Anti Nationalist Quotes

The basic distortions in the media are not innocent errors, for they are not random; rather they move in the same overall direction again and again, favoring management over labor, corporatism over anti-corporatism, the affluent over the poor, private enterprise over socialism, Whites over Blacks, males over females, officialdom over protesters, conventional politics over dissidence, anticommunism and arms-race militarism over disarmament, national chauvinism over internationalism, US dominance of the Third World over revolutionary or populist nationalist change. The press does many things and serves many functions but its major role, its irreducible responsibility, is to continually recreate a view of reality supportive of existing social and economic class power.

If you like war, be a nationalist. If you like peace, be a citizen of the world.

by 1950, caught up increasingly in our own global vision of anti-Communism, we chose not to see this war as primarily a colonial/anticolonial war, and we had begun to underwrite most of the French costs. Where our money went our rhetoric soon followed. We adjusted our public statements, and much of our journalism, to make it seem as if this was a war of Communists against anti-Communists, instead, as the people of Vietnam might have seen it, a war of a colonial power against an indigenous nationalist force.

YOU DON’T HAVE TO ALWAYS TAKE SIDES! Did you know, that it is entirely possible to disagree with BOTH self-proclaimed nationalists & those deemed anti-nationals, BOTH right-wing & left-wing hardcores, BOTH ultra-religious people & atheists, BOTH vegans & meat-eaters, BOTH CrossFitters & non-CrossFitters, BOTH ‘cardio’ & ‘non-cardio’ folks, AND BOTH ‘low-carbers’ & ‘high-carbers’?! It’s called THINKING FOR YOURSELF! It gives you an identity. It‘s a highly pleasurable job too; it involves telling people off. I highly recommend it!

nationalist or anti-imperialist struggle is a struggle about colonialism before it becomes a struggle against colonialism.

As for those not directly affected by this struggle, it would help if more conversations could hold greater complexity—the ability to acknowledge that the Israelis who came to Palestine in the 1940s were survivors of genocide, desperate refugees, many of whom had no other options, and that they were settler colonists who participated in the ethnic cleansing of another people. That they were victims of white supremacy in Europe being passed the mantle of whiteness in Palestine. That Israelis are nationalists in their own right and that their country has long been enlisted by the United States to act as a kind of subcontracted military base in the region. All of this is true all at once. Contradictions like these don’t fit comfortably within the usual binaries of anti-imperialism (colonizer/colonized) or the binaries of identity politics (white/racialized)—but if Israel-Palestine teaches us anything, it might be that binary thinking will never get us beyond partitioned selves, or partitioned nations.

Consider the great Samuel Clemens. Huckleberry Finn is one of the few books that all American children are mandated to read: Jonathan Arac, in his brilliant new study of the teaching of Huck, is quite right to term it 'hyper-canonical.' And Twain is a figure in American history as well as in American letters. The only objectors to his presence in the schoolroom are mediocre or fanatical racial nationalists or 'inclusivists,' like Julius Lester or the Chicago-based Dr John Wallace, who object to Twain's use—in or out of 'context'—of the expression 'nigger.' An empty and formal 'debate' on this has dragged on for decades and flares up every now and again to bore us. But what if Twain were taught as a whole? He served briefly as a Confederate soldier, and wrote a hilarious and melancholy account, The Private History of a Campaign That Failed. He went on to make a fortune by publishing the memoirs of Ulysses Grant. He composed a caustic and brilliant report on the treatment of the Congolese by King Leopold of the Belgians. With William Dean Howells he led the Anti-Imperialist League, to oppose McKinley's and Roosevelt's pious and sanguinary war in the Philippines. Some of the pamphlets he wrote for the league can be set alongside those of Swift and Defoe for their sheer polemical artistry. In 1900 he had a public exchange with Winston Churchill in New York City, in which he attacked American support for the British war in South Africa and British support for the American war in Cuba. Does this count as history? Just try and find any reference to it, not just in textbooks but in more general histories and biographies. The Anti-Imperialist League has gone down the Orwellian memory hole, taking with it a great swirl of truly American passion and intellect, and the grand figure of Twain has become reduced—in part because he upended the vials of ridicule over the national tendency to religious and spiritual quackery, where he discerned what Tocqueville had missed and far anticipated Mencken—to that of a drawling, avuncular fabulist.

Of course colonial governance can only return with the consent of the country in question. The nationalist leaders in developing countries are probably not eager to see this happen. But the people- given those decades of ‘anti-colonial disaster’- possibly are.

One of the ironies of twenty-first-century politics is how the nationalistic, anti-immigration activists of the Tea Party often extol Reagan as their hero. However passionately Reagan favored tax cutting or getting rid of “government waste,” his outlook was fundamentally globalist and even a touch utopian.

In the anti-Communist atmosphere of the Cold War, U.S. support of right-wing military dictatorships -Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Manuel Odria in Peru, and Marcos Pérez Jiménez in Venezuela - at the expense of outspoken nationalists or left-wing regimes, was rationalized in the name of national security.

The idea that an understanding of the genocide, that a memory of the holocausts, can only lead people to want to dismantle the system, is erroneous. The continuing appeal of nationalism suggests that the opposite is truer, namely that an understanding of genocide has led people to mobilize genocidal armies, that the memory of holocausts has led people to perpetrate holocausts. The sensitive poets who remembered the loss, the researchers who documented it, have been like the pure scientists who discovered the structure of the atom. Applied scientists used the discovery to split the atom’s nucleus, to produce weapons which can split every atom’s nucleus; Nationalists used the poetry to split and fuse human populations, to mobilize genocidal armies, to perpetrate new holocausts.

Had Schleicher been successful in his leadership of the German government at the end of 1932, he would probably have headed a very moderate, essentially anti-Nazi form of nationalist authoritarianism that would have avoided a sharp break with the republican constitution and promoted a reflationary, reformist economic policy along Keynesian or New Deal lines to revive the economy and conciliate German society.

But there was a pulling back in the Middle East, and it had two major consequences: it abetted the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS) in Iraq and Syria, and it contributed to the massive outflow of refugees from that region into Europe. That outflow in turn helped to create the anti-immigration backlash that fueled the British withdrawal from the European Union and the rise of populist/nationalist politics inside almost every EU member state. It

Conservatism, though a necessary element in any stable society, is not a social program; in its paternalistic, nationalistic, and power-adoring tendencies it is often closer to socialism than true liberalism; and with its traditionalistic, anti-intellectual, and often mystical propensities it will never, except in short periods of disillusionment, appeal to the young and all those others who believe that some changes are desirable if this world is to become a better

What would have happened if Einstein had advanced something equally new in the sphere of religion or politics? English people would have found elements of Prussianism in his theory; anti-Semites would have regarded it as a Zionist plot; nationalists in all countries would have found it tainted with lily-livered pacifism, and proclaimed it a mere dodge for escaping military service. All the old-fashioned professors would have approached Scotland Yard to get the importation of his writings prohibited. Teachers favourable to him would have been dismissed. He, meantime, would have captured the Government of some backward country, where it would have become illegal to teach anything except his doctrine, which would have grown into a mysterious dogma not understood by anybody. Ultimately the truth or falsehood of his doctrine would be decided on the battlefield, without the collection of any fresh evidence for or against it. This method is the logical outcome of William James’s will to believe.

To what extent did Castro at this point conceal secret communist purposes? He later said that he hid radical views in order to hold the anti-Batista coalition together, and this was probably true. But, though a radical, there is no conclusive evidence that he was then a Communist or even a Marxist-Leninist. Whatever he later became, he began as a romantic, left-wing nationalist—in his own phrase, a “utopian Socialist.” He had tried to read Das Kapital at the University of Havana but, according to his own account, bogged down on page 370.

The truth was that history—and in Indochina we were on the wrong side of it—was a hard taskmaster and from the early to the middle sixties, when we were making those fateful decisions, we had almost no choices left. Our options had been steadily closing down since 1946, when the French Indochina War began. That was when we had the most options, and the greatest element of choice. But we had granted, however reluctantly, the French the right to return and impose their will on the Vietnamese by force; and by 1950, caught up increasingly in our own global vision of anti-Communism, we chose not to see this war as primarily a colonial/anticolonial war, and we had begun to underwrite most of the French costs. Where our money went our rhetoric soon followed. We adjusted our public statements, and much of our journalism, to make it seem as if this was a war of Communists against anti-Communists, instead, as the people of Vietnam might have seen it, a war of a colonial power against an indigenous nationalist force. By the time the Kennedy-Johnson team arrived and started talking about all their options, like it or not (and they did not even want to think about it) they had in fact almost no options at all.

Anti-Semitism is akin to nationalism and its best ally. They are of a kind because a nation that, without territory or state power, has wandered through two thousand years of world history is a living refutation of the whole nationalist ideology that derives the concept of a nation exclusively from factors of power politics. Anti-Semitism has never had roots among workers. It has always been a middle-class and small-peasant affair. Today, when these classes face their greatest crisis, it has become to them a kind of religion, or at least a substitute for religion. Nationalism and anti-Semitism dominate the German domestic political picture. They are the barred organs of fascism, whose pseudo-revolutionary shrieks drown out the softer tremolo of social reaction.

