Nationalism has been a dirty word for too long

Melanie Phillips (below) uses "nationalism" to mean pride in national identity and characteristics. In that sense, nationalism is not a problem. Many people, however, including myself, use "nationalism" in Orwell's sense, to mean a desire for one's own nation to conquer other nations. Hitler, Stalin and Americans in the "Progressive" era were nationalists in Orwell's sense while Scottish nationalists are nationalists in Melanie's sense. It is important to be aware of the distinction.

In Melanie's sense, nationalism is just an assertive form of patriotism, which is a normal human feeling. Humans do tend to identify with groups to which they belong. Note how football fans talk about "our" team and how "we" won or lost. If you dislike that you are at odds with most of the human race

And the common Leftist claim embodied in the term "ethnocentrism" is simply false.  Being in favour of your own group does NOT commit you to being against outsiders.  Many times in my research  career, I asked people their opinion about various outsider groups -- blacks, Jews etc. -- and also asked them about their feelings about their own country: patriotism.  The two types of attitude were always uncorrelated (See e.g. here and here).  Knowing how patriotic you were enabled NO prediction of your liking or disliking any given outsider group.  Given that lack of correlation, patriotism does not CAUSE racial antagonism.  Nor does nationalism in Melanie's sense

Nationalism in Orwell's sense seems mainly to be caused by the Leftist will to power. Democrat presidents got reluctant Americans into both world wars and Vietnam. George Bush invaded Iraq only in response to an attack on America. Germany and Vietnam did NOT attack America before America went to war with them. There is no particular need to explain a response to attack but invading another country does require explanation. The great invasion of C20 was undoubtedly Hitler's invasion of Russia. And Hitler too was a socialist with a very distinct will to power


The concept of the nation state is vilified but it is essential for personal freedom and democracy

Nationalism needs to sack its PR agency. As a political creed, it is widely deemed to be synonymous with fascism, Nazism, bigotry, war and the Holocaust. The Brexit vote, the rise of nationalist parties across Europe and the election of Donald Trump are said to exemplify “nativism” — which paints nationalism as a form of xenophobic racism — and to augur the arrival in the West of a new dark age of repression.

Now, a thinker has stuck his head into the very jaws of the lion by arguing that, on the contrary, nationalism is the bulwark of liberty and democracy. Yoram Hazony, an Israeli philosopher, is the founder and former head of the Shalem Center in Jerusalem. This liberal arts college set out to challenge the failure of Israeli universities to teach the core texts underpinning Jewish identity and western civilisation.

Such failure is rooted in the default belief among progressive intellectuals in Britain, America and the rest of the West that their culture is innately racist and exploitative and that the nation state is responsible for all the ills of the world. This belief emerged in response to Nazism in Germany. That was ascribed to nationalism, said in turn to be a near-inevitable outgrowth of the western nation state. Undermine or circumscribe the nation state and you would abolish bigotry, hatred and war.

There are many different definitions of nationalism. In his new book, The Virtue of Nationalism, Hazony defines it as “a principled standpoint that regards the world as governed best when nations are able to chart their own independent course, cultivating their own traditions, and pursuing their own interests without interference”. The alternative, he says, is imperialism, which is inherently tyrannical through seeking to unite mankind under a single political regime.

Under the imperialist heading, Hazony includes liberalism, the EU and the postwar American “world order”, which sought to impose western legal norms through the global exercise of US military might.

By contrast, the mutual loyalties at the heart of the nation state, based on shared traditions of language, religion, law, culture and other characteristics, provide “the only known foundation” for tolerance and diversity, free institutions and individual liberties.

So, what about Nazi Germany? Hazony argues that Germany was not so much a nation state as a classic imperial power because it wanted to conquer all of Europe. A true nation state, he suggests, inherently requires limited borders because it is based upon the particularities of cultural identity. It’s demonstrably the case that bigotry or intolerance are not confined to the nationalist right. Universalist ideologies such as liberalism, Marxism and Islam have been shown to inflame vicious hatred against those who oppose them.

