value all Americans hold dear. I presumed that when asked about what makes America so unique, many Americans would respond that our pluralistic society is the foundation of so much of our success. That it was understood that without a marketplace of ideas, our society simply could not flourish. “But then I started college.”'... Perhaps one of the more extreme cases of hypersensitivity at Harvard was the story of a pro-choice student who found out her fellow students’ positions on abortion so that she could avoid sitting near pro-life learners... a student named Bridget Kerrigan hung a Confederate flag in her dorm room window in the winter of 1991, and refused to remove it despite multiple complaints and protests."

Massachusetts college stops flying American flag after it becomes focus of dispute over Trump - The Washington Post - "The day after the election, some people at Hampshire College reacted to the news of Donald Trump’s victory by calling for the removal of the American flag at the center of campus, saying it was a symbol of racism and hatred. That night, some lowered it. And the following night — sometime before dawn on Veterans Day — people burned it.The flag was quickly replaced, but the college board announced that it would be flown at half-staff, “both to acknowledge the grief and pain experienced by so many and to enable the full complexity of voices and experiences to be heard.”That didn’t work... Lash told the campus community that its efforts to convey respect and sorrow had had the opposite effect, and he announced that the college would remove the flag entirely for a while... At Brown University, some students tore up and stomped on flags from an event honoring veterans... At American University the day after the election, students upset about Trump’s victory burned flags and shouted “F— white America!”  Two days after the election, an American flag in St. Mary’s City was founded shredded and flying at half-staff"