Chesterton comes to mind immediately:“The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.”

Chesterton himself receives quite a mauling in Orwell's essay.

I can truthfully state that I am either fish, nor fowl, nor good red meat on this one. It seems to me to be a standard bit of verbal "wanking" so beloved by the folks in the political arena.

I think that mostly this is a in your face dig at Trump, same tenor, same sneering superiority that was displayed by the urban democrats who are currently in their third year of an extended tantrum over Trump's taking their shiny ball from them.

Look, mostly this whole patriotism/nationalism word game is just sadly funny. You are a patriot if you think like me. You are a nationalist if you don't. Patriotism is good, nationalism is bad. If I am a patriot, I am good, if you are a nationalist, you must be bad.

I think that the wisdom of Humpty Dumpty when speaking to Alice fits here:

“When I use a word..it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is…which is to be master—that’s all.”

If you see life as a zero sum game then you would be right. I do not see it that way. I never did.

What would you say if I suggested that Trump is an internationalist nationalist. Or to put it slightly differently the leader of the nationalist international, if you will? That's not hard to achieve given his status.

Checking Google Yanis Varoufakis seems to have said the same thing. Maybe I should reflect my earlier differences with him. Some of them may have been founded on fears, after all the the Greek debts crisis led to the founding of the original Alternative for Germany Party (AfD), but after they pushed out the founders neatly uniting the diverse right fringes they rode to success following closely Trump's playbook post refugee crisis (Cologne, et al) in 2015. ...

Hmm, and this may have inspired YV, Financial Times:
https://www.ft.com/content/...

An international nationalist movement sounds like a contradiction. Nationalists are concerned above all by the fortunes of their own tribe. International co-operation does not come naturally to them. And yet, despite this, the world is seeing the emergence of a “nationalist international”. Nationalist political parties are on the rise across the west — and they are taking inspiration from each other and working together.

And Bannon is touring Europe and creating a European headquarter: The Movement. Let's see. Breitbart always seemed to cooperate well with its like-minded ideologues over here.
https://www.euractiv.com/se...

Orwell's intellect is overrated, and his aphorisms have become thought-ending cliches. Look at the string of assumptions in quote above. Do individuals really 'choose' to 'sink' their consciousness into a greater body? What makes far more sense is that at the 'core' of I there is a 'we', which is conditioned by prior forms of particularity - religion, ethnicity, language, race, and culture. This is the basis of a harmonious common good, and a meaningful lifeworld.

Orwell grew up in a time of increasing scale, managerialism, and atomizaton. His thinking narrates the moral discourse shaped by that anti-social environment and its effects (mass wars) but dresses it up in an emancipatory narrative. One is immediately struck by his lack of foresight in predicting how power would operate as the 20th century wore on (Foucault and and Huxley are a lot closer the truth), and his inability to grapple with the essence of power and its moral and conceptual implications as a whole.

In reality, power is a moral imperative, and its acquisition and application the inaugural raison d'être of the state and the concomitant society. Hence, the cogito subject at the heart of Orwell's evaluative presuppositions is itself a product of prior systems of power, upstream from personal judgement and value sets. Orwell proceeds to demand by implication we view the ancestral efforts which secured our position in the present day as illegitimate, since they conformed to emergent anthropological patterns of conflict and conquest instead of categorical laws plucked out of thin air by self-styled 'enlightened' big-brains during the 18th century. Had we actually lived by these 'standards', those of us left would be a marginalized set of tribes pushed to the far north of Europe, regularly getting shafted by whatever Magian civilization moved in. As a matter of fact, that's happening right now as these self-critical ideas have installed themselves within our cultural substrate.

These pious set of mere assertions are deployed by the ruling globalist cabal to justify the replacement of Western founding stocks. Yet they are so ingrained among our senior cohort, when their *own people actually under attack* seek to affirm themselves without contradiction in *response*, they are viewed as the root menace. But if you have a decline and you have a desire to assert yourself to arrest the decline, and you have to apologize to yourself about even having the idea of assertion to arrest decline, you’re not going to get anywhere, are you?

Those who feel uncomfortable about this should have worked harder to prevent the erosion of the historic American nation, and if there is nothing they could have done against the DC Behemoth, abstain from opposing the instinctive response of the cultural immune system.