Some European nationalists do have troubling associations with Nazi or racist ideologies. Others are simply fighting to defend their national identity and culture against erosion by the combination of liberal “imperialists” and mass immigration. Yet all are demonised equally. This has resulted in a lethal confusion. People are entitled to want to live in societies that identify with a common heritage and goals. Yet this is now treated as racist, “nativist” and illegitimate by virtually the entire political mainstream.

In Britain and America, the Brexit and Trump phenomena constitute a mass revolt against this vilification of national identity. In Europe, millions of similarly disenfranchised decent citizens are voting for new parties offering them an end to mass immigration, along with a pledge to resist Islamisation and to defend their national identity.

Some of these parties do give cause for legitimate concern on account of some of their historical connections. Some supporters may be motivated by racism or anti-Muslim prejudice. In other words, racists, fascists and bigots may be piggy-backing on the frustration of those with a legitimate desire to preserve western culture. Their motivation, however, is not the same. Millions want to defend western national identity based on tolerance, liberty and one law for all. These values are threatened by mass immigration and multiculturalism.

Fascists or white supremacists don’t want to stop immigration in order to preserve western decencies. They are motivated instead by hatred of others, lust for power and denial of the core principles of civilised society. The disturbing thing, though, is that because all nationalism is equally damned as unconscionable, increasing numbers feel they have no alternative but to vote for such parties, however noxious they may be.

If the nation state fails to survive, western society will revert to premodern tribalism: group fighting group for power and supremacy and deploying coercive measures to stifle opposition.

We can already see this happening. The onslaught by liberal universalists on the nation state has produced totalitarian identity politics, victim culture and brazen antisemitism once again stalking the corridors of Britain and Europe. Far from preventing bigotry and intolerance, the delegitimisation of the nation state and the corresponding demoralisation of western culture has in fact fomented them.

The desire of the vast majority to uphold their historic culture and identity, with democratically elected legislatures passing laws reflecting that shared national project, is not a route to the destruction of liberty, tolerance and decency. It is, in fact, the only way to defend them.

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Thousands of nationalist Saxons clash with riot police in East German city where man was stabbed to death 'by migrants' as vigilante mobs 'hunt down foreigners'

Several people were injured Monday as thousands of far-right protesters took to the streets in the eastern German city of Chemnitz where a knife killing, allegedly committed by a Syrian and an Iraqi, sparked racist mob attacks that were deplored by Chancellor Angela Merkel.

The right-wing protesters chanted 'We are the People' and the Nazi-era term 'Luegenpresse' (lying press) while displaying placards that read 'Stop the refugee flood' and 'Defend Europe', the latter adorned with an image of an automatic rifle.

Some carried banners or insignia of the far-right AfD and neo-Nazi NPD parties and other extremist groups, while a handful delivered the illegal right-handed Hitler salute, police said.

Left-wing counter protesters yelled slogans like 'Nazis out' and 'There's no right to Nazi propaganda,' at a larger group of right-wing demonstrators that retorted with 'We are louder, we are more' and 'Lying press.'

Of the estimated 800 people who took part in the first round of protests, about 50 were involved in violence and attacked police officers with bottles and stones, Chemnitz Police Chief Sonja Penzel said.

A Syrian teenager and an Afghan teenager were attacked in separate incidents but were not seriously hurt and a 30-year-old Bulgarian was also threatened, she said.

Penzel said police are still evaluating video footage and called for any witnesses to the violence to come forward.

Germany has denounced far-right groups 'spreading hatred on the streets' after hundreds of followers gathered to protest in the city of Chemnitz on Sunday.

Angela Merkel's spokesman said he condemns the groups 'in the strongest possible terms' after footage emerged of skinheads chasing a man of Arab appearance down the streets and throwing bottles at police.

He added that Germany would not tolerate 'vigilante justice'. 

Officers in riot gear pushed people back as they tried to get at those on the other side. The demonstrators from the right hurled bottles and firecrackers at the rival camp before starting off on a march.