Conservatism, though a necessary element in any stable society, is not a social program; in its paternalistic, nationalistic, and power-adoring tendencies it is often closer to socialism than true liberalism; and with its traditionalistic, anti-intellectual, and often mystical propensities it will never, except in short periods of disillusionment, appeal to the young and all those others who believe that some changes are desirable if this world is to become a better place. A conservative movement, by its very nature, is bound to be a defender of established privilege and to lean on the power of government for the protection of privilege. The essence of the liberal position, however, is the denial of all privilege, if privilege is understood in its proper and original meaning of the state granting and protecting rights to some which are not available on equal terms to others.

From the early stages of his campaign and right into the Oval Office, Donald Trump has spoken harshly about the institutions and principles that make up the foundation of open government. In the process, he has systematically degraded political discourse in the United States, shown an astonishing disregard for facts, libeled his predecessors, threatened to “lock up” political rivals, referred to mainstream journalists as “the enemy of the American people,” spread falsehoods about the integrity of the U.S. electoral process, touted mindlessly nationalistic economic and trade policies, vilified immigrants and the countries from which they come, and nurtured a paranoid bigotry toward the followers of one of the world’s foremost religions. To officials overseas who have autocratic tendencies, these outbursts are catnip. Instead of challenging anti-democratic forces, Trump is a comfort to them--a provider of excuses.

Even the cinema stories of fabulous Hollywood are loaded. One has only to listen to the cheers of an African audience as Hollywood’s heroes slaughter red Indians or Asiatics to understand the effectiveness of this weapon. For, in the developing continents, where the colonialist heritage has left a vast majority still illiterate, even the smallest child gets the message contained in the blood and thunder stories emanating from California. And along with murder and the Wild West goes an incessant barrage of anti-socialist propaganda, in which the trade union man, the revolutionary, or the man of dark skin is generally cast as the villain, while the policeman, the gum-shoe, the Federal agent — in a word, the CIA — type spy is ever the hero. Here, truly, is the ideological under-belly of those political murders which so often use local people as their instruments. While Hollywood takes care of fiction, the enormous monopoly press, together with the outflow of slick, clever, expensive magazines, attends to what it chooses to call ‘news. Within separate countries, one or two news agencies control the news handouts, so that a deadly uniformity is achieved, regardless of the number of separate newspapers or magazines; while internationally, the financial preponderance of the United States is felt more and more through its foreign correspondents and offices abroad, as well as through its influence over inter-national capitalist journalism. Under this guise, a flood of anti-liberation propaganda emanates from the capital cities of the West, directed against China, Vietnam, Indonesia, Algeria, Ghana and all countries which hack out their own independent path to freedom. Prejudice is rife. For example, wherever there is armed struggle against the forces of reaction, the nationalists are referred to as rebels, terrorists, or frequently ‘communist terrorists'!

There is one point of phraseology which I ought to explain here to forestall any misunderstanding. I use throughout the term "liberal" in the original, nineteenth-century sense in which it is still current in Britain. In current American usage it often means very nearly the opposite of this. It has been part of the camouflage of leftish movements in this country, helped by the muddleheadedness of many who really believe in liberty, that "liberal" has come to mean the advocacy of almost every kind of government control. I am still puzzled why those in the United States who truly believe in liberty should not only have allowed the left to appropriate this almost indispensable term but should even have assisted by beginning to use it themselves as a term of opprobrium. This seems to be particularly regrettable because of the consequent tendency of many true liberals to describe themselves as conservatives. It is true, of course, that in the struggle against the believers in the all-powerful state the true liberal must sometimes make common cause with the conservative, and in some circumstances, as in contemporary Britain, he has hardly any other way of actively working for his ideals. But true liberalism is still distinct from conservatism, and there is danger in the two being confused. Conservatism, though a necessary element in any stable society, is not a social program; in its paternalistic, nationalistic, and power-adoring tendencies it is often closer to socialism than true liberalism; and with its traditionalistic, anti-intellectual, and often mystical propensities it will never, except in short periods of disillusionment, appeal to the young and all those others who believe that some changes are desirable if this world is to become a better place. A conservative movement, by its very nature, is bound to be a defender of established privilege and to lean on the power of absolute government for the protection of privilege. The essence of the liberal position, however, is the denial of all privilege, if privilege is understood in its proper and original meaning of the state granting and protecting rights to some which are not available on equal terms to others

The Right in the United States today is a social and political movement controlled almost totally by men but built largely on the fear and ignorance of women. The quality of this fear and the pervasiveness of this ignorance are consequences of male sexual domination over women. Every accommodation that women make to this domination, however apparently stupid, self-defeating, or dan- gerous, is rooted in the urgent need to survive somehow on male terms. Inevitably this causes women to take the rage and contempt they feel for the men who actually abuse them, those close to them, and project it onto others, those far away, foreign, or different. Some women do this by becoming right-wing patriots, nationalists determined to triumph over populations thousands of miles removed. Some women become ardent racists, anti-Semites, or homophobes. Some women develop a hatred of loose or destitute women, pregnant teenage girls, all persons unemployed or on welfare. Some hate individuals who violate social conventions, no matter how superficial the violations. Some become antagonistic to ethnic groups other than their own or to religious groups other than their own, or they develop a hatred of those political convictions that contradict their own. Women cling to irrational hatreds, focused particularly on the unfamiliar, so that they will not murder their fathers, husbands, sons, brothers, lovers, the men with whom they are intimate, those who do hurt them and cause them grief. Fear of a greater evil and a need to be protected from it intensify the loyalty of women to men who are, even when dangerous, at least known quantities. Because women so displace their rage, they are easily controlled and manipulated haters. Having good reason to hate, but not the courage to rebel, women require symbols of danger that justify their fear. The Right provides these symbols of danger by designating clearly defined groups of outsiders as sources of danger. The identities of the dangerous outsiders can can change over time to meet changing social circumstances--for example, racism can be encouraged or contained; anti-Semitism can be provoked or kept dormant; homophobia can be aggravated or kept under the surface—but the existence of the dangerous outsider always functions for women simultaneously as deception, diversion, painkiller, and threat.

A known fact may be so unbearable that it is habitually pushed aside and not allowed to enter into logical processes, or on the other hand it may enter into every calculation and yet never be admitted as a fact, even in one’s own mind. Every nationalist is haunted by the belief that the past can be altered. He spends part of his time in a fantasy world in which things happen as they should – in which, for example, the Spanish Armada was a success or the Russian Revolution was crushed in 1918 – and he will transfer fragments of this world to the history books whenever possible. Much of the propagandist writing of our time amounts to plain forgery. Material facts are suppressed, dates altered, quotations removed from their context and doctored so as to change their meaning. Events which, it is felt, ought not to have happened are left unmentioned and ultimately denied.fn6 In 1927 Chiang Kai-Shek boiled hundreds of Communists alive, and yet within ten years he had become one of the heroes of the Left. The realignment of world politics had brought him into the anti-Fascist camp, and so it was felt that the boiling of the Communists ‘didn’t count’, or perhaps had not happened.

Einstein’s first public collision with this anti-Semitism came in the summer of 1920. A shady German nationalist named Paul Weyland, an engineer by training, had turned himself into a polemicist with political aspirations. He was an active member of a right-wing nationalistic political party that pledged, in its 1920 official program, to “diminish the dominant Jewish influence showing up increasingly in government and in public.”9 Weyland realized that Einstein, as a highly publicized Jew, had engendered resentment and jealousy. Likewise, his relativity theory was easy to turn into a target, because many people, including some scientists, were unnerved by the way it seemed to undermine absolutes and be built on abstract hypotheses rather than grounded in solid experiment. So Weyland published articles denouncing relativity as “a big hoax” and formed a ragtag (but mysteriously well-funded) organization grandly dubbed the Study Group of German Scientists for the Preservation of a Pure Science. Joining with Weyland was an experimental physicist of modest reputation named Ernst Gehrcke, who for years had been assailing relativity with more vehemence than comprehension. Their group lobbed a few personal attacks at Einstein and the “Jewish nature” of relativity theory, then called a series of meetings around Germany, including a large rally at Berlin’s Philharmonic Hall on August 24.

The issue is not merely one of false stories, incorrect facts, or even election campaigns and spin doctors: the social media algorithms themselves encourage false perceptions of the world. People click on the news they want to hear; Facebook, YouTube, and Google then show them more of whatever it is that they already favor, whether it is a certain brand of soap or a particular form of politics. The algorithms radicalize those who use them too. If you click on perfectly legitimate anti-immigration YouTube sites, for example, these can lead you quickly, in just a few more clicks, to white nationalist sites and then to violent xenophobic sites. Because they have been designed to keep you online, the algorithms also favor emotions, especially anger and fear. And because the sites are addictive, they affect people in ways they don't expect. Anger becomes a habit. Divisiveness becomes normal. Even if social media is not yet the primary news source for all Americans, it already helps shape how politicians and journalists interpret the world and portray it. Polarization has moved from the online world into reality. The result is a hyper-partisanship that adds to the distrust of "normal" politics, "establishment" politicians, derided "experts," and "mainstream" institutions--including courts, police, civil servants--and no wonder. As polarization increases, the employees of the state are invariably portrayed as having been "captured" by their opponents. It is not an accident that the Law and Justice Party in Poland, the Brexiteers in Britain, and the Trump administration in the United States have launched verbal assaults on civil servants and professional diplomats. It is not an accident that judges and courts are now the object of criticism, scrutiny, and anger in so many other places too. There can be no neutrality in a polarized world because there can be no nonpartisan or apolitical institutions.

