Towards a Redefinition of Nationalism

The first step in initiating an ideological backswing, a reconstruction of thought necessary to challenge dominant presuppositions in which all modern political discourse is confined, is to reclaim the term “nationalism”, in both its conceptual and linguistic dimensions. By “nationalism”, I am not referring to the crass flag-and-dirt worship popularized as “patriotism”, which demands unwavering belief in the legitimacy and necessity of the state. Nationalism is allegiance and solidarity towards a respective collective or “nation”--a neology intended to subvert the notion that a nation is a state.

An important point to consider, when approaching the topic of race relations, is that the United States is a prison of nations. It is composed of loose collections of deracinated people, displaced from their native history, customs, and identity, and is a simulacrum of a pluralistic, free society. While many underscore the nation’s failure at metastasizing shallow conceptions of “pluralism” (political incoherence), “individual liberty” (atomization), “equality” (systemic assimilation of the minority into the majority’s institutional pathology), and “opportunity” (prospect of affording a lifestyle rendered possible primarily through resource extraction bonanzas and the incremental opening-up of foreign markets), few have railed against the United States as a combat zone, a stage for a soft war between nations of people.

What exists in the United States and beyond is a chafing struggle between nations, an insidious war that people are born into involuntarily. This soft war, which exploits the language of universality to advance an agenda of homogeneity, and which mimics all the elements of full-blown war (string of defeats and ceasefire treaties enforced by the armed hand of the state, with the systematic expropriation of the defeated by the winners), is not brought about by “racism, xenophobia, parochialism,” etc.--which are all fashionable buzzwords brandished in modern politics. The problem of unresolved social strife and its ramifications of alienation, atomization, repression of dissent, intensifying ethnic hatred, political violence and extremism, collapse of community, and deracination, is not a question of ever-enduring inequalities in power between warring nations; rather, forced integration of conflicting social groups, the attempt to systematically assimilate them into the same intimate economic and social bath through manipulation of the rhetoric of universal human rights, is the true failure of the Western World. The U.S. demands universal solidarity from its citizens when many of them cannot even identify with their neighbor across the street, usurps communitarian local rule by monopolizing law and ideology, censures nationalists and separatists of all stripes (who are rightfully enemies of the American state), and subdues the rise of national consciousness with abortive promises of universal self-determination.

There, at one critical point in history, existed a genuine Left, a Left that was unequivocally committed to the ideals of self-determination and national sovereignty. For all intents and purposes, the Old Left, and with it the promise of a revolutionary class to challenge the entrenching pattern of globalism, New Class managerialism, entrenching statism, and atomistic individualism, is gone. The New “Left” betrays every noble intention and ideal the Old Left was renowned for. Gone are the substantive demands for local governance (communitarian municipalism), for free-market anti-capitalism (anarcho-mutualism), for ethnopluralism (as opposed to “multiculturalism”), and for immediacy of action, however violent it may be. What exists now, in modern society, is not the Left, in any meaningful sense, but rather, a flimsy simulacrum that vaunts the rhetoric of the Old Left without understanding or committing to it. The irony lies in the fact that the recreational Leftists who cling to this lifestylism, and who putatively champion for the underprivileged, oppressed, etc., are the bitterly-hated class enemies of the downtrodden, including revolutionaries of the criminal (and non-criminal) working class, the racial underclasses, the lumpenproletariats, and other supposed dregs of society. The political narrative of the New Left, derisively referred to as “Cultural Marxism” by the Right, must be deconstructed completely in order to enable the emergence of alternative, subversive political thought.

Omni-separatism, or the right to national self-determination as extended to every race, religious or ethnic group, and political enclave, is perhaps the most viable, and elegant, solution to the problem of Liberal hegemony. The realization of liberation from pervasive soft war is a collective effort to be shared by the best elements of humanity, including radical ideologues, racial nationalists, pan-secessionists, dissident separatists, and other political déclassé elements. The struggle of the periphery against the Liberal center will continue to intensify as long as patterns of systemic assimilation and forced integration are enforced by the militaristic hand of the American empire. It is the duty of the radical, from the Left to the Right, to expedite this collapse for the promise of enduring peace and liberation from global hegemony.