“Why I Wholly Reject Nationalism” -- Little has been written about the difference between Folkism and Nationalism,¹ the words ‘Folk’ and ‘Nation’ have historically been conflated, along with ‘Race’, ‘Kind’ ‘Tribe’ and ‘Ethnicity’.² For the purpose of this screed, I am talking about ‘Nationalism (TM)’, or rather, the National projects that spawn out as a direct result of the Peace of Westphalia, which, for those who don’t know, is when Christian countries gained the right to have supreme authority.³
We take this for granted now, but before the Peace of Westphalia there were no countries, just holdings, all wrapped up under escalating layers of increasingly bizarre and confusing layers of authority, all the way up to the Catholic Church.⁴ The Protestant Reformation ended this, and thank God they did,⁵ but an unforseen consequence of this was the rise of Nationalism as we will call it now.
Nationalism is often misunderstood as Folkism, and this is why critics of the Left often say things like “How come the Left defends Nations and yet is against Nationalism!”⁶ this sounds intelligent and snarky enough, but it simply is not true. Indigenous Americans, Indians, are actually a great example of this, so let me give you an example.
Indigenous Movements in the United States are almost always Folkish, “This is my tribe, this is our history, we defend it” it is not very abstract.⁷ It relates to the concrete world, and it makes sense for the people who defend it. But, what would Indigenous Nationalism look like?
Imagine if every single Native American in the United States aid “I am not Navajo, I am Native Indian” and they tried to find the common denominator of all the Indigenous American groups and tried to cobble them together, forgoing everything that doesn’t fit.⁸ This would mean that tribes would lose their languages, their customs, their ways of life, if at least it was in service to the ‘National Identity’ that was being attempted to be built. This is what Nationalism is, and it is why Nationalism is always the greatest enemy of Folkism, the two cannot coexist. One affirms families and folks, the other is an almost transhuman post-modern relationship with identity, seeking to create ‘something greater’ that never was. (White nationalism is a good modern example of this, and it is why white nationalism is so hilarious retarded and schizophrenic to anyone who stops to think about it critically, a true Folkist could never be a white nationalist in a million years)
This is just an example, but this happened in real life, everywhere. France put their Parisian culture as the ‘True French’ culture in their project to create a national identity in a land that never truly had one.⁹ They banned speaking Occitan, Breton, Basque,¹⁰ banned festivals,¹¹ and sought to make everyone aligned, homogenous, and the same. You can see the same thing in Germany,¹² Italy,¹³ Russia,¹⁴ Sweden,¹⁵ the United Kingdom (Though it somewhat failed, you can see this in ppl who identify as British vs English),¹⁶ and even Japan.¹⁷ The list goes on, and for every country that adopted ‘Nationalism’ dozens of ethnicities, cultures, and religions, were wiped out in the name of homogenity, in the name of becoming one people.¹⁸
This is why Nationalism is so evil, it is the ‘Roman’ instinct to folkways, everyone must be Roman, if they cannot be Roman they will be set aside, and if they still cannot be Roman they will be made into a pastiche, a reliquary, nothing more than an oddity, the orient here, at home, in your backyard!¹⁹ These national projects come with all sorts of thing, national schools with national curriculums, national songs, national myths, national holidays,²⁰ and a social system designed from the top down to make you buy into it, forget who you are, wave the flag, and smile. Nationalism invents a falsity and kills and enslaves all those who refuse to play along.²¹
Folkism however, is different. A folk is a folk, it is easy to tell what a folk is and isn’t. You do not need to create a folk, you don’t need to force them to do this or that, a folk simply just is. It is groups of families tied together by even bigger groups of clans and tribes, all sharing language, custom, and traditions, but accepting their differences.
In Folkism you may still be apart of the same Folk, yet your folky neighbors may still be quite alien to you, and this is okay. This is just the natural diversity of being human, Folkism doesn’t seek to control or create anything, it just seeks awareness and autonomy. It is no wonder that Folkists are often anarchists, and Nationalists are often fascists.²² A Folkist does not fear the individual and their differences, their differences make the colors of life brighter, but a Nationalist sees a rainbow and wishes to paint it grey, he sees only strife, something to fear, and so he attacks it, he homogenizes, he becomes minimalist in all things, because the less you have the easier it is to ‘defend’ when all you care about is ‘defending’ instead of living honestly.