Late in the nineteenth century came the first signs of a “Politics in a New Key”: the creation of the first popular movements dedicated to reasserting the priority of the nation against all forms of internationalism or cosmopolitanism. The decade of the 1880s—with its simultaneous economic depression and broadened democratic practice—was a crucial threshold. That decade confronted Europe and the world with nothing less than the first globalization crisis. In the 1880s new steamships made it possible to bring cheap wheat and meat to Europe, bankrupting family farms and aristocratic estates and sending a flood of rural refugees into the cities. At the same time, railroads knocked the bottom out of what was left of skilled artisanal labor by delivering cheap manufactured goods to every city. At the same ill-chosen moment, unprecedented numbers of immigrants arrived in western Europe—not only the familiar workers from Spain and Italy, but also culturally exotic Jews fleeing oppression in eastern Europe. These shocks form the backdrop to some developments in the 1880s that we can now perceive as the first gropings toward fascism. The conservative French and German experiments with a manipulated manhood suffrage that I alluded to earlier were extended in the 1880s. The third British Reform Bill of 1884 nearly doubled the electorate to include almost all adult males. In all these countries, political elites found themselves in the 1880s forced to adapt to a shift in political culture that weakened the social deference that had long produced the almost automatic election of upper-class representatives to parliament, thereby opening the way to the entry of more modest social strata into politics: shopkeepers, country doctors and pharmacists, small-town lawyers—the “new layers” (nouvelles couches) famously summoned forth in 1874 by Léon Gambetta, soon to be himself, the son of an immigrant Italian grocer, the first French prime minister of modest origins. Lacking personal fortunes, this new type of elected representative lived on their parliamentarians’ salary and became the first professional politicians. Lacking the hereditary name recognition of the “notables” who had dominated European parliaments up to then, the new politicians had to invent new kinds of support networks and new kinds of appeal. Some of them built political machines based upon middle-class social clubs, such as Freemasonry (as Gambetta’s Radical Party did in France); others, in both Germany and France, discovered the drawing power of anti-Semitism and nationalism. Rising nationalism penetrated at the end of the nineteenth century even into the ranks of organized labor. I referred earlier in this chapter to the hostility between German-speaking and Czech-speaking wage earners in Bohemia, in what was then the Habsburg empire. By 1914 it was going to be possible to use nationalist sentiment to mobilize parts of the working class against other parts of it, and even more so after World War I. For all these reasons, the economic crisis of the 1880s, as the first major depression to occur in the era of mass politics, rewarded demagoguery. Henceforth a decline in the standard of living would translate quickly into electoral defeats for incumbents and victories for political outsiders ready to appeal with summary slogans to angry voters.

the conventional wisdom about the alt-right might need some serious adjusting. It’s doubtful that the real force of the movement consists of young trendy college students kicking against political correctness on their snowflake-covered campuses…maybe the hardcore ethno-nationalists aren’t tapping into some youthful surge. Maybe they’re drinking in some of the energy of older white nationalist movements, capitalizing on the general Western anti-establishment feeling, drawing in social outcasts and the bitterly disappointed, and perhaps- catching a few alienated digital natives in the process

editor of the English Review and accomplished nationalist – was then aged seventy, an ‘international expert on anti-semitism

Just before this the Verkhovna Rada made a cardinal error. It voted to pass a law to downgrade the official status of the Russian language. This was immediately vetoed by Oleksandr Turchynov, the acting president, but the damage was done. It frightened many Russian speakers and gave Putin and the “anti-Maidan” and pro-Russian constituency just what they needed in terms of “proof” of their claims that neo-Nazi Ukrainian nationalists had taken over.

The Jamaat-e-Islami played a key role in mobilizing theologians to favor an Islamic constitution. It maintained a hard-line posture against India and helped the state by describing leftists, secularists, and ethnic nationalists as “anti-Islam unbelievers.

As just one example, Great Britain had supported the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt as far back as 1928, as it identified it as “an anti-nationalist and anti-liberal vehicle” to be used against the prodemocracy forces in that country. It continued to back the Brotherhood against the government of Gamal Abdel Nasser, a secularist who had the audacity “to abolish the monarchy and establish a republic.”3 And indeed, just around the same time it was trying to overthrow Mossadegh in Iran, Britain was trying to assassinate Nasser, who represented the distinct danger of spreading secular democracy throughout the Arab world.4 As for Iran, when its revolution came in 1979, it was led by the Islamic leaders of that country more than the Left, which the United States had made sure was suppressed and crushed throughout the reign of the Shah, and even later as we will see. In other words, it was the United States’ own policies that made a revolution, and specifically an Islamic revolution, both possible and probable.

Though the historical Cossacks ceased to exist in the eighteenth century, they lived on powerfully in the Ukrainian imagination. The anarchic peasant armies of the Russian Civil War called themselves ‘Cossacks’, as do a few fringe nationalists today, turning out in astrakhan hats and home-made uniforms at anti-communist rallies. Khokhol – the name of the long pony-tail, worn with a shaven head, which was the Cossack hallmark – is still derogatory Russian slang for a Ukrainian.

In an effort to encourage the uprising in Tibet, U.S. State Department officials in 1959 urged Chiang to offer recognition of “Tibet as an independent state” to solidify anti-Communist activities in Tibet.79 While Chiang did not in the end agree to this, the Nationalists did offer the roughly one hundred Khaches ROC citizenship and passports (they had left India prior to being granted Indian citizenship).

There are, then, no easy answers to the questions raised by a thinker who may best be understood in performative terms. Their texts may be trying to provoke the reader to respond by, for example, saying something which the author does not actually believe. In that case, objecting to the argument merely means that one falls into the trap set by the text, in the way one looks silly by taking something seriously that is meant as a joke. One strategy is to accept that much of what is happening in Nietzsche's texts is indeed more performance than argument, but to look very carefully at the moments when performance gives way to assertion of a kind that cannot be construed as ironic or as merely performative. A further strategy is to keep in mind the ideological context of his writing. Although the Nietzsche of after the BT cannot be considered as a German nationalist, his elitism and his tendency to regard social issues as though they were biological issues - for example in relation to the idea that societies and cultures can become 'sick' - are very much part of reactionary thought in the second half of the nineteenth century. Such ideas fed into Nazism and other anti-democratic movements in the twentieth century, and are neither Nietzsche's creation, nor of any serious philosophical interest.

On television and on the front pages of the major newspapers, Trump clearly seemed to be losing the election. Each new woman who came forward with charges of misbehavior became a focal point of coverage, coupled with Trump’s furious reaction, his ever darkening speeches, and the accompanying suggestion that they were dog whistles aimed at racists and anti-Semites. “Trump’s remarks,” one Washington Post story explained, summing up the media’s outlook, “were laced with the kind of global conspiracies and invective common in the writings of the alternative-right, white-nationalist activists who see him as their champion. Some critics also heard echoes of historical anti-Semitic slurs in Trump’s allegations that Clinton ‘meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty’ and that media and financial elites were part of a soulless cabal.” This outlook, which Clinton’s campaign shared, gave little consideration to the possibility that voters might be angry at large banks, international organizations, and media and financial elites for reasons other than their basest prejudices. This was the axis on which Bannon’s nationalist politics hinged: the belief that, as Marine Le Pen put it, “the dividing line is [no longer] between left and right but globalists and patriots.” Even as he lashed out at his accusers and threatened to jail Clinton, Trump’s late-campaign speeches put his own stamp on this idea. As he told one rally: “There is no global anthem, no global currency, no certificate of global citizenship. From now on, it’s going to be ‘America first.’” Anyone steeped in Guénon’s Traditionalism would recognize the terrifying specter Trump conjured of marauding immigrants, Muslim terrorists, and the collapse of national sovereignty and identity as the descent of a Dark Age—the Kali Yuga. For the millions who were not familiar with it, Trump’s apocalyptic speeches came across as a particularly forceful expression of his conviction that he understood their deep dissatisfaction with the political status quo and could bring about a rapid renewal. Whether it was a result of Trump’s apocalyptic turn, disgust at the Clintons, or simply accuser fatigue—it was likely a combination of all three—the pattern of slippage in the wake of negative news was less pronounced in Trump’s internal surveys in mid-October. Overall, he still trailed. But the data were noisy. In some states (Indiana, New Hampshire, Arizona) his support eroded, but in others (Florida, Ohio, Michigan) it actually improved. When Trump held his own at the third and final debate on October 19, the numbers inched up further. The movement was clear enough that Nate Silver and other statistical mavens began to take note of it. “Is the Presidential Race Tightening?” he asked in the title of an October 26 article. Citing Trump’s rising favorability numbers among Republicans and red-state trend lines, he cautiously concluded that probably it was. By November 1, he had no doubt. “Yes, Donald Trump Has a Path to Victory” read the headline for his column that day, in which he

I have often wondered since if anything could have stemmed the tide at that time. The students saw in the Nazi promises a rising of Germany to her old power and glory. In Berlin, where patriotism had always been strong and the political sentiment conservative, the dream of a rejuvenated Germany turned their eyes and their hopes toward the coming movement. The professors were not so easily persuaded and tried to warn us that dangers lurked in the strong nationalistic and anti-Semitic theories of the Nazis, but great numbers refused to listen to them and there was a tremendous ferment among the student body.

