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The Vagaries of Nationalism

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In this photo, Russians are crawling around a garbage dump trying to salvage the condemned food that hasn’t been burned yet:

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Hundreds of tons of meat, fresh produce and cheese are being destroyed in Russia because they supposedly come from the evil West. In the meanwhile, there are more abandoned, hungry children who live in the sreeets and orphanages in Russia today than there was in the aftermath of the civil war back in the 1920s.

Russians say they support Putin because he gave them back their national pride. Of course, it’s hard to see how crawling on your knees in a garbage dump hunting for a few tomatoes is such a hugely proud activity but nationalist sentiments are never guided by reason.

The great thinkers of the Enlightenment with their love of reason came up with a system that exploits those who don’t value reason above all. Nationalism is that system’s name.

25 responses to “The Vagaries of Nationalism”

  1. cliff arroyo Avatar
    cliff arroyo

    The lack of reason in nationalism is no special case though, certainly no other political ideology and no religion are founded on reason. And there’s no reason to expect the post nation state reality to be based on reason (all the indications I can perceive point the opposite direction).

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  2. NG Avatar
    NG

    Has nationalism anything to do with Russian’s love of dill on their food?

    “According to one of Russia’s oldest and largest greenhouse providers, Agrotip, the average Russian consumes 1.6 kg (3.5 lbs) of dill a year — about enough to fill a large suitcase.”

    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/26/us-russia-food-dill-idUSTRE76P1J420110726

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      Man, so true. I suffer greatly because I can’t get enough of fresh dill here in the US. Ukrainians love it even more than Russians. To us, it’s like turmeric is to Indians. Or poblanos to Mexicans.

      Our food is very bland, there are no condiments. So we have to go with dill that grows abundantly as a weed.

      Last week, I had no food in the house, so I made the tastiest soup known to humanity out of a potato, a few frozen pelmeni, and a sprig of fresh dill.

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      1. cliff arroyo Avatar
        cliff arroyo

        Some years ago I was having lunch with a colleague from Ireland. He tasted the soup, made a face and complained that it had ‘that Polish taste’. Of course it was dill (which he didn’t even know the name of…. Ireland had/has maintained almost no local food traditions and made almost no use of herbs according to him).

        Polish love of dill is extreme (maybe not as extreme as Ukrainian) along with parsley and chives, the only fresh herbs that are always available everywhere.

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        1. Clarissa Avatar
          Clarissa

          We love parsley, too. And cilantro. But I don’t remember seeing chives anywhere back in Ukraine.

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      2. Shakti Avatar
        Shakti

        I get the dill from farmer’s and ethnic markets, like I get cilantro and basil (my pesto is basically all basil). The supermarket is always very expensive for a little bit of herbs and is meant for people who never use it in any great quantity.

        Do the Russian/Ukrainian grocery stores in the area not stock the dill? I have to travel at least 40 miles sometimes one way to get some things.

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        1. Clarissa Avatar
          Clarissa

          Yes, our “Russian” (owned and run by Jews, of course) store in St Louis has fantastic dill. But it takes an hour to get there and then an hour to get back.

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          1. Avatar
            Anonymous

            St. Louis is very dangerous due to the extremely homicidal nature of the place (primarily due to its huge black population), no? Or do you go into the safe suburbs, which are still mostly white IIRC, not St. Louis itself or any of its heavily black suburbs?

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            1. Clarissa Avatar
              Clarissa

              St Louis is very segregated. The nice neighborhoods are very nice. Multimillion dollar houses plastered with BLM signs and not a black person in sight.

              I’m not in St Louis at all, though. I’m across the river, in Illinois.

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              1. Avatar
                Anonymous

                I know that you live in Illinois, in the St. Louis suburbs, presumably in a heavily white areas. I was specifically talking about the location of the Russian store in St. Louis where you go to. Is it in a heavily black area or in a heavily white area?

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              2. Clarissa Avatar
                Clarissa

                No, the store is in the midst of the fanciest area in St Louis. It’s not Russian, it’s Global Foods. For the globalists, you know. 🙂

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          2. stille Avatar
            stille

            Sounds like you need a herb garden. As you’ve said, dill grows like a weed 🙂

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            1. Clarissa Avatar
              Clarissa

              I’m so shit at gardening that I didn’t manage to grow even dill. I’m really that useless.

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  3. Avatar
    Anonymous

    The interesting thing is that by late 2021, some Russian nationalists really did believe that Putin had created the perfect state, superior to both the West and China. I’ll give you just one example, not because I want to promote him, but rather because I want you to thoroughly understand the mentality of Russian nationalists (or at least one prominent one among them) on the eve of Russia’s full-scale 2022 invasion of Ukraine (the 2014-2015 invasion was on a much more limited scope):

    https://www.unz.com/akarlin/russias-nationalist-turn/

    Anyway, nationalism began as a way to liberate oppressed peoples and give them their own homelands. You saw that in the Balkans, in various other European countries during WWI, in Palestine/Israel with the Zionist movement, with the various decolonization movements during the 20th century, and with the breakups of various multinational states and empires in both the 1910s and the 1990s. Granted, some of these national experiments fared better than other ones did, and some actions done in the name of nationalism were just plain stupid, such as Gavrilo Princip’s assassination of Franz Ferdinand, which helped spark a World War so bloody that it ensured that its outcome would not be worth it in terms of the cost paid in lives even if Russia would have hypothetically managed to avoid the Bolshevik coup in 1917. But Yeah, nationalism is a mixed bag. It’s neither fully good nor fully bad. I do tend to notice that more inclusive and less aggressive/expansionist nationalisms tend to fare better than those nationalisms that are more exclusive and more aggressive/expansionist.

