Wez
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TM – I’m well aware of the history you describe but to be a ‘nationalist’ you have to have a nation with which to identify so the history of nation states is not a ‘different thing’. When you speak of ‘popular sentiment’ this is just another form of tribalism which is rooted in the psychological need for the weak to identify with the strong and, as you say, it can take many forms like religion, secret societies, sports teams, cultural and ethnic values or just plain racism.
I quite like this definition as it implies that the ideology was a spin-off of technological advances – very Marxian:
‘The origins and early history of nation-states are disputed. A major theoretical question is: “Which came first, the nation or the nation-state?” Scholars such as Steven Weber, David Woodward, Michel Foucault and Jeremy Black[10][11][12] have advanced the hypothesis that the nation-state did not arise out of political ingenuity or an unknown undetermined source, nor was it a political invention; rather, it is an inadvertent by-product of 15th-century intellectual discoveries in political economy, capitalism, mercantilism, political geography, and geography[13][14] combined with cartography[15][16] and advances in map-making technologies.[17][18] It was with these intellectual discoveries and technological advances that the nation-state arose.’I’ve always thought of nationalism as as a form of tribalism that the princes (and later Bourgeoisie) used to initially split from the Holy Roman Empire and the Pope in the name of Protestantism during the Reformation?
Has it not been a long standing aim of the US to destabilize Russia with the aim of regime change? Presidents come and go but the quest for global hegemony remains. Who makes these long-term plans if not some consistently murky group within the establishment?
ALB – It has long been known that the US has a long term strategy of destabilizing Russia with the aim of regime change. Presidents come and go but the aim of global hegemony stays the same – who makes these decisions if not some kind of ‘deep state’?
As far as I know ‘Death Wish’ was a cheesy Hollywood movie starring Charles Bronson so I fail to see what that’s got to do with anything? Lifelong frustration, misery and hatred do indeed feed the need for self destruction symbolized by the killing of others. Any organism that cannot successfully react to stimuli will become violent and destructive, and as you rightly point out in the case of the international working class, self destructive. I have always considered your own obsession with Armageddon ( world war 3) as an example of depression and self destructive psychology. Anyways I don’t propose to debate this all again but the link to my essay on the subject is always open for anyone to read: https://wezselecta.blogspot.com/2015/09/the-death-instinct.html#comment-form
TM – You expressed surprise at the working class’ self destructive urges so I’m just reminding you that the phenomena is well understood.
TM – ‘The comments section of the above video shows just how patriotism can drive our fellow workers so crazy that they DELIGHT in and APPLAUD the prospect of global destruction and the violent death of all.’
No mystery there TM – it’s called ‘the Death Instinct’.
C – Anyone who does an online search concerning the various contemporary wars, genocides and various disasters would never find our analysis. The homepage should be there to answer anyone’s search for why these things are happening, not a debating forum. It may well be that we have no comrades available for such day-to-day work so I’m only asking. This is obviously one of the reasons why we don’t have a large presence in the digital world.
I’ve often wondered if, in the absence of the asteroid that killed them, some dinosaur species would have evolved into intelligent technologically advanced animals like ourselves and so would have replaced us mammals? Modern theory seemed to have displaced the old idea that they were slow moving and slow minded reptiles. With the discovery of another planet with signs of life it might be that forms other than mammals can evolve technological societies. Or are mammals and great apes unique in this regard?
DJP – Ollman went out of his way to demystify dialectics however the rest of the book is dedicated to the superior kind of ‘philosophical toolbox’ (as he calls it) that enables us, among other things, to cut away the ideological overgrowth of traditional (in this country) economic and political analysis. The triad of ‘thesis-antithesis-synthesis is something other philosophers have concocted and is never mentioned by either Hegel or Marx.
DJP – “Dialectics” is just a word that has become overinflated.’
‘It just refers to a movement or development of something through the pull and push of opposing forces or arguments.’I think it is rather more than just a word that has become ‘overinflated’ as it represents a ‘continental’ approach to philosophical analysis that is almost entirely absent in the purely ‘analytical’ philosophy that is dominant in the British/American intellectual tradition. It is far too ‘superficial’ to speak of it as merely a form of dialogue after the insights it provided for Marx and others. You speak of Marx’s empirical research of economics preceding any dialectical analysis whereas I think his conclusions were only possible by treating such data within a dialectical/historical perspective. As always I recommend Bertell Ollman’s book ‘Dance of the Dialectic’as an introduction to the rules and procedures of post Marxian dialectical analysis.
Looks like another reinvention of the wheel. I’d give it a read although the price is above my pay grade as a pensioner. A strange assessment of China saying it is neither capitalist or socialist! A crumbling state capitalist regime that has long ago succumbed to the realities of global capitalism despite all of the propaganda. The author would probably have said the same about ‘soviet’ Russia and we all know how that turned out.
DJP – ‘Why the mismatch? Clickbait.’
Very cynical but probably true. I would like to think they lure in reactionaries who think they are going to get their prejudices confirmed only to find them subverted by a rational discourse.