Growing up in the Middle East, I came to find out that Arab children are taught hatred of the Jews from their mother’s milk. From a young age, Arab children are constantly bombarded with stories and information presenting Jews as barbaric, conniving, manipulative, warmongering people. Meanwhile, Jews teach their children patience, humility, service, tolerance, understanding of others, and charity to all. They call it tikkun olam, "to repair the world." The Arab-Israeli conflict has remained intractable because the Arab world refuses to accept the right of a Jewish state to exist autonomously in the middle of the Muslim Middle East. At first this refusal was based on what appeared to be pan-Arab nationalism, and then on Palestinian nationalism. There is a lot of bluster, pride, and honor among Arabs, which supports the nationalism angle. But as a Lebanese Christian looking at it from ground level and willing to blow the whistle on the hatred that Arabs harbor and teach their children against Jews, I can tell you that religious hatred, humiliation, and resentment are the driving factor behind the Israeli-Arab conflict. As a Christian who was raised in a country where people were shot at checkpoints because their ID card said “Christian,” I see it differently. I think that with the Iranian Revolution of 1979, and especially after the rise of the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) during the 1987 intifada, the world is seeing the true reason for the Arab world’s refusal to recognize Israel’s right to exist: radical Islamic supremacism. It has come to the surface, overshadowing the nationalist rationale and moving on, seeking bigger game in the West.

Sedition was therefore explicitly intended as an instrument to terrorize Indian nationalists: Mahatma Gandhi was amongst its prominent victims. Seeing it applied in democratic India shocked many Indians. The arrest in February 2016 of students at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) on charges of sedition, for raising ‘anti-Indian’ slogans in the course of protests against the execution of the accomplice of a convicted terrorist, and the filing of an FIR against Amnesty International in August 2016 on the same charges, would not have been possible without the loose, colonially-motivated wording of the law.

Unsurprisingly, the nation’s xenophobia has seeped into popular culture. Bollywood, long known for its extensive Muslim involvement across the entire industry, is being forced to toe the anti-Islam perspective. Many in Bollywood happily pushed the hard-line Hindu nationalist agenda, releasing films that openly celebrated the actions of the Indian armed forces. In a similar vein, the Israeli series Fauda, which features undercover Israeli agents in the West Bank, has been hugely popular among right-wing Indians, looking for a sugar hit of war on terror and anti-Islamist propaganda in a slickly produced format. During the May 2020 Covid-19 lockdown, the right-wing economist Subramanian Swamy, who sits on the BJP national executive, tweeted that he loved Fauda.28 The post-9/11 “war on terror” suited both India and Israel in their plans to pacify their respective unwanted populations. To this end, Israel trained Indian forces in counterinsurgency. Following a 2014 agreement between Israel and India, pledging to cooperate on “public and homeland security,” countless Indian officers, special forces, pilots, and commandoes visited Israel for training. In 2020, Israel refused to screen Indian police officers to determine if they had committed any abuses in India. Israeli human rights advocate Eitay Mack and a range of other activists petitioned the Israeli Supreme Court in 2020 to demand that Israel stop training Indian police officers who “blind, murder, rape, torture and hide civilians in Kashmir.” The court rejected the request, and in the words of the three justices, “without detracting from the importance of the issue of human rights violations in Kashmir.

As Lukasz Hirszowicz wrote, the “Palestine question was as if made to order for the needs and aims of Nazi propaganda.”Anti-Jewish persecution in Germany and elsewhere in Europe “compelled the Jews to demand Palestinian visas and stimulated the efforts of the Zionists for larger immigration quotas. On the other hand, Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda coincided with the thesis of the Arab nationalists regarding the alleged control by ‘international Jewry’ over world finance and politics and about the ‘British-Jewish conspiracy’ to take over Palestine from its inhabitants.

Important factors included growing Muslim hostility toward Jews as a result of nationalist mobilization, the creation of Israel, rampant poverty, and the ongoing refusal of citizenship by the French as well as negative experiences with the anti-Semitic Vichy regime during the war.100 Tension with the Muslim majority population started to grow in Morocco in 1947 against the backdrop of the war in Palestine. Following

Important factors included growing Muslim hostility toward Jews as a result of nationalist mobilization, the creation of Israel, rampant poverty, and the ongoing refusal of citizenship by the French as well as negative experiences with the anti-Semitic Vichy regime during the war.100 Tension with the Muslim majority population started to grow in Morocco in 1947 against the backdrop of the war in Palestine. Following the June 1948 pogroms in Oudjda and Djérada in eastern Morocco on the border with Algeria, emigration of Jews from Morocco to Israel became a more widespread phenomenon.101 When the French colonial rulers realized that the constant illegal flow of migrants could not be stopped, they allowed for the organized emigration of Jews, giving the Jewish Agency free rein in processing and selecting the migrants. For this purpose, the Jewish Agency–operated Kadima (forward) office was created in April of that year.102 A similar office had operated in Tunis since the second half of 1948, when the French authorities had started tolerating, if initially not fully legalizing, Aliyah.103

We see anti-black sentiment in the immediate rejoinder to Black Lives Matter that all lives matter, that blue lives matter. And in the absurdly fake comparison between the white nationalist and alt-right movement with the Black Panther Party of the 1960s. We see anti-blackness in how much more harshly we criticize blacks, by every measure. We see it in the president of the United States positioning the avowed white supremacist Neo-Nazis marching openly in the streets... as equal in comparison to the people protesting them.

Hitler was able to exploit with guile the gullibility of the 'best' people, and with the utmost sincerity the patriotism of the nationalists who wanted to see Versailles avenged... The anti-communist line got the capitalists, the anti-Versailles line got the army and the nationalists, the anti-Semitic line got the masses as well as the classes.

Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and language of dominance heartened right-wing gangs that had previously operated on society’s margins. Six months into Trump’s presidency, they launched a coming-out party. On August 11, 2017, racists, antisemites, white nationalists, Ku Klux Klan members, neo-Nazis, and members of other “alt-right” groups met in Charlottesville, Virginia, to “Unite the Right.

Some sci-fi, fandom, and gaming communities—having accepted run-of-the-mill anti-feminism—are beginning to espouse white-nationalist ideas. ‘Ironic’ Nazi iconography and hateful epithets are becoming serious expressions of anti-Semitism.

The imperial Russian government's ineffectiveness in World War I had forced the tsar to abdicate in 1917. Following the February Revolution in that year the Provisional Government replaced the tsarist regime, but as a result of the October Revolution the Bolsheviks seized power, executing the tsar and his family, and the Russian Empire collapsed. The Ukrainian Central Rada, or governing council, proclaimed Ukraine an autonomous republic, but meanwhile the German and Austro-Hungarian armies, still at war with Russia, drove out the Russian army and occupied Ukraine. The Germans supported a coup led by Pavel Petrovich Skoropadsky (1873-1945), who in April 1918 declared himself the Hetman of All Ukraine, a position he held until the following December, when, following the end of the war and the withdrawal of the German army, he was deposed and fled. It is here, in December 1918, that the novel White Guard begins, in a Ukraine damaged by World War I and engulfed in the Russian Civil War, with all of its confusion, violence, and chaos. As the novel unfolds, the Germans have mostly withdrawn and the hetman, essentially a German puppet, is under siege by Ukrainian nationalist and socialist forces led by Semyon Vasilievich Petlyura (1879-1926), who fought unsuccessfully for Ukraine's independence following the Revolution of 1917. Petlyura's nationalism made him an enemy of the Bolsheviks, and his socialist ideas made him an enemy of the Whites, who were opposed to the Communists. The Russian forces (both political and military) who became known as the Whites fought against the Red Army in the Civil War from 1918 to 1921. Their military arm was known as the White Army, or White Guard. Ideologically quite diverse, the Whites were not so much a single army as a confederation of counterrevolutionary forces loosely united by their anti-bolshevism, and to a lesser extent by the idea of preserving and restoring the Russian monarchy and Russian Empire, as well as by their anti-liberalism and anti-Semitism. After the events described in the novel, the Soviet army recaptured Ukraine, driving Petlyura out, and held Kiev in 1919 from February 6 until August 31. From August 31 until about December 16, forces under Anton Ivanovich Denikin (1872-1947), a general in the imperial Russian army before the Revolution and one of the leaders of the Whites in the Civil War, were in charge. Then, from December 16 the Soviet government was back in the city until May 6, 1920, when it was occupied by the Poles, who on June 11 were forced out by the Red Army. Three centers of power, revealing the basic vectors of all the coups, had taken shape in Kiev: the military district headquarters (which included counterrevolutionaries, monarchists, and White Guards), the Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies (Bolsheviks and other Communists), and the Ukrainian Central Rada (national-ist, independence-oriented, and Petlyurist).

Europe’s lingering economic malaise is not just a slow recovery. Mainstream forecasts predict that hundreds of millions of Europeans will miss out on the opportunities that past generations took for granted. The crisis-burden falls hardest on Europe’s youth whose lifetime earning-profiles have already suffered. Money, however, is not the main issue. This is no longer just an economic crisis. The economic hardship has fuelled populism and political extremism. In a setting that is more unstable than any time since the 1930s, nationalistic, anti-European rhetoric is becoming mainstream. Political parties argue for breaking up the Eurozone and the EU. It is not inconceivable that far-right or far-left populist parties could soon hold or share power in several EU nations. Many influential observers recognise the bind in which Europe finds itself. A broad gamut of useful solutions have been suggested. Yet existing rules, institutions and political bargains prevent effective action. Policymakers seem to have painted themselves into a corner.

