Patriotism Against Nationalism
From an excellent New Yorker article on Churchill:
This habit of thinking about peoples and their fate in collective historical cycles, however archaic it might seem, gave him special insight into Hitler, who, in a Black Mass distortion, pictured the world in the same way. Both Churchill and Hitler were nineteenth-century Romantics, who believed in race and nation—in the Volksgeist, the folk spirit—as the guiding principle of history, filtered through the destinies of great men. (It is startling to think that, even in the darkest depths of the Second World War, J. R. R. Tolkien was writing the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, which contains, with the weird applicability available only to poetry and myth, the essential notion that the good gray wizard can understand the evil magi precisely because he is just enough like them to grasp their minds and motives in ways that they cannot grasp his.) Of course, Churchill and Hitler were, in the most vital respects, opposites. Churchill was, as Lukacs insists, a patriot, imbued with a love of place and people, while Hitler was a nationalist, infuriated by a hatred of aliens and imaginary enemies.
This is so true. We need to keep this in mind when we deal with the teabaggers: They claim to love America, with all their flags, but they’re not real Americans at all, because what they’re saying feels like hate to me. They’re against things instead of being for them, which is negative. That makes them nationalists, haters, not real Americans. And that makes them a very serious threat. Those of us who do love our country, who love it enough to admit how incredibly much is wrong with it and with the people who live here, we need to get angry about this and stay angry about it. We need to go after these people. We need to crush them before they get any power. If you’re not scared yet, be scared. We are at war. They are the enemy.Report
“They claim to love America, with all their flags, but they’re not real Americans at all,….”
Yikes.Report