Hacker News Reader

It may be because there are rarely such simplistic rule-based lessons. To your example, nationalism could be a great emancipatory force in one century and an instrument of great suffering in another. If there is some takeaway, then it must be more subtle than "nationalism=evil".

View on HN

You’ll notice that I qualified it with “the kind of nationalism that…”

I don’t have a problem with the kind of nationalism that gave European minority languages pride in their own culture and literature in the 19th century, for example.

I do have a problem with the kind of nationalism exemplified by lots of 20th century European leaders from Kaiser Wilhelm II to Milosevic.

The latter kind is sadly on the rise again. And the former isn’t endemic to nationalism. Everyone can have pride in their identity, it doesn’t need a state apparatus.

>Everyone can have pride in their identity, it doesn’t need a state apparatus.

Well, you'd want to think so. But I wonder if all identities politics doesn't, in the end, trend towards fascism.

You don't have to wonder. Just observe what is going on in so-called liberal democracies of the world while identity politics is implemented by governments: censorship, redefinition of words, inventing new moral issues to shutdown inconvenient facts and such.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com