Posted under Globalism & NeoCons & Survival of the West
The difference is vital, argued Joe Sobran:
Patriotism is like family love. You love your family just for being your family, not for being “the greatest family on earth” (whatever that might mean) or for being “better” than other families. You don’t feel threatened when other people love their families the same way. On the contrary, you respect their love, and you take comfort in knowing they respect yours. You don’t feel your family is enhanced by feuding with other families.
While patriotism is a form of affection, nationalism, it has often been said, is grounded in resentment and rivalry; it’s often defined by its enemies and traitors, real or supposed. It is militant by nature, and its typical style is belligerent. Patriotism, by contrast, is peaceful until forced to fight.
The patriot differs from the nationalist in this respect too: he can laugh at his country, the way members of a family can laugh at each other’s foibles. Affection takes for granted the imperfection of those it loves; the patriotic Irishman thinks Ireland is hilarious, whereas the Irish nationalist sees nothing to laugh about.
The nationalist has to prove his country is always right. He reduces his country to an idea, a perfect abstraction, rather than a mere home. He may even find the patriot’s irreverent humor annoying.
What better example than the chickenhawks who defended W’s every act of aggression against Iraq in the name of “global democractic revolution”? That evil philosophy was based on the leftist mindset that one’s country is defined by the nobility of certain ideals, rather than shared history, language, and culture. Little wonder this country was convulsed with policies and institutions reminiscent of ideological tyrannies, such as the USA Patriot Act, the Department of Homeland Security, and, most ominously, government warnings against those who do not conform to approved orthodoxy, which made multiculturalism the state religion,as well as official domestic and foreign policy.
Mindless PC Enforcer Mouthpiece on 23 Oct 2010 at 2:43 pm #
How dare you quote an anti-Semite like Joe Sobran! He was a vile anti-Semite! Nothing he ever wrote can ever be approvingly quoted again because he was an anti-Semite!
And did I mention he was an anti-Semite!
RedPhillips on 23 Oct 2010 at 2:48 pm #
Our White Nationalist commenters should take note of this distinction. Nationalism is part of the problem.
Thuggish Cultural Marxist Orthodoxy Enforcer on 23 Oct 2010 at 3:03 pm #
I am OUTRAGED that you dare quote a discredited anti-Semite like Joe Sobran. I DEMAND that you remove this post AT ONCE! If you do not comply with my demand I will immediately report your thought crime to the SPLC, ADL and Obama Justice Department!
HarrisonBergeron2 on 23 Oct 2010 at 4:07 pm #
Mindless PC Enforcer Mouthpiece, Thuggish Cultural Marxist Orthodoxy Enforcer:
Not the SPLC! They might call me a racist!
You win — I love Big Brother.
HarrisonBergeron2 on 23 Oct 2010 at 4:16 pm #
Red Phillips,
Good point! But they’ll never grasp the difference.
And the funny thing is, the SPLC and ADL also believe there’s no difference between the two. For example, anyone who objects to the Latinization of America is denounced as a neo-Nazi. Heidi Beirich once even wrote this of Pat Buchanan:
“The thesis is that America must retain a white majority to survive as a nation. It is rooted in a blood-and-soil nationalism more blood than soil. The echoes of Nazi ideology are clear and chilling.”
See? Enforcing existing Federal law = Nazism!
Thaddeus on 23 Oct 2010 at 4:25 pm #
“Our White Nationalist commenters should take note of this distinction. Nationalism is part of the problem.”
While I recognize Sobran’s point in principle, there are no hard and fast definitions of the two terms that he is using. He could just as easily have reversed them, switching the terms, and made Patriotism the jingoistic label and Nationalism the moderate but deep-seated love of one’s homeland. Or he could have contrasted Nationalism versus Chauvinism (in the state sense, not the gender sense — it wasn’t originally a gender term). Both of these words have very fluid definitions, and someone could easily use “Nationalism” in the exact sense that Sobran is using it.
(FTR, I’m not even a White Nationalist, but I do incline toward national socialism.)
Strauss: “Life-Giving Delusion” | Conservative Heritage Times on 23 Oct 2010 at 7:59 pm #
[...] all so-called “irrational ties” such as nationalism (I more closely mean patriotism by Sobran / Chesteron‘s definition), naturalism, tradition, particular ties, and of course above all [...]
Weaver on 23 Oct 2010 at 8:14 pm #
When I say nationalism, I [approximately] mean patriotism by this definition. I suspect some of the white nat posters also believe that as well, though they might not yet be fully aware of the duality.
Relevant link: Chesterton on patriotism.
Weaver on 23 Oct 2010 at 10:35 pm #
Thaddeus,
what’s your nationality then? I mean to ask which nationality you serve not which nationality is associated with the state you pay taxes to.
Dave K on 25 Oct 2010 at 3:28 am #
Let’s remember, PC Enforcer, the tidbit from Sobran on the real definition of an anti-Semite. An anti-Semite is someone Jews hate.
Thaddeus on 25 Oct 2010 at 3:46 am #
Weaver, my heritage is Prussian, which is how I identify myself.
