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'You can feel rejected without throwing in your lot with a lout like Tommy Robinson.' (Drik/Getty Images)
Someone once called nationalism the most contradictory of all political ideas. If it can lead straight to the gas chambers, it can also free you from oppressive imperial powers. For every Franco or Modi there is a George Washington or Mahatma Gandhi. Nationalism can salvage cultures and languages at risk of extinction, but it can also boast of their supremacy over all others. As the most successful revolutionary movement of the modern age, it has allowed disregarded nations to break on to the world stage; it has also been a form of spiritual introversion which drives them back inside their own psyches.
Some nationalists look fondly to a past utopia before the colonial invader pitched up on their shores. There were patriotic Irish scholars in the 18th century who claimed that Irish was probably the language spoken in the Garden of Eden. One shouldnāt, however, be misled by this archaic impulse. Nationalism is a thoroughly modern ideology, which stretches back no more than about two and a half centuries. It was only around then that Europe was seized by the novel idea that to be a nation entailed having oneās own political state. There was a direct hook-up between the ethnic and the political. Human beings (which didnāt for this purpose include women) had the right to self-determination not just as people but as peoples. A crucial hyphen was inserted between the words ānationā and āstateā, and a new phenomenon came into existence.
There were problems with this revolutionary notion. For one thing, almost all so-called nations were ethnically hybrid, with the odd exception such as China, so why shouldnāt each of these ethnic groups have its own state? For another thing, nations at the time were defined largely by imperialism and colonialism. These sovereign powers played a major part in drawing up the frontiers between territories, mostly in their own material interests, so wasnāt revolutionary nationalism just an inverted mirror of its antagonist? Anyway, by what mystical logic did being Tibetan or Peruvian automatically afford you the right to your own political state? There were, to be sure, forms of so-called civic nationalism for which being Peruvian meant simply being a citizen of Peru whatever your ethnic origin, and this was to be the foundation upon which most nations were constructed; but the Romantic desire to affirm your difference, uniqueness and possible superiority as a people never lost its grip, and has recently been active on the streets of Britain.
In a long historical perspective, this summerās rioting happened because a section of the British working class had imbibed all too well the propaganda of its social superiors. For a world of empires and dynasties to give way to one of autonomous nation-states, a seismic cultural transformation was required. People who previously thought of themselves in concrete terms as tenants of a feudal landowner and more abstractly as loyal servants of the monarch had to learn how to become French or British or Portuguese citizens. Their identities had to be remoulded and reoriented. Some of the British were rich and powerful while others were semi-destitute, but there was a bond between them ā Britishness ā which seemed to render such divisions irrelevant. Rich and poor could forget their quarrels and unite in the face of a demonised outsider. This, needless to say, could prove highly convenient for the rich. All social classes could come together against a common enemy, and in Britain both the French and the Irish have traditionally served this function. What also proved vital to the nationās sense of shared identity was Protestantism, which was sadly lacking in both France and Ireland.
The problem is that this robust national identity, which answered well enough at the time to the needs of mercantile and industrial capitalism, is less and less capable of doing so under current conditions. Capitalism is now a global phenomenon, and along with it the labour market. National unity is still politically and culturally imperative, but it is increasingly out of step with the contemporary global marketplace. Culture and the economy are out of sync. This, of course, is often the case, since culture usually changes with glacial slowness while the economy can shift in an instant. But this difference has been intensified by the transition from national to transnational capitalism. Working people whose mentality has been moulded by centuries of allegiance to king and country are now being implicitly asked to acknowledge the great lie of nationalism: the fact that there is no organic bond between an ethnic group and a specific terrain, that no stretch of soil belongs by divine or natural right to those who speak a particular language or have a certain skin-colour. The country was never yours to claim back. Immigrants havenāt robbed you of what was never your property in the first place. There are no exclusively British values which outsiders canāt or wonāt share. You have been sold a fantasy by a national state in whose interests it was for you to buy this illusion, but which has transformed its nature while you have remained the same.