This is why I reject Nationalism, because it is just Rome, it is Babylon, it is Ur.²³ It is the same totalizing homogenizing force of history that sees human beings as cattle instead of free, independent agents, born into Godful world of beauty and bounty. I reject Nationalism wholly, I do not want to teach cats to be dogs and kill them if they cannot bark. I respect the rights to every single folk, everywhere in the world, the right to self-determination and autonomy.²⁴ It may not be realistic, but my ideal world is something like the Holy Roman Empire, every people who can be said to be a people are a people and able to express themselves as such, without being shoehorned into anything else.²⁵ The Free City of Bremen can just be the Free City of Bremen in all its glory and uniqueness, it does not need to become Prussian in mind and manner.²⁶
You may not agree, and that is okay, you will burn in hell forever, not my problem, but-- ALL MEN ARE BORN FREE²⁷ and the EARTH is our COMMON TREASURY.²⁸ We have a right to be who we are, to associate with who we please, to have what customs we wish, worship what Gods we like, and live and settle the land how we like. These are the rights of every human child born upon this Earth. Look at every national project, look at all the pain, all the suffering, the genocide, the linguicide, the complete loss of history, customs, traditions, libraries burnt to the ground, for what?²⁹ So that a Bavarian and a Prussian can call themselves ‘The Same’, while they both are children of Odin, they are Great Grandchildren, you cannot make a Great Grandchild the spitting image of the Grandfather, but that is what the entire psychosis of Nationalism is. Folkism says ‘let children be children, and have more children, and so too will they be different as we are from our father and his father and so on’, and this is natural, this is right, this is the natural pattern of the universe, and life itself.
Nationalism makes an ‘Indian’ out of us all,³⁰ it makes us ‘Indigenous’ and in the Nationalist’s world theres -nothing- worse than being ~indigenous~. They’ll do it to you too, when you no longer fit the arbitrary mold of the times. They’ll put you in schools to make you normal,³¹ they’ll beat you for speaking your language,³² they’ll arrest for your practicing your customs,³³ and all the while they’ll look you in the eyes and tell you it is your fault, why oh why can’t you just be normal, don’t you see we’re all the same, why can’t you just submit? Why can’t you just submit...? Why? Why?? Why???
Never forget who you are, our day will come.
Notes (I wrote this thread off the cuff and asked Claude for footnotes for the curious reader. My least favorite part of writing is this shit, so this is a good use I think, let me know if you found the footnotes useful, I don't usually have any and assume everyone knows what I'm talking about at all times)
¹ Among the few who have written on it: Johann Gottfried Herder, who held in This Too a Philosophy of History (1774) that each nation “has its centre of happiness within itself, as every sphere has its centre of gravity”; and Lord Acton, in his essay “Nationality” (1862): “the combination of different nations in one State is as necessary a condition of civilised life as the combination of men in society.” ↩
² “Nation” comes from Latin natio, from nasci, “to be born”: at first a birth-group, a folk. Medieval universities sorted their students into “nations” by home region. ↩
³ Pope Innocent X condemned the Peace of Westphalia in his bull Zelo Domus Dei (1648); the powers that signed it ignored him. ↩
⁴ Boniface VIII’s bull Unam Sanctam (1302) declared it “altogether necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman Pontiff.” ↩
⁵ In England, the Act of Supremacy (1534) made Henry VIII “the only supreme head in earth of the Church of England.” ↩
⁶ The confusion is built into the language: the Navajo Nation (so named in 1969) and Canada’s First Nations use “nation” in the older sense of a folk. ↩
⁷ Even the pan-tribal bodies, such as the National Congress of American Indians (founded 1944), have mostly fought for each tribe’s sovereignty, as in the NCAI’s campaign against the federal “termination” policy of the 1950s. ↩
⁸ It has been tried, from outside. Federal boarding schools set out to strip tribal languages and make generic Americans; Richard Pratt, founder of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, put it in 1892 as “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” Native critics still object to a flattened, generic “Indian” image, like the Plains war bonnet put on everyone. ↩
⁹ The Abbé Grégoire’s survey of 1794 found that no more than 3 million of about 28 million French people spoke French “purely,” and at least 6 million did not know it at all. His report was titled “On the necessity and means of annihilating the patois and universalizing the use of the French language.” ↩
¹⁰ Bertrand Barère to the National Convention, January 1794: “Federalism and superstition speak Low Breton; emigration and hatred of the Republic speak German; counter-revolution speaks Italian, and fanaticism speaks Basque.” Under the Third Republic’s Ferry laws (1881–82), schools taught only in French, and a child caught speaking patois was made to wear “le symbole,” a token of shame. ↩
