Thomas_More
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Antifascists are fascists in that they oppose free speech and wish to silence those of another opinion.
No wonder they are on both sides of the front line in Ukraine.Anti-Fascists recently blocked a peace march in Germany. Anti-Fascists also hijack workers’ and trades union demonstrations, provoking the police.
The European heads of state who are warmongering against Russia are supported by Anti-Fascists and some of these have joined the Ukrainian army. (Paradoxically, because Putinists throw the name “Nazi” at the Ukrainians).
The rightwingers in Europe who are anti-war are called “fascists.”
WSWS is obsessed with Fascism, which does not exist any more. It’s an emotive word that the Leninist Left always toss around.
I am more worried by Trump being in the hands of Washington’s and Europe’s NeoCon warmongers who want WW3.
US move to resume nuclear testing.
European heads still doing their utmost to provoke a nuclear war, as well as sabotaging their own economic interests. Still no explanation to be found.
Nationalist upsurgents in Japan unwittingly revealing how fake, western and foreign their nationalism is, by condemning homosexuality.
Homosexuality was an integral part of samurai culture and was never persecuted, but valued, in Old Japan. This was another of the many cultural aspects shared by Old Japan with Ancient Greece.Nationalism is a fraud anyway – as Japan’s “national flag”, an American ensign pilfered from a US merchant vessel by Meiji nationalists in the 19th century.
Trump now on direct warpath against Russia.
As the Ukrainian state loses more and more, European governments might launch a war with Russia in order to bring in the US.
They keep asking, “Would you defend us if Russia attacks?”, which could be whispered, “If we can get Russia to attack us, would you defend us?”True. All I meant was that the existence of, say, the English nation-state under, say, Elizabeth Tudor, does not mean there was nationalism too. Unless one says there was, but in the form of protestantism.
The popular sentiment, instilled by state brainwashing, media and schooling, of “nation for nation’s sake” emerges in the late 18th century and doesn’t really take off until the late Victorian era.
Then it rises throughout European states more or less simultaneously.
The nation-state evolved before popular nationalism. Indeed, the Tudor and Stuart state was fraught with internal dissent and its subjects divided in earnest by religion, with English Catholics mortal enemies, or considered mortal enemies, of the state in spite of being English subjects.
That is what I meant.
But the nation-state’s origins is a different thing from nationalism, by which is meant the popular sentiment of that name.
Loyalty was to princes and the Church (whichever Church is one’s Church). The Gunpowder Plot conspirators were English, but gave their lives to kill the sanctified and legally consecrated King of England. Guy Fawkes was a Yorkshireman, and fought for Spain against England.
https://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2025/10/on-eve-of-destruction.html?m=1
Evident now that total war, and soon, is now the agenda.
The Humanists, like More and Erasmus, saw the Henrician Supremacy (which was not Protestant) and Luther’s revolt as signs of the disintegration of Christendom, and thus opposed it, whilst pursuing their own Humanist reforms under the aegis of Rome.
Nation-states were emerging and an English nationalism supported the Elizabethan war against Spain. But this nationalism was still tied to religion and was really anti-papist. The rural population, subject to enclosures, was still predominantly Catholic and had supported Mary’s march on London in 1553.
Of course, the British school system mispresents history in modern nationalist terms.Spain, England’s main enemy at the time, had become the first nation-state with the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella, and yet nationalism was absent. Like Reformation England, religion was foremost. The rise of nation-states which remained Catholic was expressed by the Counter Reformation, which was not a counter reformation but was the Reformation in the Catholic countries. It produced ecclesiastical, but Catholic, independence in Spain, with episcopal loyalty going to the monarch rather than the Pope, and Gallicanism in the Church of France, promoting monarchical and ecclesiastical centrism.
In the German states battling the Emperor, the Lutheran revolt was in fact reactionary, championing the feudal princes against Imperial centrism. It delayed the rise of Germany as a unified state until the late 19th century and kept the princes in control and the bourgeoisie in subjection.
I never said nationalism caused the world wars. I said Germany’s late arrival on the scene of capitalism and of colonial aspirations created the conditions which produced the German wars in Europe (WW1 & 2).
The first nation-state was Spain. But nationalism originated in Britain.