What you canāt accept is that transnational capitalism doesnāt care about culture or skin colour or what language was spoken in the Garden of Eden as long as it has someone to squeeze a profit out of. It is as woke in its own way as a Guardian editorial. It is the most impeccably liberal of set-ups, welcoming Malaysians to Denmark and Danes to Malaysia if this will suit its economic purposes. No mode of production has been more culture-blind. Unlike some of those who live under its rule, it is largely indifferent to questions of identity, including national or ethnic identity, since identity is a straitjacket which stops you from being mobile and adaptable. Only adolescents obsess about who they are. There are no natives any longer; instead, everyone is an expatriate, some of whom cling to the mirage of a mono-cultural country which vanished decades ago but which they still like to think of as home.
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Subscribe“…it can lead straight to the gas chambers…”
Well, second sentence, that’s gotta be some kind of record.
In any case, I call Godwin! and claim my Ā£10.
Lumping the dictator Franco with the elected Modi is a bit of a stretch too, although I see he is a popular bogeyman on the left. (I think that stems from the Ahmedabad riots of 2002 where his alleged complicity rests on the assertion that he “didn’t do enough” to prevent them. And also that he ran a successful moderately pro-business government in Gujarat)
Then again, Franco was replaced by restoration of the monarchy, and what could be more nationalist than that?
Franco arranged his replacement by a constitutional monarchy. He embodied the Kirkpatrick Doctrine.
Shows that TE is the usual predictable Marxist polemicist. PM Modi has been democratically elected as a three term leader by the world’s most populous democracy; but I expect TE to consider Lenin and Mao to be the biggest ” democrats”.
UH should stop descending into bilge Communist propagandists as Mr Eagleton.
He’s not been paying attention again, has he.
If he’d bothered to read more widely (including Unherd Comments over the last couple of weeks) he’d understand that the growing anger is very much with the political class.
The rioters may well have had more than one motivating factor – including a small number who genuinely dislike people from other countries – but the reason the rioting sprung up is the failure of the political class to prevent the weighing down of public infrastructure, either through neglect, rising levels of immigration or a combination of both; plus, a perception of differential treatment. The spark was a single incident but the pressures had been building for decades.
The vast majority of UK citizens have no racist inclinations, and are perfectly happy to work and socialise alongside other ethnicities who participate in the social realm. If Eagleton really was capable of thinking outwith the false prism of Marxism, he’d realise that as a relatively small island, the UK simply can’t become the end point of mass migration. That’s the truth, and it renders his diatribe about “nationalism” irrelevant.
I understood “isn’t directed at” in the literal sense that the demonstrations didn’t take place at, say, the Houses of Parliament.
Except… the opposite is true. The political class might prefer that to happen, where it can be more easily contained.
The Peasants Revolt was crushed when they marched on London.
Whilst i don’t agree with.mob violence, i can see parallels.
Nor was The Lanesborough torched.
Eagleton’s point about punching down is pretty spot on (except that blaming minorities for crises generated by governments has happened in a fair few other places than Britain over the years…)
… “who do you target if you are poor, humiliated, excluded and without a future? Why, the only social group (refugees) who are even poorer, more excluded and more humiliated than you are.”
That’s the point. The rioters don’t feel the “refugees” (illegal immigrants?) aren’t poorer/more excluded/humiliated than they are; they’ve been put up in a hotel, for a start, and will probably be prioritised over the rioters and their families for various other social services and special treatment.
I believe (correct me if wrong), that refugees are guaranteed an hotel of at least 3-star rating. That in itself is a disgraceful state of affairs, given the struggles that many of us have from day to day. Add to that the downright theft off pensioners who are just about the Pension Credit threshold. Put the two together, and the government is just asking for trouble.
Not to mention the 2 tier justice system
In some cases, particularly among young people, I think Marxist analysis is a stage that they will go through and, one hopes, will come out the other side older and wiser, but anyone over thirty and still a Marxist is either cynically fighting for political power, or they are not as intelligent as they think they are.
Spot on, Claire.