In the wake of the Communist victory in 1949 and the CCP’s subsequent decades of lavish self-praise as heroes of the anti-Japanese resistance, the Nationalist war effort has often been overlooked and denigrated.31

demonstrations in Moscow prior to Putin's return to the presidency in 2012 unnerved Putin, in Obama's view, to the point where he believed “he was losing control.” Putin quickly infused his administration with an “anti-American and anti-Western,…proto-Russian nationalist, almost czarist” attitude, which improved his political position at home but complicated his foreign policy, especially his dealings with the United States. It also put Moscow on edge, Putin insiders looking anxiously over their shoulders, concocting Western conspiracies, imagining NATO threats.

Despite its disapproval of Nasser's action and the pro-Soviet direction in which he was leading Egypt, the [Eisenhower] administration saw Nasser's foreign policy as purely a reaction against Israel and Western colonialism. It remained convinced that if Israel had not existed, and if the Arab states had not long been dominated by the Western powers, especially Britain, the Arabs would not be anti-Western and pro-Soviet. The administration saw the invasion of Egypt as a golden opportunity to win Arab friendship. . . American opposition to the invasion, in short, would identify the United States with the anticolonialism of the entire underdeveloped world, and particularly with the anti-Israeli and nationalistic sentiments of the Arab world. . . At least, that was the rationale for the United States humiliating its two main allies, thereby turning Nasser's military defeat into a political victory. . .It is ironic in view of America's leading role in halting the attack on Egypt, that it should have been the Soviet Union that was to reap the benefits. . . Losing Suez resulted in the collapse of British power in the Middle East, the strengthening of Arab nationalism, and the consolidation of Egyptian-Soviet links.

Egyptian liberalism is typically presented as an odd combination of two arch enemies: monarchical (the liberal, Europe-oriented elite) and Nasserite (Arab nationalist, which despite an anti-Western political agenda is culturally drawn to London, Paris and New York).

Despite its disapproval of Nasser's action and the pro-Soviet direction in which he was leading Egypt, the [Eisenhower] administration saw Nasser's foreign policy as purely a reaction against Israel and Western colonialism. It remained convinced that if Israel had not existed, and if the Arab states had not long been dominated by the Western powers, especially Britain, the Arabs would not be anti-Western and pro-Soviet. The administration saw the invasion of Egypt as a golden opportunity to win Arab friendship. American opposition to the invasion, in short, would identify the United States with the anticolonialism of the entire underdeveloped world, and particularly with the anti-Israeli and nationalistic sentiments of the Arab world. At least, that was the rationale for the United States humiliating its two main allies, thereby turning Nasser's military defeat into a political victory. It is ironic in view of America's leading role in halting the attack on Egypt, that it should have been the Soviet Union that was to reap the benefits. Losing Suez resulted in the collapse of British power in the Middle East, the strengthening of Arab nationalism, and the consolidation of Egyptian-Soviet links.

Did you know... ...that it is entirely possible to disagree with BOTH self-proclaimed nationalists and anti-nationals, BOTH right-wing and left-wing hardcores, BOTH ultra-religious people and atheists, BOTH vegans and meat-eaters, BOTH CrossFitters and non-CrossFitters, BOTH ‘cardio’ and ‘non-cardio’ folks, AND BOTH ‘low-carbers’ and ‘high-carbers’?! It’s called THINKING FOR YOURSELF; it’s a highly pleasurable job since it involves telling people off; I highly recommend it!

The sudden and massive influx of refugees from Africa and the Middle East has overwhelmed the absorptive capacity of the European Union and triggered a populist-nationalist backlash, while also prompting the EU to start limiting its policy of free movement of people between countries. The June 2016 British vote to withdraw from the EU was driven in no small degree by anti-immigration sentiment. And

The anti-socialist right, in power for much of the past four decades, had become more nationalist and populist, the Jewish population more religious.

George Kennan, the famed Cold War diplomat, believed the West would come to regret NATO expansionism: “[It] would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era,” he wrote in the late 1990s. “Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.

Jinnah had, among other things, criticized the singing in government schools of the patriotic hymn ‘Vande Mataram’. Composed by the great Bengali writer Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, the poem invoked Hindu temples, praised the Hindu goddess Durga, and spoke of seventy million Indians, each carrying a sword, ready to defend their motherland against invaders, who could be interpreted as being the British, or Muslims, or both. ‘Vande Mataram’ first became popular during the swadeshi movement of1905–07. The revolutionary Aurobindo Ghose named his political journal after it. Rabindranath Tagore was among the first to set it to music. His version was sung by his niece Saraladevi Chaudhurani at the Banaras Congress of 1905. The same year, the Tamil poet Subramania Bharati rendered it into his language. In Bengali and Tamil, Kannada and Telugu, Hindi and Gujarati, the song had long been sung at nationalist meetings and processions. After the Congress governments took power in 1937, the song was sometimes sung at official functions. The Muslim League objected vigorously. One of its legislators called it ‘anti-Muslim’, another, ‘an insult to Islam’. Jinnah himself claimed the song was ‘not only idolatrous but in its origins and substance [was] a hymn to spread hatred for the Musalmans’. Nationalists in Bengal were adamant that the song was not aimed at Muslims.The prominent Calcutta Congressman Subhas Chandra Bose wrote to Gandhi that ‘the province (or at least the Hindu portion of it) is greatly perturbed over the controversy raised in certain Muslim circles over the song “Bande Mataram”. As far as I can judge, all shades of Hindu opinion are unanimous in opposing any attempts to ban the song in Congress meetings and conferences.’ Bose himself thought that ‘we should think a hundred times before we take any steps in the direction of banning the song’. The social worker Satis Dasgupta told Gandhi that ‘Vande Mataram’ was ‘out and out a patriotic song—a song in which all the children of the mother[land] can participate, be they Hindu or Mussalman’. It did use Hindu images, but such imagery was common in Bengal, where even Muslim poets like Nazrul Islam often referred to Hindu gods and legends. ‘Vande Mataram’, argued Dasgupta, was ‘never a provincial cry and never surely a communal cry’. Faced with Jinnah’s complaints on the one side and this defence by Bengali patriots on the other, Gandhi suggested a compromise: that Congress governments should have only the first two verses sung. These evoked the motherland without specifying any religious identity. But this concession made many Bengalis ‘sore at heart’; they wanted the whole song sung. On the other side, Muslims were not satisfied either; for, the ascription of a mother-like status to India was dangerously close to idol worship.

In the anti-woke world of the extreme right, white nationalist vigilantes are the heroes, antiracist organizers the villains, democracy is the enemy of liberty, there are two genders, one civilization, one master race, and women and Black people know their place.

He feared that rising anti-Muslim sentiment had strengthened the influence of India’s main opposition party, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

And George Kennan, at the age of ninety-three, warned that “expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era. Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.” He feared it could be the beginning of a new cold war, and in this he was prophetic. Kennan knew that empires do not vanish into thin air.

Founded in Buenos Aires in 1974 and relocated to Mexico City after Argentina’s 1976 coup, Tercer Mundo (Third World) covered political events throughout what is today known as the Global South—Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. In its first issue (September 1974), the journal discussed Argentina’s nationalist leader, Juan Domingo Perón, events in Peru, the decolonization struggle in Mozambique, dictatorship in Bolivia, and the Middle Eastern conflict. In issue 4 (May 1975), Tercer Mundo analyzed “Islamic Socialism” in Somalia, denounced the U.S. economic “blockade” of Cuba, discussed cultural decolonization in Tanzania, and reported on struggles for economic independence in Angola and Panama. Publishing from Mexico City a few years later, the journal’s issues 20 and 27 (April 1978 and February 1979) trained its anti-imperialist lens on issues commonly affecting Libya, Morocco (Western Sahara), Zaire (Congo), Mexico, Panama, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Yemen, Iran, and Cambodia.

At the core of anti-Fascist rhetoric as deployed by the official Left was a simple binary view of political allegiance: we are what they are not. They (the Fascists, Nazis, Franco-ists, Nationalists) are Right, we are Left. They are reactionary, we are Progressive. They stand for War, we stand for Peace. They are the forces of Evil, we are on the side of Good. In the words of Klaus Mann, in Paris in 1935: whatever Fascism is, we are not and we are against

Elaborating on the accusation made on the Hindu Mahasabha of being a communal organization and a mirror image of the Muslim League, he said: The fact is that Nationalism and Communalism are in themselves either equally justifiable and humane or not. Nationalism when it is aggressive is as immoral in human relation as is Communalism when it tries to suppress the equitable rights of other communities and tries to usurp all to itself. But when Communalism is only defensive, it is as justifiable and humane as an equitable Nationalism itself. The Hindu nationalists do not aim to usurp what belongs to others. Therefore, even if they be called Hindu communalists they are justifiably so and are about the only real Indian Nationalist. For, a real and justifiable Indian Nationalism must be equitable to all communities that compose the Indian Nation. But for the same reason the Moslems alone are communalists in an unjustifiable, anti-national and treacherous sense of the term. For it is they who want to usurp to themselves all that belongs to others. The Indian National Congress only condemns itself as an anti-national body when it calls in the same breath the Hindu Mahasabha and the Muslim League as bodies equally communal in the reprehensible or treacherous sense of that term. Consequently if to defend the just and equitable rights of Hindus in their own land is communalism then we are communalists par excellence and glory in being the most devoted Hindu communalists which to us means being the truest and the most equitable Indian Nationalists!