Both groups took to the streets of Chemnitz after a 35-year-old German man was injured during a clash after a street festival and died early Sunday.  

A 22-year-old Iraqi and a 23-year-old Syrian have been arrested and charged with murder.

The stabbing happened around 3.15am on the sidelines of a street festival.

Police have denied rumours that the fight broke out after the alleged sexual harassment of a woman.

Prosecutor Christine Muecke told reporters Monday the slaying stemmed from a verbal confrontation that escalated. Two men were taken into custody - a 22-year-old Syrian citizen and a 21 year-old Iraqi citizen- and both were held on suspicion of manslaughter, Muecke said.

Initially around 100 people gathered after being urged on to the streets by a far-right football group who urged supporters to show 'who is in charge'.

While that demonstration passed off largely without event, a much larger group of 800 gathered later around a statue of Karl Marx, catching police by surprise.

During the violent demonstrations, marchers chanted 'we are the people! and 'this is our city!'

Following the demonstrations, Merkel spokesman Steffan Seibert said: 'We don't tolerate such unlawful assemblies and the hounding of people who look different or have different origins and attempts to spread hatred on the streets. 'That has no place in our cities and we, as the German government, condemn it in the strongest terms.

Tweeting about Sunday's incident, AfD politician Markus Frohnmaier said: 'If the state is no longer to protect citizens then people take to the streets and protect themselves. It's as simple as that!'

The violence in Chemnitz is likely to put further pressure on Merkel's conservatives, who last week faced accusations of ignoring the rise of far-right groups in the eastern state of Saxony, where Chemnitz lies.

Almost a quarter of Chemnitz voters supported the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party last year.

Merkel's decision in 2015 to let in about a million migrants, many fleeing wars in the Middle East, has fuelled support for far-right groups such as PEGIDA and the AfD, now the main opposition party in parliament.

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Women don’t have penises

Britain it might soon be a crime to express this scientific fact

Is it now a crime to tell the truth in Britain? It’s heading that way. At the weekend it was revealed that Merseyside Police are making ‘enquiries’ into a trans-sceptical group that distributed stickers saying ‘Women don’t have penises’. Yes, that’s right: the police, the actual police, are investigating a group for expressing what the vast majority of people consider to be a biological, social, actual fact: that if you have a penis you are not a female. What next: arrest people for saying the sky is blue or that Piers Morgan is a muppet?

The stickers, shaped like penises, were produced by a so-called TERF group. TERF stands for ‘trans-exclusionary radical feminist’ – that is, a feminist who doesn’t think men who have a sex change are real women – but it is really just an updated, PC word for ‘witch’. When trans-sceptical women are denounced as ‘TERFs’ by hordes of irate identitarians online, they are really being branded disobedient bitches, women who really ought to know their place. The ‘TERFs’ distributed their heretical stickers in the Merseyside area, including on the Antony Gormley sculptures that make up his piece ‘Another Place’ on Crosby Beach, and all hell broke loose.

Twitter went into meltdown. This is a hate crime, they said. These people genuinely believe it is a hate crime to say women don’t have penises. Arrest all biology teachers right away! Twitter snitches, who are legion, grassed on the TERFs to the mayor of Liverpool, Joe Anderson, who promised that he would get the police to ‘identify those responsible’ for these outrageous declarations of scientific truth. These sticker heretics are an affront to Liverpool’s history of ‘diversity’ and ‘equality’, he said. A fancy way of saying they are thoughtcriminals. And lo, the Merseyside Police duly got involved: ‘[W]e are aware of this matter and enquiries are being made.’

Consider what is being done here. Not only are the police making enquiries about the expression of an idea, which is something they should never do; but even worse, they are making enquiries about speech that simply said, ‘Women do not have penises’. But that is true. Or, to make a tiny concession to this era of relativism, this statement is considered by very many people to be true. If you have a penis, you are male. If you have a vagina, you are female. Of course people with penises should be at liberty to call themselves women and change their names and so on – but that doesn’t mean the rest of us have to accept that they really are women. They clearly are not.