Can you explain what you mean “Marxist analysis” and what parts of Marx you are referring to? There is of course a difference between being a Marxist and using/critiquing some parts of his extensive and diverse work. After all, pretty much every serious contemporary (political) thinker still interacts with the work Marx/Engels one way or another. Both on the left and the right. And I would say no serious thinker can just agree with- or dismiss all of it. Those who do usually haven’t read much if anything.
In answer to your question; briefly, I mean the fundamental oppressors v’s the oppressed idea which is the foundation of Marxism and it’s offshoots of feminism, anti-racism et al.
I agree with you, it is necessary for any “serious contemporary (political (or otherwise)) thinker” to have a grasp of Marxism academically, and it’s importance historically over the past 150 years. In my view it probably had a valid part to play in the latter part of the 19th century in industrial societies, but it’s central philosophical idea of oppressors v’s oppressed is divisive and nihilistic.
I see. This trigger seems to be a byproduct of the culture war that accelerated around 2016 then. Before that, feminism, CRT, PoMo etc. were not so strongly associated with Marxist “class struggle” nor were people that strongly opinionated about any of it as far as I can see. Not that there is no relation at all but it is, in my opinion, a huge oversimplification. And these antagonisms are strikingly different from McCarthyism just a few decades earlier.
Anyway, the cultural discussions are quite a far cry from things like alienation, dielectric materialism (the Marxian-Hegelian model) and the analytical economic work on use/exchange value, labor theory of value etc. Many of these things are dated but others are quite relevant and perhaps even more so because of how global capital is developing. In fact, the intellectual foundations of some of the radical “New Right”, which in turn produced some of the foundations for modern “populist” movements, used quite a bit of Marxism and even critical theory.
I think I’ll leave you there in your labyrinth, I hope you manage to find a way out one day.
I hope you do too.
Joseph Mccarthy, a much maligned figure, was right: Washington DC was awash with Russian spies. The problem he had was that infiltration had meant that part of the Federal Government was working for ‘the other side’.Ā Ā Sounds familiar?
Diana West’s ‘American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character’, describes the difficulties in revealing the malevolence, and how the US hasn’t recovered, resulting in a nation ‘unable to know truth from lies’.
And in her (much shorter) book, ‘The Red Thread: A Search for Ideological Drivers Inside the Anti-Trump Conspiracy’, she asks the simple question: Why? What was the motivation? And she finds plenty of trails, with some going back to the Cold War, and some more modern. For example, Russiagate was done to hide Uranium One, which still hasn’t hit the headlines.
The evidence includes material from Moscow archives, gathered following the fall of the USSR.
RA do you understand the change in the dialectic formula from Hegel to Marx, Marx to Gramsci and then Gramsci to Applied Postmodernism?
All each movement did Post-Marx was modify or invert an aspect of “Theory” dialectically to treat two opposites as one part of the same whole. Its a form of Social Alchemy or transmutation of society.
People reading Marx get caught up in his supposed economic theories like the “Labour Theory of Value.” All he was trying to do was abolish every hierarchy and classification system that he didn’t create. It’s no different than every dialectical movement that followed and modified his work.
I’m not entirely sure what you’re getting at. Gramsci’s literary critique and ideas of hegemony were indeed of influence as early poststructuralist work focused on linguistics and semiotics. However, postmodernism borrows more heavily from Nietzsche (not Marx or Marxists). In general and in its rejection of modernist metanarratives – which would include the Hegelian dielectric itself. Postmodernists have, of course, this tendency to be very self-contradictory. Also it is not intrinsically a political movement with a single orientation, although many theorists were clearly leftists and (former) Marxists. And of course contemporary social ‘justice movements’ do adopt postmodern techniques as well and, in my opinion, sometimes take it way too far. That said, I have not read each and every postmodern writer, I find it hard to read and am generally quite critical.
A better example would be critical theory. They really do start with Gramsci. Although as I said before you can find some (far) right examples in many of these movements as well.