¹¹ The Republican calendar of 1793 abolished Sundays and saints’ days, and the dechristianizing campaign of 1793–94 shut churches and stopped processions. ↩
¹² Prussia Germanized its Poles: in the Września school strike of 1901, Polish children were beaten for refusing to pray in German. The Nazi state banned the Sorbs’ league, the Domowina, in 1937. ↩
¹³ “We have made Italy; now we must make Italians,” a line usually credited to Massimo d’Azeglio. By Tullio De Mauro’s well-known estimate, about 2.5% of Italians spoke standard Italian at unification in 1861. ↩
¹⁴ The Valuev Circular (1863) and the Ems Ukaz (1876) banned most Ukrainian-language publishing, and Lithuanian in the Latin alphabet was banned from 1864 to 1904, so smugglers carried books over the border. ↩
¹⁵ Finnish was forbidden in the schools of Tornedalen. From 1913, under the policy “Lapp ska vara lapp” (“a Lapp shall be a Lapp”), the children of Sámi reindeer herders were kept in hut schools so that they would stay “authentic.” ↩
¹⁶ The “Welsh Not” was hung on children caught speaking Welsh at school; Gaelic was left out of Scotland’s Education Act of 1872; Ireland’s national schools taught in English from 1831. ↩
¹⁷ The Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act (1899) pushed the Ainu into Japanese farming and schooling. Okinawan schools hung a hōgen fuda, a “dialect tag,” on any child caught speaking Okinawan, the same device as the Welsh Not and the French symbole. ↩
¹⁸ Religions too: Japan’s shrine-merger policy, from 1906, abolished tens of thousands of village shrines in the making of State Shinto, over the protests of the folklorist Minakata Kumagusu. ↩
¹⁹ In Rome’s western provinces Latin replaced Gaulish and the old languages of Iberia; of the languages spoken there before Rome, only Basque survives. ↩
²⁰ Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation (1808) called for exactly such a national schooling. France assembled the full set: the Marseillaise (anthem in 1795, restored in 1879), Bastille Day (a national holiday from 1880) and the Ferry schools. ↩
²¹ When Lyon rose for federalism in 1793, the Convention decreed the city destroyed and ordered a column raised on its ruins: “Lyon made war on liberty; Lyon is no more.” The Vendée was crushed in the same years. ↩
²² Anarchists who championed small peoples and federations include Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (The Federative Principle, 1863), Gustav Landauer, and Leopold Kohr (The Breakdown of Nations, 1957). The fascists went the other way: in 1933–34 the Nazi state abolished the self-government of every German state, Bremen’s included. ↩
²³ The Third Dynasty of Ur (about 2112–2004 BC) standardized weights, measures and the calendar across its provinces and ran a vast bureaucracy. ↩
²⁴ The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007) affirms both, in Article 3 (self-determination) and Article 4 (autonomy or self-government in internal and local affairs). ↩
²⁵ At the Peace of Westphalia the Empire held some three hundred territories, from electorates and duchies to prince-bishoprics, abbeys and free cities, each with its own laws. ↩
²⁶ Bremen was confirmed a Free Imperial City in 1646, was never annexed by Prussia, and joined the German Empire in 1871 as its own state. It’s still a city-state today, one of Germany’s 16 Länder. Lyon in 1793 (note 21) is its dark twin. ↩
²⁷ Article I of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights (1780) begins “All men are born free and equal.” Elizabeth Freeman (“Mum Bett”) won her freedom from slavery with it in 1781, which gives the line a Yankee pedigree. Compare Rousseau, The Social Contract (1762): “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” ↩
²⁸ Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers, The True Levellers Standard Advanced (1649): “the great Creator Reason, made the Earth a Common Treasury.” ↩
²⁹ Serb nationalist forces shelled and burned Sarajevo’s National Library in August 1992, and most of its collection was lost. The Jaffna Public Library, about 97,000 volumes of Tamil heritage, was burned in 1981. ↩
³⁰ “Indian” is Columbus’s misnomer: believing he had reached the Indies, he gave one name to hundreds of peoples. ↩
³¹ By 1926 about 83% of Native school-age children were in boarding schools, and the Interior Department’s Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative report (2022) counted 408 federal boarding schools. ↩
³² Children were beaten or shamed for it under the Welsh Not, the symbole and the hōgen fuda (notes 10, 16 and 17). Ireland had one too: the bata scóir, a tally stick notched for every Irish word a child spoke and paid for with the cane. ↩
³³ The Code of Indian Offenses (1883) made the Sun Dance and other ceremonies crimes, punished with jail or cut rations. Canada banned the potlatch from 1884 to 1951; in 1921 it charged dozens of Kwakwaka’wakw people over a single potlatch and seized their regalia. US law did not fully protect Native religion until the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978. ↩