I suspect Orwell would be amused by the suggestion that his intellect
is overrated, when the subject in question is his polemical essay on
English intellectuals. Orwell became such a giant precisely because he trod a different path to his peers and actually experienced life from perspectives those who merely cogitate on it probably could not even conceive of. In terms of foresight, I am reminded daily how prescient he was in terms of how power would operate in a future of the omnipresent security state. He got the date and geography slightly off yes, but we are much close to 1984 than Huxley's dystopia at this point.

Orwell understood the communist and imperial mindset pretty well, but that was about it.

Related to what you are saying, I was thinking the other day about the possibility that this Trump´s presidency, so full of exaggerated confrontational gestures and bad manners, could be the nail in the coffin of democracy as we know it today, at least in the US, so as to discredit politics to such extent that people could be more inclined to accept other kind of rule....like that by military, for example, in search of the lost order....

To this end, I thought about the recent development of events in Brazil as a template, the more when we all already know about Bannon´s hand in that.....

What do you think?

IMO the least likely form of change would be military intervention. The US military has a very strong ethos against that. A more likely future is dissolution of the Union once again. what has been revealed by recent discord and elections is a lack of mutual sympathy among regions.

After a dissolution of that nature, would the United States Government then proceed to re-integrate the Secessionist States by force, considering that they have competent National Guard units who may decide to swear an Oath of Allegiance to their new homes ?

Quien sabe? No se.

I've always loved the old Rolling Stones song 'Time is on my side'.

"These pious set of mere assertions are deployed by the ruling globalist
cabal to justify the replacement of Western founding stocks".

I suggest 'passive decline of influence of a sufficient extent' rather than 'replacement', although bear in mind that a ship sinks very slowly at first but very rapidly at the end.
Other than that I have seen nothing that refutes what you are saying.

I beg your pardon, Oh neocon scion of the WASP elite. and what did you ever do for the "historic America?"

I'm not American, but i'm 5th generation in an Anglo-setter nation. The implication here is that i'm an ungrateful you whipper-snapper who just doesn't grasp the sacrifices and horrors of the 20th century. Exactly when does my generation get the moral cachet entitling us to input directions into the civilizational compass? Arguments predicated on commitment to a cause haven no inherent validity. I'm certainly not disparaging or denying here, but you're putting us in a position where our ambit of choice is circumscribed by the ideology that justified post-War US hegemony (for which people from my community were still dying until very recently in Afghanistan).

I have long thought that NATO should have been abolished after the fall of the USSR. Go your own way. I am not concerned with you foreigners in Europe or anywhere else. I am concerned with the state of mind of my own people who should wise up and forget about Europe except as a trading partner and a tourist destination.

Well, I would love to do that Col., but unfortunately Western civilization as a whole goes the way of Washington, New York, Brussels, and maybe Paris and Moscow. What happens to weaker power centres without the strong ones? What has happened Tibet, that's what.

Thinking in terms of elites tied to specific nations is no longer a good model to conceive of politics. Formal institutions like NATO are an expression of that. We have to address transnational networks of soft power that bind together and enculturate the ruling class. I have more in common with a Trump voter from flyover country and he with me than either of us with our respective 'national' elites.

Blah Blah. At least you did not tell me about your hero grandpa.

When you consider that many people who pause to think pensively about Globalisation do not understand it's true destructive nature, it's a lot to expect them to also understand and practice the difference between Patriotism and Nationalism in simple commentary or when it is sold to them as a political solution.

My self assigned task here is education.

An important distinction, thank you for forcing us to consider the difference.

The two are not always easy to distinguish and a 'My country right or wrong' mindset seems to be dangerously on the rise. I was considering the use of the national flag on homes in the US and UK. It surprised me how common it seemed in the States and assumed it was a show of Patriotic fervor when I see it in the UK it sends a shiver down my spine as (with the exception of major international sporting events) I interpret it as extreme Nationalism often associated with racist or Neo-Nazi sympathies. Conflation of the two seems much the same as that of Anti-Israeli, Anti-Zionist and Anti-Semitic again three very distinct mindsets.

Uh ... what distinguishes anti-Israeli from anti-Zionist?

Nothing.

On May 26th, 2019, there will be european elections all over EU. Macron, who has a very low popularity at home (Trump is right on this point), is trying to build an international stature as "the" european liberal leader against the "populists" (Orban, AfD, Salvini, Brexiters, and Le Pen party, who will probably win these elections). That's why he speaks a lot against "nationalism" (which often echoes as "national-socialism" in the french public) and populism (which has a very pejorative meaning in France, contrarily to USA (Les Granges, struggle against banks and railways companies in the South, etc.)). But, all this bla-bla is only electoral posture. Like Trump, Macron has no culture, and one should not give too much importance to his speeches. Macron is neither a nationalist, nor a patriot. He comes from the Rothschild bank' french branch, and has no other credo than globalist liberalism. Of course, he is sometimes forced to play simulacres of patriotism, when walking over the bones of 1,6 million of french "poilus"...