I used the term Applied Postmodernism to describe the synthesis between Critical Theory/Liberation Theology and Postmodernism. Whereas Postmodernism is just a “critique” about “Power” that treats all broad narratives as arbitrary, Critical Theory operates through Praxis. Applied Postmodernism is just Postmodern Critique that privileges developing world Liberation Theologies and Critical Theory as the only methods that can redistribute power “equitably” at scale.
I wish postmodernism borrowed more heavily from Nietzsche than Marx and Marxists! Nietzsche was a genius.
Standpoint Marxism has been around since the 1970s: used heavily in academic feminism, critical race theory and others, especially in American universities.
UnHerders don’t understand Marxism, have never read Marx. Just use the words as superficial insults
There’s a difference between being Marxian and being Marxist.
A certain amount of Marxian analysis provides useful insights (the class nature of warfare for instance; the Brits and Germans killing each other across no man’s land really did have much more in common than with “their” leaders).
Marxists, on the other hand…
I’m not sure about that. Yes, soldiers do have much in common across the divide, as do officers and the leaders, but I think looking at war from a class point of view is not helpful, it does not clarify, it is a device towards an end, and a distortion of the truth.
Perhaps the best that I can say about Marxian analysis is that it brings about discussion, but in the end I always find it inhuman and unjust.
You don’t believe in what we all see with our eyes, that we live in a society where there are people who are very rich and their money comes from those who work?
I don’t want to become involved in a long argument, however, I understand how upsetting the world can be, I’m often upset. I understand how Marx appears to offer explanations and answers, but neither his philosophy or his economics work without killing masses of people and/or totalitarian governance.
He did not understand human nature and he did not believe in God.
Please keep reading as widely as you can and living adventurously within your capacity. Don’t make one group of people the enemy, and avoid being certain about your own righteousness. Life is complicated.
So this society is unequal and bad? Compared with what?
How? Seriously you don’t know? And comapred to pre-neo-liberal Europe iinequality has grown massively. https://equalitytrust.org.uk/scale-economic-inequality-uk/
As the saying goes, if you are not a socialist when you are 20 you have no heart. If you are still a socialist by the time you are 30 then you have no brains.
And if you’re a Marxist age 70+ funded by the taxpayer for a life time to take an axe to the good, the true and the beautiful, then you’re an evil ideologue, narcissist and threat to civility and civilization
I can’t stand TE.
Eagleton is a very bad sociologist and historian, and a rather vulgar Marxist. Yes nationalism is modern. Yes it relies on fiction (‘imagined community’). But that fiction is necessary to create the kind of shared identity and mutual identification without which any welfare state or social policy or infrastructure investment is impossible. This is because without ‘Britishness’ or ‘Canadianness’ or ‘Frenchness’ – membership communities based on citizenship – the fiscal transfers whereby a young person in Ontario pays for the health care of an old man in Nova Scotia (2000 miles away) become impossible. Taxation would appear to be simple robbery. And this is what it was in pre-national mercantilist states and empires. You render to Caesar at the point of a centurion’s short sword. Catholicism was the first and only legitimate form of internationalism. And it was never intended to create a global welfare state or whatever juvenile Marxist soviet fantasy Eagleton would like to impose on people….
The imagined communities of nationhood are real, are rooted in a human propensity for affiliation, it builds on a deeply ingrained tribal psychology (inside/outside; we/ them) and aside from immediate family, that ‘we’ has only really been created on the basis of shared gods, (imagined) shared ethnicity or shared enemies.
Liberal-democratic nations have created something quite extraordinary – innovation, markets, fiscal transfers, safety nets and civic (rather) than ethnic forms of national identity which allow a steady flow of immigrants to be adopted into a symbolic/ shared kinship. But that system can be overloaded and destroyed. And the principle danger is ideological morons like Eagleton – people who never got over that teenage thrill of sticking it to the (working class, police-)man at some far left march calling for total iconoclasm and Jahr Null.
How do you have a democratic system without boundaries?
How do you have a welfare system without borders?
A lot of people accept the propaganda that all opposition to the government is based on racism. Thatās why weāve seen so many brainwashed drones marching against āracismā. Theyāve been deployed to help prop up an unpopular government, but have no relevance to the real issues.