How has it become so controversial to say this? Because the atmosphere around trans issues has become alarmingly stifling. Everything from saying ‘Women don’t have penises’ to having Scarlett Johansson star in a film about an alleged trans-man is now branded ‘transphobia’. Feminists who gather to discuss the Gender Recognition Act and the fact that it will allow almost anyone to identify as a woman are harassed, censored, and in some cases physically attacked. Woe betide anyone who turns up to a campus to raise questions about the transgender ideology: they can expect to be No Platformed by the moral guardians who govern student politics.

The end result is the truth itself has come to be outlawed. It is now genuinely risky to say that someone who has a penis is not a woman – that is, it is genuinely risky to engage in reasoned, rational discussion about sexual difference and biological reality. We are sleepwalking into a police state. In recent days the Metropolitan Police have decreed, in their infinite wisdom, that Boris Johnson didn’t commit a speechcrime when he criticised the niqab (the implication being that sometimes it can be a speechcrime to mock religion); the West Yorkshire Police threatened to arrest people who abused or mocked them on their Facebook page; and now Liverpool police are making enquiries about trans-sceptical speech. Every day people are arrested for so-called trolling. And a battery of laws, from hate-speech legislation to the Malicious Communications Act, is used to punish people for making off-colour jokes or saying super-rude things about MPs.

Enough. Get the cops out of public debate. Women don’t have penises, they just don’t, and it should never be a police matter to say so.

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Federal Court: First Amendment Protects Sharing Food With Homeless People

In a colorful decision that managed to invoke the Boston Tea Party, Lady Macbeth and Jesus of Nazareth, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Wednesday that feeding the homeless is “expressive conduct protected by the First Amendment.” The decision revives a challenge brought by a local chapter of Food Not Bombs, which sued Fort Lauderdale, Florida for requiring a permit to share food in public parks.

Thanks to the city's ordinance, Fort Lauderdale has become infamous for cracking down on compassion. In 2014, police arrested a 90-year-old man and two ministers who were simply trying to share food with the homeless.

“We are very pleased with this ruling, and we look forward to continuing our community organizing in Fort Lauderdale,” Nathan Pim, a member of Fort Lauderdale Food Not Bombs and a plaintiff in the case, said in a statement. “We hope we are one step closer to something we've fought for over many years—simply being able to help people without being threatened with arrest by people who should be working with us.”

Every week at Stranahan Park in downtown Fort Lauderdale, Food Not Bombs offers free vegetarian and vegan meals to the public. Although many of the participants at these events are homeless individuals, Food Not Bombs is not a charity.

Originally started in the early 1980s by anti-nuclear activists in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Food Not Bombs protests war and poverty. Today, this network of social justice pacifists claims over 5,000 chapters worldwide. Writing for the court, Judge Adalberto Jordan explained that for the Fort Lauderdale chapter, “providing food in a visible public space” is “an act of political solidarity meant to convey the organization’s message.”

But in October 2014, Fort Lauderdale enacted an ordinance that bans sharing food in public parks, unless the hosts obtain a “conditional use permit” from the city. Event organizers also must comply with the city’s regulations for “social services facilities,” which cover “outdoor food distribution centers…used to furnish meals to members of the public without cost or at a very low cost.”

In February 2015, Food Not Bombs sued the city, claiming that the ordinance and associated park rule violated their right to free speech and free association, and were “unconstitutionally vague.” A year later, a federal district court dismissed their case, and held that their food sharing events were outside the scope of the First Amendment because they did not convey a “particularized message.”

But the Supreme Court rejected that line of reasoning more than two decades ago. In its 1995 decision, Hurley v. Irish-American Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Group of Boston, the High Court ruled that Massachusetts could not force veterans organizing a St. Patrick’s Day parade to include gay, lesbian and bisexual individuals.

Writing for a unanimous court, Justice David Souter remarked that “the Constitution looks beyond written or spoken words as mediums of expression” and that “a narrow, succinctly articulable message is not a condition of constitutional protection.”

