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Entry: Tribe, Class, and Murder Link: http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/tribe_class_and_murder#19600 Post contents: To reply first to Mr. Z: I had a college professor, a man as wide as tall, who began his first class by standing on two stool, bending over and looking at he class through his legs, and saying “Don’t trust people with big butts.” Let me assure Mr. Z that I do trust him as an honest and a wise man, with no hidden agenda. I share many of his loyalties: love of Middle Europe, love of the Habsburg dynasty, love of Italy, love of The Faith, love of the Traditional Mass. AND when I read his article today – an article that presented on one hand an overwhelming prosecutor’s brief against that evil called Nationalism, <i>BUT</i> on the other hand calls it a “necessary evil” – I was amazed! To consider definition. Mr. Z is quite correct that much Nationalism isn’t ethnic. All the same, such nationalisms are fake attempts to imitate ethnic and racialist nationalism but asserting the existence of a super ethnos or super race – all covert attempts to grant the centralizing State some legitimacy. In fact Delcassé, Treitschke, Joseph Chamberlain, and Mazzini told lies. There are no people called “Frenchmen”, “Germans”, “Britons”, “Americans”, “Canadians”, and “Belgians”. In distinction to this fake Central-Statist Nationalism, only “real” Nationalism is ethnic (“race” also being a fake concept). I put “real” in quotes because even with ethnic nationalism, there is something unreal. Here a more subtle distinction is needed between putative Nation and real Patria. I can understand Mr Z taking the Middle European view that decentralization means devolving into ethnic “Nations”. But the Burkean/Tory view is different. Patriotism is loyalty to a particular region and a particular people who share a common <i>history</i> (the key Burkean concept), not the bonds of consanguinity. A region and a people may be of many different ethnic and physiological groups, but the key is that they all share a common history. So my own country, North Carolina. So Switzerland. And Patria is always a small area. Nationalism, in contradistinction to Patriotism, is a “romantic” myth that envisions a purified “race” or “ethnos” free from “polluting” effects. To the extent that Nationalism is interested in history at all, it is a fictive history of some supposed Golden Age. Cf. Roger Griffin on palingenetic ultranationalism and Richard Sennett on retribalization. Nation almost always leads to expansionism and war. Mr. Z is correct that as the bonds of religion weaken and as liberalism and statism disintegrate, nationalism raises its ugly head. He is also correct that there are other alternatives to Nationalism. One is loyalty to a dynasty. Another is Catholic Social Teaching, embodied in earlier Christian Democracy. And one ought to ask why Switzerland, a poly-ethnic and poly-sectarian order, does so well. Sent at: 2008 05 16