“while some of them just hated foreigners and wanted to beat them up”
Terry, is it really hatred, causing them to want that? or is it anger at the helplessness they feel when some foreigners have been getting away with drugs, rape, murder for nigh on decades now?
The rage at migrants is not racial, or because of their colour, or because they come from elsewhere. It is because they don’t integrate well. They remain a separate group within Britain.
And because we never asked them to come. Many are unwelcome guests.
Done because they are too menny.
Oh dear. I could go on for hours about what’s wrong with this piece. For example, he throws around the word ‘ethnicity’ and its derivatives with gay abandon, without once defining his term.
But the basic problem is that he thinks he knows the motivations of the rioters. Really? Has he asked them? Almost certainly not. He’s just making it all up. We’ve seen this before, and recently. Bravo, Mr. Eagleton: Remoanerism redux!
Put it down to yet another UnHerd dud, and move on.
“Only a tiny number of zealots are likely to throw themselves on the barricades shouting āLong Live the European Union!ā, let alone āUp With World Government!ā How do you develop forms of consciousness which correspond to a globalised world?”
How about the zealots chanting “Allahu Akbar”? There seems to be a rather large group of people who have been organizing marches, amongst other activities, who have no issues identifying with a grander global vision than the nation state. It’s just that their “form of consciousness” predates the formation of the nation state by about a thousand years.
Well, with exceptions.
England is over a thousand years old and people were calling themselves EnglisÄ even before that. So maybe what we have is a global form of consciousness from the seventh century meeting a national form of consciousness from the ninth century(-ish).
Good luck with that!
What an insufferable smart arsed sophist Eagleton is.
I have to agree and in fact I canāt even be bothered to pick out quotes that contradict or are just absurd.
Charlatan posing as an academic
He’s not that good! Are you his PR or something?
Finally – someone has touched on the relationship between Capitalism and the Immigration crisis.
In all the years listening to political commentators like Konstantin Kisin, Douglas Murray, and Matthew Goodwin (I happen to agree with them alot) on the topic of immigration, it baffles me that not one of them mentions how the system of capitalism exacerbates the crisis, if not is its root cause.
To put a very blunt connection:
Low skilled-immigration = lower wages = reduced costs = higher profits
Who wins? The corporations that seek profit, profit, profit.
What is the system that enables this? Capitalism.
If corporations are forced to pay higher wages that the native population can live on, it removes the incentive for them to find cheap labour elsewhere, hence reducing the need for more immigration.
It is absolutely right that people are angry at the political class. But we should also set our sights on the capitalist class who have the most to gain from mass immigration.
Interesting that you don’t think you’ve seen anyone connect the two before. Perhaps it’s because a lot the focus goes onto illegal migration, or perhaps it’s too obvious to point out? The working class that has had their wages kept down by migration are certainly aware of the connection. Of course, it’s not in the middle classes benefit to mention this, so maybe that is why.
I can however remember an Evan Davis piece for BBC1 on migration not long after freedom of movement opened up to Eastern Europe. So in the mid 00s. The conclusion was basically that migration would boost the economy, but some would lose out. Possibly it was the last honest statement on the effect of migration I saw, so maybe you are right, though I think everyone knows it even if it goes unsaid.
On reading and watching these people I’ve mentioned – yes, they will blame the corporations and their greed, but for them to criticize Capitalism? I haven’t heard them do that yet. In fact, they are staunch supporters of it, which is what I find most contradicting.
The only person so far I have listened to articulate the Capitalism = Mass Migration issue is the American author Sohrab Ahmari (Should the US Shut Its Borders: A Free Press Debate – on youtube for anyone interested)
Capitalism is a broad church. The particular type of capitalism we inhabit is a globalised neoliberalism and it is that which promotes immigration.
One of the very strange things I find about many people on the left, like Terry, is that they support large-scale immigration despite it being due to a system that I suspect they otherwise oppose.
