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Entry: National Consciousness And Nationalism Link: http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/national_consciousness_and_nationalism#25608 Post contents: The concept and term “nationalism” is easily falsified when applied to traditional criteria for what one respondent called “the witches’ brew” of the American ideological hegemon (before he resorted to “red-fascism” as its description) Since Hegelianism is an essential ingredient in the mix, “witches’ brew” conveys Voegelin’s view of Hegel as a sorcerer and author of a grimoire which he attempts to substitute for reality and human nature and create a “secondary reality.” We all recall the unnamed neocon who taunted the journalist as “a member of the reality based community” and boasted of his own perogative: “We create reality” as well as O’Brien in 1984 who taunts Winston Smith: “We create human nature, Winston.” In rhetorical terms, “nationalism” applied to the neocon American ideological hegemon is a catachresis, an attempt to denote something for which, without the catachresis, there is no actual name, e.g., "a table's leg" Its name is legion at least in its component parts and can’t be understood without Carlton Haye’s sense of nationalism as a subsitute for religion, Voegelin’s sense of gnosticism, and Santayana’s sense “egotism and will” as the genealogy of The German Mind. To relieve my “hobby horse” a bit I’ll note that in 1977 in “A Last Look at the Tube” Marshall McLuhan predicted that a nationalist religion and military dictatorship would emerge in the US as one result of television. Sent at: 2008 07 20