It’s not really a paradox. In some circumstances, nationalism leads people to go to war with their neighbors. In other circumstances, it leads them to bond with their neighbors. <\/p>\n
In some circumstances, a strong Jewish or Christian or white or black identity will cause you to hate out-groups with whom you must compete for scarce resources. When this competition for resources is not intense, however, the need for hating out-groups is reduced. <\/p>\n
New York Times<\/a>: <\/p>\n This ethno-nationalist renaissance presents an odd paradox. European nationalists who at one time might have gone to war with one another now promote a kind of New Right rainbow coalition, in which sovereign states steadfastly maintain their ethnic and cultural identities in service of some larger \u201cWestern\u201d ideal. This \u201cethno-pluralism,\u201d as New Right activists call it, is not based on Western liberal notions of equality or the primacy of individual rights but in opposition to other cultures, usually nonwhite, that they say are threatening to overtake Europe and, indeed, the entire Western world by means of immigration. The threat to the West is also often cast in vague cultural terms as a kind of internal decay.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The stronger your in-group identity, the more likely you are to have negative feelings about out-groups. This social identity theory applies to almost all groups be they Jewish or Christian or Muslim or racial. <\/p>\n That question has deep roots in Germany. In 1918, the German philosopher Oswald Spengler published the first volume of \u201cThe Decline of the West,\u201d arguing that cultures decline as regularly and predictably as any other organic entity \u2014 and that Western civilization was near the end of its cycle. Germany had just lost a war, and Spengler\u2019s book struck a chord with disillusioned Germans looking to explain their sense of downfall. Spengler belonged to a loosely defined group of German thinkers called the Conservative Revolutionaries, who argued that Western decline was the inevitable result of materialism and soulless democracy. They opposed the fractious parliamentary democracy of the time, the liberal values of the French Revolution and ultimately modernity itself. They called for national revival by way of an authoritarian leader who could bring about an almost-mystical regeneration of the Volk \u2014 in part by pitting them against the Volk of other nations. \u201cA people is only really such in relation to other peoples,\u201d Spengler wrote, \u201cand the substance of this actuality comes out in natural and ineradicable oppositions, in attack and defense, hostility and war.\u201d<\/p>\n …But the German New Right has other influences as well. Nils Wegner, a young writer who translates English-language books into German for Kubitschek\u2019s publishing house, follows the American alt-right scene with great interest \u2014 listening, for example, to podcasts by Richard Spencer, the white-supremacist leader who once declared before a crowd of acolytes: \u201cHail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory!\u201d Wegner told me that the American idea of a \u201cracially defined ethno-state\u201d would \u201ccome across as pretty weird over here,\u201d because Europeans are not comfortable putting identity matters in racial terms. I asked him if this discomfort was substantive or merely semantic, and his answer was surprisingly forthright. \u201cI would say that the main difference is the semantic difference,\u201d he said. \u201cAlso, the modus operandi is not really the same.\u201d Unlike alt-right activists in the United States, he went on to explain, activists on the European New Right tend to avoid appearing alongside \u201corthodox\u201d right groups \u2014 neo-Nazis \u2014 because \u201cthe look\u201d would impede their effort to appear as a \u201cnew kind of postmodern\u201d patriotic movement.<\/p>\n Wegner said another difference was a matter of intensity. The Americans, he said, see their country as collapsing, and therefore they advocate revolutionary action \u2014 the creation of a white ethno-state in the Pacific Northwest, for example. European New Right activists don\u2019t see their circumstances as that dire, he continued. They would be content with a \u201croll back\u201d on immigration.<\/p>\n …One sympathetic teacher suggested that Kubitschek read the work of the historian Ernst Nolte, known for a controversial essay he wrote around that time titled \u201cThe Past That Won\u2019t Go Away.\u201d Nolte portrayed Nazism as a reaction to the \u201cexistential threat\u201d posed by Bolshevism and suggested Bolshevik \u201cclass murder\u201d was comparable to the Holocaust, calling it the \u201clogical and factual predecessor to the Nazi \u2018racial murder.\u2019\u2009\u201d Nolte\u2019s revisionism sparked a divisive debate in Germany known as the \u201chistorians\u2019 dispute,\u201d and though Nolte was denounced as a Hitler apologist, several conservative German historians and journalists supported him. For Kubitschek, Nolte\u2019s work has been a lifelong influence.<\/p>\n …The source of the contempt, according to Kubitschek, was Germany\u2019s \u201cmemory politics,\u201d the effort by Germans to confront their Nazi past, which involves tempering any nationalist urges. New Right thinkers see that restraint not as a virtue but as a symptom of a deeply ingrained self-hate \u2014 a hatred that must be overcome for Germany to be great again.<\/p>\n In January, Bj\u00f6rn H\u00f6cke, the AfD leader, voiced a similar lament in a speech at a beer hall in Dresden, and much more caustically. Germans are \u201cthe only people in the world who have planted a monument of disgrace in the heart of their capital,\u201d he said, referring to the Holocaust memorial near the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. German history was being made \u201crotten and ridiculous,\u201d he said. \u201cIt cannot and must not go on like this! There is no moral duty to dissolution!\u201d The speech provoked a national uproar, and even some politicians within AfD criticized it.<\/p>\n Kubitschek saw it as a tactical error. H\u00f6cke\u2019s comments, he said, were \u201ccorrect in substance but wrong in tone.\u201d<\/p>\n …Kubitschek casually mentioned that he would not mind at all if a strongman came to replace Merkel, if that was the only way to correct her decision to allow the migrants to enter Germany. In a time of great peril, he noted soberly, a leader must act beyond the law. He cited Carl Schmitt, the conservative political theorist who criticized parliamentary democracy and aligned with the Nazis after they took power: \u201cSovereign is he who decides on the exception.\u201d Merkel herself had acted outside the law by opening the border, Kubitschek said, and that proved she was sovereign. And yet, he continued, \u201cI\u2019d have absolutely nothing against it if someone came along and with the same sovereignty did the opposite. Someone who would say: \u2018The experiment is over. The Parliament won\u2019t be consulted. I will prop up with my power the administration, the organs of the state, the police\u2019 \u2014 who would in any case be supportive \u2014 \u2018the border patrol, the military, and we will end this experiment.\u2019 That means: borders shut. Test to see who can be assimilated; they can stay. Those who can\u2019t be assimilated, they\u2019ve got to go.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n This is an amazingly fair and even-handed article from the New York Times.<\/p>\n Life is frequently a war over scarce resources and different groups have different interests and different understandings about what is good and right and Godly. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It’s not really a paradox. In some circumstances, nationalism leads people to go to war with their neighbors. In other circumstances, it leads them to bond with their neighbors. In some circumstances, a strong Jewish or Christian or white or … Continue reading