Although India had fared better than many other countries in the wake of the financial crisis, the global slowdown would inevitably make it harder to generate jobs for India’s young and rapidly growing population. Then there was the problem of Pakistan: Its continuing failure to work with India to investigate the 2008 terrorist attacks on hotels and other sites in Mumbai had significantly increased tensions between the two countries, in part because Lashkar-e-Tayyiba, the terrorist organization responsible, was believed to have links to Pakistan’s intelligence service. Singh had resisted calls to retaliate against Pakistan after the attacks, but his restraint had cost him politically. He feared that rising anti-Muslim sentiment had strengthened the influence of India’s main opposition party, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

For every community of angsty kids who pretend they are secretly vampires, there are seven different forums of white nationalists who sincerely believe that Jewish people are secretly vampires. For every Kiki and silly toy collectors community, there are forums full of dudes collecting upskirt photos of random women and girls who had no idea that they were about to become porn.

We see anti-black sentiment in how quickly images of brutality toward black children (let alone black adults) are justified by the white assumption that it must have been deserved. Such beliefs would be unimaginable if we had been shown images of white teens being thrown across schoolrooms, of white kindergarteners handcuffed, of a white child shot while playing with a toy gun in the park. We see anti-black sentiment in the immediate rejoinder to Black Lives Matter that all lives matter, that blue lives matter. And in the absurdly false comparison between the white nationalist and “alt-right” movement (now directly connected to the White House) with the Black Panther Party of the 1960s. We see anti-blackness in how much more harshly we criticize blacks, by every measure.

A Fearful Demagogue SAVARKAR AND THE MUSLIM QUESTION AS I SUGGESTED in the introduction, only a kaleidoscopic view gives us the full picture of Savarkar’s life and thought. This is particularly important when approaching the development of his anti-Muslim views, which have over the last century become the normative views of the current Hindu right wing. In this chapter, I will weave together not one, not two, but six different strands of Savarkar’s anti-Muslim braid.1 The first strand is the Gandhi-helmed anticolonial nationalist movement in India in the post-World War I period when the colonial government put out yet another “reform” package. The second is the Caliphate as a theory, mourned ideal, and practice in its last iteration in Ottoman and Republican Turkey. The third takes us to the debates in India about the Caliphate, referred to as Khilafat in India, and, relatedly, the discussions of the proposed hijrat (migration) to Afghanistan in India among Muslim intellectuals, leaders, and businessmen.2 The fourth strand returns us to Turkey and Mustafa Kemal’s abolition of the Caliphate in 1924. In the fifth we follow, in summary, the progress of the Indian Khilafat movement (the only such movement in the world). The sixth is the immediate cause for Savarkar’s expostulations, namely his anger about Gandhi’s support for the Khilafat movement. Savarkar, from house arrest, attacked virtually every iteration of the ideas and events laid out above—the idea of the Khilafat, the movement and its leaders, Gandhi, Muslims, and all Hindus who supported Khilafat. While he did not criticize the reform package, he insisted that Muslims were taking advantage of it. Once I trace the trajectory of each of these strands, I will move on to what Savarkar had to say about the Muslim question. I do this for two reasons. First, the strands allow us a broader look at the regional, national, and global context that framed Savarkar’s views. Second, Savarkar’s views about Muslims build on all of these strands, especially the way in which the Khilafat movement revealed for him the fundamental disloyalty of Muslims to India. But this was not all, for he came to see Muslims as a monolithic community that was defined as much by its proclivity for violence as by its foundational claims for a distinctive—and exclusive—political sovereignty of its own. In both cases, he felt lay extraordinary dangers for Hindus.

The Gates’ charity implies the formula: respect all cultures, your own and others. The Rightist nationalist formula is: respect your own culture and despise others which are inferior to it. The Politically Correct formula is: respect other cultures, but despise your own which is racist and colonialist (that’s why Politically Correct woke culture is always anti-Eurocentric). The correct Leftist stance is: bring out the hidden antagonisms of your own culture, link it to the antagonisms of other cultures, and then engage in a common struggle of those who fight here against the oppression and domination at work in our culture and those who do the same in other cultures.

Have you read Matthew 23? Yehoshua Chrestos was neither a Christ(ian) nor a Nationalist.

army, that’s all.” He couldn’t wait to leave. After the Holocaust, when fascism became synonymous with anti-Semitism and mass murder, the term “Zionist fascisti” would become an almost unimaginable slur. But in 1929, to label Zionists (or segments of Zionism) as fascist was inflammatory but not uncommon. The right-wing Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky had indeed been influenced by European fascist movements, modeling his own paramilitary force on Mussolini’s blackshirts. Jabotinsky’s Jewish opponents in the Zionist Labour movement regularly called him a fascist. When John and Jimmy invoked fascism, they meant that Zionism was expansionist, aggressive, nationalistic, and racially exclusive, all characteristics of the kind of fascism they had seen firsthand in Italy, Romania, and Hungary.

Because "anti-communism" has taken on a mystical, nonrational, almost religious character in the United States and some other Western countries, I want to explain that I do not use it in these terms in referring to my own attitude or that of Vietnamese Buddhist or other nationalist leaders. Communism has a base of social and personal idealism, and recruits thousands of people who are passionately concerned to eliminate the exploitation and inequality that have characterized much of Western society, and to create a form of social organization whose slogan will be "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need." This is an objective that is theoretically consistent with the best in most of the world's great religions, and with which religious people can have no quarrel. Moreover, the economic organization of society in socialist terms, meaning a society in which the means of production are operated for the good of the people generally rather than for the profit of a minority, is consistent with the needs of a country like Vietnam. Few Vietnamese Buddhist or nationalist leaders could believe that their country could adopt a Western-type capitalism, even if they thought it was a moral form of social organization. Vietnamese anti-communism stems from the methods that organized communism uses to attain its ends: the suppression of all significant dissent and debate; the liquidation of even the most sincere and committed opponents, violently if need be; the assumption of omniscience on the part of the party, which is a form of fanaticism that is stultifying to a never-ending search for truth—to which Buddhists, for example, are committed; and the willingness to sacrifice the very existence of a small country like Vietnam to the "larger" interests of the Communist side in the cold war between the great powers. This is not theorizing for Vietnamese non-Communist nationalists, who have found themselves and their organizations repressed with the same ruthlessness north and south of the seventeenth parallel, by the North Vietnamese-NLF-China coalition as well as by the Diem-Ky-US grouping. I do not mean to imply that all Vietnamese nationalists who are also anti-Communist share exactly the same view. Some of them undoubtedly are far to the right, politically. Many would oppose the Communist tactics on the quite simple grounds that they believe in their own goals for Vietnam and want to work for them. For many of us, however, for whom the stated objectives of communism are largely acceptable, the opposition we feel grows from our conviction that when such methods are used to attain these "good" ends, the ends themselves become unattainable because the methods used corrupt the whole struggle. If humanistic religion has any meaning at all, it is that humanistic ends cannot be achieved by inhuman and depersonalizing means.

To explain how we got to this seemingly intractable place, a little history is required—never a simple proposition in a part of the world where rivaling versions of the past are a dense thicket. The 1930s saw a series of Arab revolts against the influx of Jewish migrants to Palestine, which was then under British control. This wave of Jewish immigration was regarded by many Palestinians as a colonial imposition, a perception that was further cemented when British troops and local police put down the Arab uprising with tremendous force, fueling further resentment. When Palestine was partitioned in 1947, a move with overwhelming Arab opposition, and Israel declared statehood the next year, the first Arab-Israeli war was locked in. These were the years that Palestinians call the Nakba, or catastrophe: roughly 750,000 Palestinians were expelled, hundreds of Palestinian villages were destroyed, and thousands were killed, with many of the horrifying truths about these atrocities finally escaping Israel’s own Shadow Lands in recent years. Of course Palestinians would resist such ethnic cleaning with violence of their own. Yet rather than seeing Arab resistance for what it was—a nationalist, anti-colonial battle over land and self-determination (with some anti-Semitic elements, to be sure)—many influential Zionist leaders portrayed the entire Palestinian cause as nothing but more irrational Jew-hatred, a seamless continuation of the very same anti-Semitism that had resulted in the Holocaust, and that therefore needed to be crushed with the kind of militarized force that Jews had not been able to marshal in Nazi-controlled Europe. Within this imaginary, the Palestinian, as the Jew’s new eternal enemy, was treated as so illegitimate, so irrational, so other, that Israelis believed themselves to be justified in reenacting many of the forms of violence, dehumanizing propaganda, and forced displacement that had targeted and uprooted the Jewish people throughout Europe for centuries, a process that continues to this day with ongoing home demolitions, Israeli settlement expansions, targeted assassinations, settler rampages through Palestinian communities, openly discriminatory laws, and walled ghettos into which Palestinians are corralled.

Among the most ardent enemies of Judaism today is the Left. Marxists, for example, are theoretically opposed to all religions. But from Marxism’s earliest days, its adherents tended to be particularly anti-Jewish. Among other reasons: Judaism, unlike other religions, incorporates nationhood, while Marxist theory advocates the tearing down of national as well as religious allegiances. In practice, however, Marxist parties have been intensely nationalistic wherever they attained power, and the combination of chauvinistic nationalism with Marxist theory produced a particularly virulent strain of antisemitism. Neither could tolerate the Jews. Thus, for example, Soviet Jews who were committed to the God and Torah components of Judaism provoked antisemitism for Marxist reasons (quite aside from traditional Russian Orthodox antisemitism), while those who affirmed the national component of Judaism provoked Jew-hatred for Soviet nationalist (Russian, Ukrainian, Moldavian, etc.) as well as Marxist reasons. Thus, Soviet antisemitism was a reaction to every component of Judaism.