And when I say that I’m not a White Nationalist, I suppose I could be being imprecise myself in the use of the phrase. I don’t quite know how it’s most commonly used. I always take it to apply to those who are seeking a white ethnostate. I don’t subscribe to that position, not because I don’t think it’s desirable (it is), but because I just don’t see it having even a remote chance of being realized.
On the other hand, if “White Nationalist” means someone whose loyalty is consciously to the Caucasian race, then yes, I would put myself under that banner.
Kirt Higdon on 25 Oct 2010 at 4:12 am #
I agree with Sobran’s distinction, but unhappily “patriot” and nationalist are now functionally equivalent and anyone opposed to the US global empire is labelled unpatriotic. Patriotism is now not the last, but the very first refuge of scoundrels.
HarrisonBergeron2 on 25 Oct 2010 at 12:34 pm #
Kirt Higdon,
I think political correctness is now the preferred refuge of modern scoundrels.
Kirt Higdon on 25 Oct 2010 at 3:41 pm #
Patriotism provides the umbrella for political correctness. All “politically incorrect” positions such as racism, anti-Semitism, male chauvinism, homophobia, etc. etc. (and all of these are increasingly broadly and vaguely defined) are labelled “un-American” and hence unpatriotic. To give one obvious but far from isolated example, it is the super-patriots of the right who yield second place to no-one in their worship of Lincoln and MLK. It’s also among the “patriots” where you find the more-Zionist-than-the-Jews Israel firsters.
HarrisonBergeron2 on 25 Oct 2010 at 5:26 pm #
Kirt Higdon,
Good points. Remember Glenn Beck’s ludicrous rally for patriotic Americans invoking Lincoln and MLK? And then he says he’s for smaller, Constitutional government? Hello?
Weaver on 26 Oct 2010 at 3:03 am #
Thaddeus,
There’s a post I’ve been wanting to put up on the long-enduring state, centered around, or at least including, this by Machiavelli:
I think that’d clarify my own views somewhat.
The dichotomy there would be: empire vs. nationalism, and within such a dichotomy I’d place “nationalism”, as defined in this thread, on the side of empire. Patriotism then would be on the side of “nationalism” within that dichotomy.
A similar dichotomy would be nihilism v. trad, and I think nationalism would be included on the side of trad – part of my draw to ethnicity and universal nationalism and traditionalism is my rejection of nihilism.
Since we haven’t symbolically learned [or been "taught"] a lesson from Communism, nihilism’s threat might not be widely acknowledged for awhile. Atm people [society not paleos] reject religion because it’s associated with the Taliban. And they reject nationalism because it’s associated with WWII… The truly terrifying enemy though is nihilism, and religion and nationalism among other things serve to ward off nihilism and to encourage a more natural and balanced life.
-
You say “Caucasian race”, but that could include a lot of people. Historically in the US white meant Nordic, especially Nordic who’d melted into the WASP identity.
If white nationalism is embraced, it’s feared that we’ll lose our very real regional and national ethnicities, which are roughly rooted in genetics (though not in purity), and become a mass of whites who are easily manipulated by (for example) the mass media and demagogues who proclaim to be defending white interests. These “white leaders” would have little to no attachment to most of us. We’d merely be seen as statistics, possibly to serve a small group of whites, possibly to serve all whites, possibly to serve only the white leader. Chesterton writes on this danger of distance in the link I posted above.
In the US were the Jewish, white, Hispanic, black, and northeast Asian leaders to all secretly work together, they could “divide and conquer” and wield great power in the US. They could pretend to fight one another on TV and then use the acquired power for profit.
However, since whites are the last group to organise in the US, it means really that we’re as a Chinaman once said of China (I’ll have to look up which because the foreign names don’t stick in my head): we’re the weakest in the US and the meat which the rest feast upon. Similarly, the US state is eaten by free trade to serve a few rather than the whole.
For as long as we don’t Balkanise into smaller homogeneous states, whites are very much at a loss in the US without ethnic organising. Balkanisation promises a fairly peaceful solution to US diversity.
Worse than white nationalism, many whites embrace ideological and state “nationalism” (seeing the state or ideology as theirs – e.g. the cult of freedomites, the word freedom changing to suit whomever’s talking on TV).
-
A very real danger of WN can be seen in how chummy genetic engineering and transhumanism often is on fringe WN sites. They worship progress rather than God, and they serve progress rather than whites.
They’re merely another brand of progressive. Non WN progressives too are often chummy with genetic engineering as solving all the world’s problems, so the difference between the two becomes… marketing slogans. The content is identical.
La Raza similarly was founded on the dream of some sort of super race. That’s not defending one’s own people; that’s progressing into something new. And it’s extremely significant. This isn’t bourgeois squeamishness on my part. This is my reacting against faux-nationalists who feign to care for their people. Concerns of transhumanists and supermen breeders is very real among those who’ve read various intellectual “leaders”. The actual regular folks don’t think like this, but their leaders often seem to. Regular folks just want to serve their people or at most abstract their nationality which might exist all over the place. They don’t want this breeding nonsense.