If the First Amendment were “confined to expressions conveying a ‘particularized message,’” Souter argued, then the Constitution “would never reach the unquestionably shielded painting of Jackson Pollock, music of Arnold Schoenberg, or Jabberwocky verse of Lewis Carroll.”

With that as precedent, the 11th Circuit ruled that to determine if an activity is expressive or not, “we ask whether the reasonable person would interpret it as some sort of message, not whether an observer would necessarily infer a specific message.” So for the Fort Lauderdale Food Not Bombs case, “the circumstances surrounding an event often help set the dividing line between activity that is sufficiently expressive and similar activity that is not.”

As Judge Jordan noted, walking or sitting down aren’t usually considered “expressive conduct,” but they certainly convey a message in the context of a picket line, a parade, or a sit-in. Likewise, when viewed in their full context, the Food Not Bombs events are “more than a picnic in the park.”

Since the chapter's events are open to the public, occur against a backdrop of controversial homeless policies in Fort Lauderdale, take place near city government buildings, and involve “tables and banners (including one with its logo) and distribut[ing] literature,” the court concluded that a “reasonable observer would interpret its food sharing events as conveying some sort of message.”

“History may have been quite different had the Boston Tea Party been viewed as mere dislike for a certain brew and not a political protest against the taxation of the American colonies without representation,” Jordan wrote.

Having ruled that Food Not Bombs does  have a First Amendment right to share food, the 11th Circuit sent the case back down to the lower court to determine if the city’s ordinance violates those rights. The City of Fort Lauderdale did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“The court’s opinion recognized sharing food with another human being is one of the oldest forms of human expression,” said Kirsten Anderson, litigation director at the Southern Legal Counsel and lead attorney on the case. “We think this decision strengthens our message to cities across the country that they need to invest in constructive solutions to homelessness instead of wasting government resources on punishing people who seek to offer aid.”

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Lauren Southern's visit to Australia



Under the heading "It’s OK To Be Right, But Careful What You Wish For Lauren Southern" there is an article in the far-left "New Matilda" by Dr Petra Bueskens, a Melbourne feminist, who offers several criticisms of Lauren Southern.  Her article is very long-winded, like most offerings in New Matilda, but I will try to pick out a few salient passages to reproduce below.

She has obviously been collecting for a long time examples of female assertiveness going well back into history and she spends a lot of time giving us those examples.  She uses those examples to claim that feminism is not a new thing and that it has always been influential in the development of Western civilization.

But there are two problems with that. The examples she gives are NOT representative examples of thinking in those times so any influence they had is purely conjectural.  The second problem is that she assumes that her feminine protesters in the past were similar to feminists today. I would argue that they are a totally different ilk.

Female protest througout history was protesting about formal rules and customs that limited the opportunities for women to show all their talents.  They protested discrimination against women.  Modern-day feminists are not like that.  They achieved equal opportunities long ago.  Testimony to that is the fact that there are now more female graduates than male coming out of our universities.

So modern day feminsts, having overcome discrimination, now discriminate against men.  They want equal numbers of males and females in all walks of life and are not at all slow to discriminate against men to achieve that.  If there is, for instance, a vacancy on a company board, feminists clamour for a female to be appointed, even if there is a male available who is better qualified for the post.  It is now males who are denied opportunities to show all their talents. Females are a privileged caste.

So modern-day feminists are hateful bigots.  And that is what Lauren protests about.  Dr Bueskens says Lauren cuts her nose off to spite her face when she criticizes feminists.  She does not.  She simply dissasociates herself from a gang of angry Harpies.  Females do perfectly well without the "assistance" of female haters.

And the follies go on.  Dr Bueskens says that the emergence of successful colonial societies such as Canada and Australia proves that multiculturalism is a good thing. It does not.  It proves that SOME immigrants can form an integrated society.  But that was never in question.  What disturbs many conservatives is that all immigrants are not equal and that some immigrants -- mainly Africans and Muslims -- just create problems for society while contributing little that is positive.  A big majority in the two groups mentioned are welfare dependent so do not even contribute their labour.