    In regards to Russia specifically, had Russia avoided invading Ukraine, especially in 2022 but ideally in both 2014-2015 and in 2022, and actually managed to use nationalism to generate a mass movement that eventually got the Russian TFR to Israeli Jewish levels without being dysgenic, then Russian nationalism would have actually been something to admire. But Russian nationalism could not significantly raise Russia’s subpar TFR and thus Russia felt compelled to try conquering other countries in a desperate, last-ditch attempt to massively boost its population.

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      People around here get banned for linking to Karlin.

      He’s not a Russian nationalist. He’s an FSB stooge. And I can’t understand why people so insistently quote this badly made FSB project at me. Isn’t it obvious this is completely fake?

      I’m not interested in opening an argument on this sad stooge, by the way. Don’t bring him here, don’t link. I have no desire to be spammed by Russian bots.

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      1. Avatar
        Anonymous

        Fair enough. I do wonder if Karlin’s recent anti-Putin act (calling the Putin regime a swinish kleptocracy and calling Putin a monkey, both on Twitter, IIRC) is also just an act, though. Would Putin really want even his own FSB plants saying stuff like that about him and his regime?

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        1. Clarissa Avatar
          Clarissa

          It’s propaganda 101. “Putin steals and is corrupt” is a narrative that keeps the regime strong.

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          1. Avatar
            Anonymous

            How much odds would you place on Putin eventually “taking care” of Karlin similar to what he previously did with Navalny, Strelkov, Nemtsov, et cetera?

            (Would be very sad if it were to happen, of course. Extremely tragic.)

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            1. cliff arroyo Avatar
              cliff arroyo

              “very sad if it were to happen, of course. Extremely tragic”

              No it wouldn’t… it would be extremely banal and predictable.

              Liked by 1 person

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              1. Avatar
                Anonymous

                Very true, unfortunately. Those who play with wolves or even in wolves’ dens shouldn’t be surprised if they will subsequently get eaten by wolves.

                This lesson might have been first learned by the Bolsheviks, who created a monster-state only to subsequently see themselves devoured by the monster-state that they created in the vast purges that Stalin conducted. It would have been much better for the Bolsheviks not to seize power in Russia in 1917 and instead to remain an opposition party but to also keep their own lives.

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          2. Avatar
            Anonymous

            BTW, it’s interesting that when the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine began, Karlin was as giddy about it as a kinky schoolgirl who is just about to try anal sex for the very first time, believing that this was the key to restoring Russia’s superpower status and Russia’s ability to survive as its own unique, “sovereign” civilizational space. Once Russia’s war effort flopped, he then flipped to supporting open borders and the complete abolition of all nation-states and their replacement with network-states.

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            1. cliff arroyo Avatar
              cliff arroyo

              “flipped”

              … for clout. How people can be taken in and actually believe paid clout chasers is what’s puzzling…

              Liked by 1 person

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              1. Clarissa Avatar
                Clarissa

                Changing the subject from the eminently boring Karlin, have you noticed that the censorship hold against Steve Sailer has lessened? He’s publishing a book and gives talks in different cities. That’s really great! I only hope the same happens for David Cole before he drinks himself to death. Cole would be a mega star in any normal society. So would be Sailer.

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              2. Avatar
                Anonymous

                I absolutely do think that Steve Sailer is a very rational and respectable figure. It’s deeply regretful that the mainstream has censored him so much. He’s a bit too anti-immigration in the American context for my taste, but still has a lot of excellent takes, especially on human biodiversity. (I think that globalism for the Anglosphere is less bad than globalism for most other developed countries since the Anglosphere actually can successfully recruit a lot of global cognitive elites, even if it also gets a lot of global proles as well as a part of this process.) I think that Steve Sailer was much more sensible than Vox was on Charles Murray’s views about possible genetic causes for average racial differences in IQ, for instance. I also think that Steve Sailer is correct in pointing out that the abolition of racially restrictive covenants wasn’t exactly a super-good thing for white Americans who lived in large US cities since a lot of those cities subsequently turned into crime-ridden shitholes. He’s a huge admirer of how Oak Park, Illinois did integration:

                https://www.unz.com/isteve/oak-park-v-austin/

                He’s right, unfortunately!

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              3. Avatar
                Anonymous

                If it’s for clout, then I wouldn’t be surprised to see him eventually engage in gay sex for some extra clout either. To rebel against the Evil Stupid Rightoid Putinist regime, after all.

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A conservative literary critic and college professor

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