Macron is not de Gaulle : if you have 6 minutes to loose and if you understand french, here is the speech of de Gaulle during the 50th anniversary of Verdun (1966) in Fort de Douaumont, in front of many Poilus (from 6'30") : the battle, Pétain, the Germans, Europe, Verdun Treaty (843), etc... :
https://www.youtube.com/wat...

This is a play on words.
In the same land can coexist several nations.
In Portugal we are only one nation, but in Spain, Britain, America, Russia, diverse nations coexist.
Why should we like the land of our fathers, our Fatherland, or the land of our mothers, our Motherland, and not like our Nation, our Culture?

Nation and State are different things. They often are different in meaning as you say.

The French, who are from the north, from Neustria, and spoken langues d'oïl, conquered the south, what today is Le Midi de France, whose populations spoked langues d'oc, and imposed upon the south their language and culture , the language and culture of northern France. And now the French say that they love Patriotism e hate Nationalism, the imposition of our nation upon other nation. That is a nice example of the proverbial French Hypocrisy.

The same thing happened in the US. Northern nationalism has conquered Southern nationalism.

You seem bitter. Is that because Portugal's first king was the son of a man from Dijon?

Self serving, yes. As are all politicians.

But I suspect he also does not want to see another Verdun. Or another Douaumont charnel house where the unidentified bones of 130,000 French and German soldiers reside.

https://www.atlasobscura.co...

Or he does not want another Zone Rouge like the two million acres around Verdun that remains forbidden territory even now. The only ones allowed in are the EOD techs of the Département du Déminage that are still digging out unexploded ordnance 102 years later. Much of that UXO contains mustard, phosgene, or chlorine. All of it is badly corroded and volatile. French EOD pulls out hundreds of tons every year.

https://orionmagazine.org/a...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...

I just heard that ignorant pansy Jesse Watters say that the French have not known military glory since Bonaparte. Too bad we cannot deposit him in that contaminated zone to find his way out.

Somewhat related: Trump's refusal to stand in the rain on that solemn 100th anniversary spoke more of the man than anything previous. Didn't want to get rained on! That war, those trenches, the rain, the rain, the rain. He probably cannot spell infantry, much less describe what it is. There is the Commander In Chief in all his glory. We are lost.

Rob,
That was the fake news take on it. The reality is that the Secret Service wasn't prepared to get him there in a vehicle. The original plan was to arrive by helo. He was there the next day in the rain. Fake news is the enemy of the people.

A lack of critical thinking is the enemy of the people Eric. Stalin used that phrase "enemy of the people" long before DT. Your using those terms speaks volumes. The MSM has been a lost cause for decades. If it was important enough for him to be there, he would have found a way.

Once again, I think he is walking wounded.

Rob,
The helo that Trump was to arrive on was grounded due to bad weather. Secret Service planning for the security of POTUS is a complex effort. It is not all that flexible. Not being able to consider that is a lack of critical thinking. A high octane political propaganda machine that is running on all cylinders day and night, year after year, to attack one man - who happens to be deemed a political enemy - and find fault in every single action and word is, indeed, an enemy of the people. If you are buying what the machine is selling, then you are completely divorced from anything like "critical thinking". Pot meet kettle.

His speaking at Suresnes is completely unacceptable since that violated the narrative.

"That war, those trenches, the rain, the rain, the rain...."

https://youtu.be/vcGC2JDh-p...

Inform us of your military record.

No military record here, sir, I am a civilian, born in peace time, even at a time when military service was no more mandatory....But no unaware of war fatigues, since here in Europe we have had almost all relatives who fought the great war....Granpa was a partisan then....

Just read that about the trenches and the rain...and remembered this film....I hope you all can enjoy it....It´s good to watch this kind of films, especially for us who had the great fortune of never being there...

I am always amused when civilians tell me about their soldier relatives. you are not your "grandpa." Grow up.

"...you are not your "grandpa"....

Of course, neither did I pretend to be....only tried to saiy we have stories of war and its consequences which were transmitted from generation to generation...what could help us in Europe who have never known war in trying to avoid confrontation...especially nonsense confrontations for us like those against Russia or Iran....for example...