All men are NOT born equal nor are all immigrants . And all societies that I know of have criteria for who can be admitted and who cannot.  So Lauren is not going far in arguing that "indigestible" groups should be excluded where possible and their influence minimized.

Dr Bueskens sees Lauren only though the lens of her conventional Leftist prejudices, blindnesses, and contestable assumptions and therefore misses the real person.  I could go on to challenge more of her assertions but I am  in no doubt that I will never be able to clean out the Augean stables. But I think I have shown that, despite her lengthy article, she leaves out a lot of the relevant arguments and considerations. 


Southern arrived in Australia wearing an ‘It’s okay to be white’ t-shirt, designed purely to stir controversy and point out what she identifies as an asymmetrical discourse on race. Her core message on this tour is that “multiculturalism doesn’t work”, with little attention to the fact that colonial settler societies like Australia (like her home country of Canada) were built on immigration.

One of the key platforms of Southern’s videos is that the discourse of “political correctness” has become an orthodoxy shutting down free speech, and that the left should respond with ideas and debate rather than with protest, aggression, public take-downs and no-platforming. On this we can agree!

It is something the globally famous intellectual Jordan Peterson has forcefully put on the map in the last two years. However, I invoke Peterson not because of his position on free speech or because, like Southern, he is a “darling of the alt-right”, rather it is to point out something he often says about people at the very beginning of adulthood: you know nothing!  While I am not in full agreement with him on this (I have a daughter Southern’s age), it is clear, for all her defensive protestations, she knows nothing about the history of “western civilization” and nor, for that matter, do Peterson or Molyneux if they cannot see feminism as an integral part of it. 

From Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies to the Querelle de Femme, from Mary Astell’s A Serious Proposal to the Ladies to Mary Wollstoncraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, from the bluestockings to the fight for the Married Women’s Property Acts, from the Seneca Falls Convention to J.S. Mill and Harriet Taylor’s The Subjection of Women, from the suffrage movement and the New Woman to Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex; from Betty Friedan’s ‘problem with no name’ to Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch we have the clear articulation of a feminist voice invested in reason and rights that is the very epitome of free speech marshalled against the prevailing orthodoxy.

In Southern’s infinite wisdom – though here she is following the ignorance that characterises the alt-right’s approach to feminism – she assumes that feminism had nothing to do with the creation of “the west”, by which she is mostly referring to the transformations in society and culture associated with the European Enlightenment. In fact feminism was an integral and defining voice! You weren’t anybody unless you were invited to Madame de Staël’s salon and all the well-known philosophes, with the notable exception of Rousseau, were “feminists” (though this of course was not a term in use at the time).

The other assumption – again commonplace on the right – is that feminism is anti-rationality and illiberal. This is patently absurd since it was the desire to have “Woman right” (as it was then called) and the vote enshrined in law that was central to early modern feminist campaigns, as was the desire to own property, including property in the person, and enjoy equal civil rights. 

It is interesting to me that Canada is producing so many of these social media stars: people who were once on the left or saw themselves as liberals and have now undergone a YouTube conversion and seen the alt-right light  – Jordan Peterson, Janice Fiamengo, Lindsay Shepherd and Karen Straughan, as well as more established stars such as Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux. In the US there is Sam, Harris, Dave Rubin, Ben Shapiro and, more recently, Candace Owens.  The so-called “intellectual dark web” of left-to-right converts (as well as left-to-critical left converts) is growing apace.

In any event, the twist in this narrative is that with the institutionalisation of progressive agendas, the new right emerge as the “radicals”, the one’s “shaking the joint up”.  Conversely, those shutting down free speech, the supposed progressives, become the face of the establishment, the arbiters of what is and what is not allowed to be said.  Hence the concerns – that I too share – about the left’s more recent propensity to shut down free speech on contentious issues.

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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