There were even conservatives who, though they went along with Hitler’s nationalist goals and his anti-Weimar fulminations, opposed him because they couldn’t abide his populism—to them, he was too democratic. These individuals could be as ferocious in their opposition as any Communist. A pertinent example of the type was Friedrich Reck, a popular novelist and friend of Oswald Spengler and Gregor Strasser. He was a confirmed reactionary—a rueful monarchist and an unapologetic elitist (“increased life expectancy,” he said, “is largely due to the incubation of basically unfit children”). But to him, Hitler was the plebeian embodiment of “mass man,” “a deeply miscarried human being,” a “poor devil sprung out of a Strindbergian excremental Hell.” Reck shared many of the premises of Hitler, but no one outdid him in his detestation of “that power-drunk schizophrenic,” the “Prince of Darkness himself.” To those conservatives who grudgingly went along, the Nazis may have been a threat to law and order at the time of the putsch but not after. The greater threat, the long-term threat, was Marxism. Even if Hitler was extreme, even if he was vulgar, even if his anti-Semitism was pathologically obsessional, he remained a German nationalist of obvious talent and a useful tool in the battle against Communism. And so he would never lack for sympathizers in high places, like the judges at his treason trial, even if they looked down on him and didn’t take him as seriously as they should have. Hindenburg’s own dislike of Hitler had less to do with ideology than with simple snobbery—here was a revered German general being compelled to deal on a level of equality with an anonymous German corporal. This conservative tolerance for the Nazis (which always had the potential, as conditions worsened, to shade over into extreme nationalism and then into war crimes) finds an echo in Joachim Fest’s observation that down to 1938, Hitler could be considered a great German statesman, as well as in Henry Kissinger’s opinion that Hitler’s intentions were ambiguous—until they weren’t.

The hysterical liberal call-out produced a breeding ground for an online backlash of irreverent mockery and anti-PC, typified by charismatic figures like Milo. But after crying wolf throughout these years, calling everyone from saccharine pop stars to Justin Trudeau a ‘white supremacist’ and everyone who wasn’t With Her a sexist, the real wolf eventually arrived, in the form of the openly white nationalist alt-right who hid among an online army of ironic in-jokey trolls. When this happened, nobody knew who to take literally anymore, including many of those in the middle of this new online far right themselves.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) has so often been accused of being fascism’s progenitor that his case requires particular care. Intended for the Lutheran pastorate, the young Nietzsche lost his faith and became a professor of classical philology while still extraordinarily young. For his remaining good years (he suffered permanent mental breakdown at fifty, perhaps related to syphilis) he invested all his brilliance and rage in attacking complacent and conformist bourgeois piety, softness, and moralism in the name of a hard, pure independence of spirit. In a world where God was dead, Christianity weak, and Science false, only a spiritually free “superman” could fight free of convention and live according to his own authentic values. At first Nietzsche inspired mostly rebellious youth and shocked their parents. At the same time, his writing contained plenty of raw material for people who wanted to brood on the decline of modern society, the heroic effort of will needed to reverse it, and the nefarious influence of Jews. Nietzsche himself was scornful of patriotism and the actual anti-Semites he saw around him, and imagined his superman a “free spirit, the enemy of fetters, the non-worshipper, the dweller in forests.” His white-hot prose exerted a powerful intellectual and aesthetic influence across the political spectrum, from activist nationalists like Mussolini and Maurice Barrès to nonconformists like Stefan George and André Gide, to both Nazis and anti-Nazis, and to several later generations of French iconoclasts from Sartre to Foucault. “Nietzsche’s texts themselves provide a positive goldmine of varied possibilities.

During the war with Russia, the Jewish community of Poland was threatened with a particularly virulent strain of Polish anti-Semitism. A group of rabble-rousing nationalists claimed that the Jews had never fully assimilated into mainstream Polish society and therefore constituted a fifth column. They made the audacious accusation that the Jews had collaborated with Russia to help in its fight against Poland. Such sentiments reached Radziejow, where locals branded the Jews as traitors. These anti-Semites pointed out that in recent local history, the Jews had petitioned a foreign government, Germany, for their own benefit. Motivated by greed, and under the guise of patriotism, city officials of Radziejow arrested several prominent Jews. These Jews were falsely charged with treason for their alleged collaboration with the Russians during the war. It was irrelevant to the persecutors and prosecutor that the accused Jews were never even involved in politics. This was a age-old scheme used by anti-Semites to extort money from the Jewish community. In this case, the plan was to implement a newly established criminal statute to justify the arrest of Jews and charge them with the capital crime of treason. Government officials

In the summer of 1966, Seale was hired to run a youth work program at the North Oakland Neighborhood Anti-Poverty Center funded by the federal War on Poverty. Through his role as a social service provider, he came to understand even more clearly the economic and social needs of black youth. Beyond delivering services, Bobby brought his revolutionary nationalist theory to the job and used the opportunity to push up against the ideological bias in the government program. Rather than merely guiding young blacks into a government-prescribed path, he used his authority to help them stand up against oppressive authority, particularly against police brutality. One day Seale’s boss instructed him to take a group of young black men and women on a tour of the local police station. When the group arrived, the police officers pulled out notepads and pencils and started to interview the teenagers about the character of gangs in the neighborhood. Seale protested, instructing his group to remain silent and announcing that his program would not be used as a spy network to inform on people in the community. The officers claimed that they simply wanted to foster better relations with the community. In response, Seale turned the conversation around, creating an opportunity for the teenagers to describe their experiences with police brutality in the neighborhood. It was the first time the young people had had the opportunity to look white police officers in the eye and express their anger and frustration. One teenager berated the police for an incident in which several officers had thrown a woman down and beaten her in the head with billy clubs. “Say you!” said a sixteen-year-old girl, pointing at a policeman. “You don’t have to treat him like that,” Seale said to the girl. “I’ll treat him like I want to, because they done treated me so bad,” she replied. Bobby sat back as the girl grilled the officer about whether he had received proper psychiatric treatment. The officer turned red and started to shake. “The way you’re shaking now,” she said, “the way you’re shaking now and carrying on, you must be guilty of a whole lot! And I haven’t got no weapon or nothin.’”69 The poverty program provided a paycheck, some skills, and an opportunity to work with young people. But Newton and Seale were still searching for a way to galvanize the rage of the “brothers on the block.” They wanted to mobilize the ghetto the way that the Civil Rights Movement had mobilized blacks in the South. They dreamt of creating an unstoppable force that would transform the urban landscape forever. The problem was now clear to Huey and Bobby, but they did not yet have a solution. Huey and Bobby were not the only ones looking for answers.

The Revolutionary Action Movement advanced a pivotal idea that would become central to the politics of the Black Panther Party. Drawing on a line of thought reaching back at least to the mid-1940s and the black anticolonialism of W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Alpheaus Hunton, RAM argued that Black America was essentially a colony and framed the struggle against racism by blacks in the United States as part of the global anti-imperialist struggle against colonialism.47 Max Stanford defined the politics of revolutionary black nationalism this way in 1965: “We are revolutionary black nationalist, not based on ideas of national superiority, but striving for justice and liberation of all the oppressed peoples of the world. . . . There can be no liberty as long as black people are oppressed and the peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America are oppressed by Yankee imperialism and neo-colonialism. After four hundred years of oppression, we realize that slavery, racism and imperialism are all interrelated and that liberty and justice for all cannot exist peacefully with imperialism.

The relationship between Britain and the Brotherhood was of course nothing new, as ever since its formal founding in 1928 it had been identified as primarily an anti-nationalist and anti-liberal vehicle rather than a pro-democracy movement, even though its most prominent ideologue, Hassan al-Banna, publicly endorsed the parliamentary system and constitutionalism.83

Hitler decided that the party needed a new flag, something striking that would look good both large on a poster and small on a uniform patch. In his autobiography, Mein Kampf, Hitler describes the Nazis’ new flag: “In red we see the social idea of the movement, in white the nationalistic idea, in the swastika the mission of the struggle for the victory of the Aryan man, and, by the same token, the victory of the idea of creative work, which as such always has been and always will be anti-Semitic.” The swastika is a centuries-old symbol that, before its use by the Nazis, meant life and good luck.

The Kremlin switches messages at will to its advantage, climbing inside everything: European right-wing nationalists are seduced with an anti-EU message; the Far Left is co-opted with tales of fighting US hegemony; US religious conservatives are convinced by the Kremlin’s fight against homosexuality. And the result is an array of voices, working away at global audiences from different angles, producing a cumulative echo chamber of Kremlin support, all broadcast on RT.

Here are the ominous parallels. Our universities are strongholds of German philosophy disseminating every key idea of the post-Kantian axis, down by now to old-world racism and romanticist technology-hatred. Our culture is modernism worn-out but recycled, with heavy infusions of such Weimarian blends as astrology and Marx, or Freud and Dada, or “humanitarianism” and horror-worship, along with five decades of corruption built on this kind of base. Our youth activists, those reared on the latest viewpoints at the best universities, are the pre-Hitler youth movement resurrected (this time mostly on the political left and addicted to drugs). Our political parties are the Weimar coalition over again, offering the same pressure-group pragmatism, and the same kind of contradiction between their Enlightenment antecedents and their statist commitments. The liberals, more anti-ideological than the moderate German left, have given up even talking about long-range plans and demand more controls as a matter of routine, on a purely ad hoc basis. The conservatives, much less confident than the nationalist German right, are conniving at this routine and apologizing for the remnants of their own tradition, capitalism (because of its clash with the altruist ethics)—while demanding government intervention in or control over the realms of morality, religion, sex, literature, education, science. Each of these groups, observing the authoritarian element in the other, accuses it of Fascist tendencies; the charge is true on both sides. Each group, like its Weimar counterpart, is contributing to the same result: the atmosphere of chronic crisis, and the kinds of controls, inherent in an advanced mixed economy. The result of this result, as in Germany, is the growth of national bewilderment or despair, and of the governmental apparatus necessary for dictatorship. In America, the idea of public ownership of the means of production is a dead issue. Our intellectual and political leaders are content to retain the forms of private property, with public control over its use and disposal. This means: in regard to economic issues, the country’s leadership is working to achieve not the communist version of dictatorship, but the Nazi version. Throughout its history, in every important cultural and political area, the United States, thanks to its distinctive base, always lagged behind the destructive trends of Germany and of the rest of the modern world. We are catching up now. We are still the freest country on earth. There is no totalitarian (or even openly socialist) party of any size here, no avowed candidate for the office of Führer, no economic or political catastrophe sufficient to make such a party or man possible—so far—and few zealots of collectivism left to urge an ever faster pursuit of national suicide. We are drifting to the future, not moving purposefully. But we are drifting as Germany moved, in the same direction, for the same kind of reason.

They [the ‘small fry’] were virulent nationalists, imperialists, anti-Semites and Jew-haters. Without them, Hitler was unthinkable.

As part of the Wurttemberg army, Rommel would have had greater exposure to Jewish soldiers, as this army followed slightly different standards of conduct, and certainly was less extreme and nationalistic than the Prussian armies of Germany’s north.[12]  Anti-Semitism in Germany was certainly not something that arrived with Hitler; throughout the late 19th century, writers speculated it was the Jews who were holding back German greatness, and many of Germany’s most influential thinkers were exposed to an extreme form of German nationalism, mixed with a dark pessimism about the future.

An excellent work on the period, The Politics of Cultural Despair by Fritz Stern, gives insight into what young men in the Prussian systems were taught. Paul de Lagarde, one of Germany’s most influential thinkers in this period, blamed the Jews for Germany’s problems, ”wrap[ping] his incredibly ferocious anti-Semitism…in a respectable cloak of nationalist idealism. With both horror and envy, he identified the Jews as a proud invincible nation whose religion had nothing to do with the Old Testament, but consisted in an unshakeable faith in its own nationalism. In other words, the Jews possessed the very unity that the Germans lacked.

While many Americans still believe that the Christian right is primarily concerned with "values," leaders of the movement know it's really about power. Trump's supposedly anti-Christian attributes are in fact part of the attraction. Today's Christian nationalist talk a good game about respecting the constitution and America's founders, but at bottom they prefer autocrats to democrats. Trump believes in the rule of force, not the rule of law. He is not there to uphold values but to impose the will of the tribe. He is a leader perfectly suited to the cause.

Among the most important figures to emerge during this period was Father Charles Coughlin, an anti-Semitic Catholic priest whose fiery nationalist radio program reached up to forty million listeners a week.

Arguably the first concrete example of “national socialism” in practice was the Cercle Proudhon in France in 1911, a study group designed to “unite nationalists and left-wing anti-democrats” around an offensive against “Jewish capitalism.” It was the creation of Georges Valois, a former militant of Charles Maurras’s Action Française who broke away from his master in order to concentrate more actively on converting the working class from Marxist internationalism to the nation. It proved too early, however, to rally more than a few intellectuals and journalists to Valois’s “triumph of heroic values over the ignoble bourgeois materialism in which Europe is now stifling . . . [and] . . . the awakening of Force and Blood against Gold.” The term national socialism seems to have been invented by the French nationalist author Maurice Barrès, who described the aristocratic adventurer the Marquis de Morès in 1896 as the “first national socialist.” Morès, after failing as a cattle rancher in North Dakota, returned to Paris in the early 1890s and organized a band of anti-Semitic toughs who attacked Jewish shops and offices. As a cattleman, Morès found his recruits among slaughterhouse workers in Paris, to whom he appealed with a mixture of anticapitalism and anti-Semitic nationalism.80 His squads wore the cowboy garb and ten-gallon hats that the marquis had discovered in the American West, which thus predate black and brown shirts (by a modest stretch of the imagination) as the first fascist uniform. Morès killed a popular Jewish officer, Captain Armand Meyer, in a duel early in the Dreyfus Affair, and was himself killed by his Touareg guides in the Sahara in 1896 on an expedition to “unite France to Islam and to Spain.”81 “Life is valuable only through action,” he had proclaimed. “So much the worse if the action is mortal.

The fact that the Nationalist prefers a world with a multiplicity of countries, religions, and cultures puts the lie to two of the Democratic Socialists’ greatest claims to moral supremacy. It is Nationalism, not Socialism, that seeks to live in peace and harmony with the other peoples and cultures of the world and, because it does, it is Nationalism, not Socialism, that promotes co-existence and diversity.

The Nationalist of old and the Socialist of today both embrace a system in which a venerated government owns everything within its realm. This is why the brilliant Thomas Sowell titled one of his most essential works describing the ideology of today’s Left, The Vision of the Anointed.

Whenever the Democratic Socialist points to a nation where Socialism has succeeded, he invariably ignores the elephants in the room of China, Russia and Nazi Germany, and references only the tiny Nordic states of Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark and Norway. These are odd choices since none of them is actually Socialist. Not in the slightest. In fact, they all fall far to the right on today’s American political spectrum. Their economic system is the same as that of the United States – free-market capitalism. They are proud Nationalists who love their country, respect the borders of their neighbors and expect their borders to be respected by others.

We see anti-black sentiment in how quickly images of brutality toward black children (let alone black adults) are justified by the white assumption that it must have been deserved. Such beliefs would be unimaginable if we had been shown images of white teens being thrown across schoolrooms, of white kindergarteners handcuffed, of a white child shot while playing with a toy gun in the park. We see anti-black sentiment in the immediate rejoinder to Black Lives Matter that all lives matter, that blue lives matter. And in the absurdly false comparison between the white nationalist and “alt-right” movement (now directly connected to the White House) with the Black Panther Party of the 1960s.

The obscenity of the situation is breathtaking: global capitalism is now presenting itself as the last protection against fascism; and if you try to point out some of Macron's serious limitations you are accused of - yes, of complicity with fascism, since, as we are told repeatedly by the big (and not so big) media, the extreme Left and extreme Right are not coming together; both are anti-Semitic, nationalist-isolationist, anti-globalist, etc. This is the point of the whole operation: to make the Left - which means any true alternative - disappear.

That Pakistan should face a particularly acute challenge in forging a coherent national identity will scarcely surprise those who have long pointed to its artificiality as a nation-state. Indeed, at independence, the country was largely bereft of the prerequisites of viable nationhood. The exceptional physical configuration of the new state, in which its eastern and western territories were separated (until 1971 and the secession of Bangladesh) by more than a thousand miles of Indian territory, was an immediate handicap. So was its lack of a common language. Its choice of Urdu—spoken by a small minority—to serve as a national language was fiercely resisted by local regional groups with strong linguistic traditions. They expressed powerful regional identities that separated the numerically preponderant Bengalis of the country’s eastern province from their counterparts in the west, where Punjabis dominated over Sindhis, Pashtuns and Balochis. Pakistan’s national integration was further handicapped by the lack of a common legacy grounded in a strong nationalist narrative informed by a mass anti-colonial struggle. Yet, these severe limitations were judged to be of secondary importance when set against the fact of a shared religion—Islam—held up by Pakistan’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah (1876-1948), as the real test of the Muslim ‘nation’ that would inherit Pakistan.

The need for international engagement became all the more urgent in 1931, when the Japanese army, at its own initiative, invaded and occupied Manchuria and established an imperial colony, crowned by a puppet state, in this vast northern corner of China. Unable to have the occupation sanctioned by the League of Nations, Japan left the organization in 1933. Reporting back to the foreign office from the Los Angeles games, Japan’s consul, Satô Hayato, declared that, ‘This Olympic Games has been very beneficial in erasing anti-Japanese sentiment.’ Alternatively, for the more liberal and cosmopolitan wing of Japanese society, this kind of impact meant that the games could be ‘an opportunity for a national people’s diplomacy’, making peaceful inter-societal connections when the inter-state realm was so bellicose.3 However, Consul Satô spoke for many in the imperial bureaucracy, armed forces and ultra-nationalist circles, arguing that, ‘The best way to get the Americans to understand the real Japan is to defeat America and show them the true strength of the Japanese. Rational discourse is completely useless. Americans probably first understood the true strength of the Japanese when the Rising Sun flag was raised . . . during the Olympic Games.

The integration of the Shoah into Europe’s historical awareness made this discourse intolerable. Anti-Semitism is no longer acceptable in the nationalist and conservative right-wing parties that were its guardians for so long.

The Liberals were in a minority, but were strongly backed by the Irish Nationalists, even though they were themselves divided between pro- and anti-Parnellite factions. Gladstone’s last government included three subsequent Liberal prime ministers – Rosebery, Henry Campbell-Bannerman and H.H. Asquith, but his closest associate was John Morley, the Irish Chief Secretary, who was later to write his biography in three extensive volumes.