Generous social welfare schemes are the greatest inducement for unproductive low-skilled immigrants to come to places like Britain.
They can live finer lives while unemployed in the West than they could working 13 hours a day in their home countries. You can hardly blame them for choosing to take advantage of our stupidity.
The working class left, via the unions, were historically against immigration, seeing it as a capitalist conspiracy to bring down wages.
They didn’t really change, it’s just that the majority of left is now middle class civil servants and academics.
Yes. The natural successor to Keir Hardie, who founded the Labour Party to defend working people against the importation of cheap labour, is not Keir Starmer, it’s Nigel Farage. How many of these over-privileged and pretentious numpties yakking on about ‘far right’ are even aware of that
Have you really listened to them for years? Did you just hear them and not listen? Either that or you just didn’t understand anything.
All the writers/commentators you have called out have pointed out at length the poor economics of using cheap immigrant labour to satisfy big corporations at the expense of working class people.
I would also recommend learning a bit more about capitalism. There’s countless ways in which capitalism can be controlled, directed managed. This current political/economic system is one of them – and most would agree mainly benefits big corporations and short term politicians who can point at a graph that went up.
Blaming capitalism is like blaming rain. It’s neither good nor bad intrinsically – but without a form of it we’d be in the dark ages.
Alleluia – exactly this. Capitalism is a man made construct, not an immutable force of nature. As such it can be fine tuned, using the law, to produce fairer outcomes. It really is that simple.
Not at all. What we call capitalism is more akin to an evolved system from the universal human tendency to barter goods and services than a top-down “intelligent design” statist system like socialism. The latter attempts to control the former but cannot exist for long without it.
Who wins?
You do. Where do you think all that unearned property wealth you’ve been accumulating for the past twenty years has been coming from?
Unearned property wealth hasn’t been coming from Capitalism. It’s been coming from central banks keeping interest rates artificially low and flooding the world (via QE) with liquidity.
Blame governments’ fiat currency policies for this; they’re the ones imposing constantly debased means of exchange on their citizens.
“What is the system that enables this? Capitalism”
The whole point of Capitalism is that it’s not a system.
And blaming “Capitalism” for the sins of capitalists is a bit like thinking governments “saved” Capitalism during the GFC by rescuing capitalists (actually, it was the opposite; rescuing the bankers and financiers from the consequences of the risk-taking and poor decision making was what drove the final nail into Capitalism’s coffin).
The people who benefit most from the increase of the number of poor people – indigenous or immigrant – are Leftist politicians, because the poor tend to vote for their redistributive policies.
Capitalists in developed countries obviously wish to reduce their costs, but they make most profit from having highly productive skilled employees. Not what springs to mind when considering the mass of poorly-educated illegal immigrants who are non-native English speakers and often barely literate.
Excellent point
Very interesting article. I think, however, it overplays the capitalistic angle of the nation-state. Throughout history people all over the world have been distinguishing between Themselves and the Others using any number of cultural constructs. Before nationality there was tribe, cast, clan, house, you name it, to say nothing about religion. State actors have been fighting with each other and outsiders for millennia using any number of separating lines. Nations are indeed a relatively recent addition to these constructs but they are not less real.
Ultimately the far more important question is what are the root causes of the current situation and what to do about it.
I read all that and Terry’s conclusion is; nationalism is bad because it’s nationalism.
Saved you the read.
Dyed in the wool progressives (especially Marxists) dislike nationalism, organised religion, capitalism, and free speech. Mostly because it removes the ‘spotlight’ from their political focus.
Terry Eagleton: QED
‘Nationalism is a thoroughly modern ideology,….’
Yes, it replaced tribalism, at least in Europe.
There are places where tribalism still holds sway.
As for the riots, why doesn’t Sir Keir Starmer do what Governor Tim Walz did on May 30, 2020 when he needed to crush the Peaceful BLM protests? Why not call in the military?
If it takes Walz 7000 National Guard to put a halt to peaceful BLM protests, then the protests last week must have been incredibly peaceful….
Another day, another Guardianista.
Time to reconsider my subscription.
He’s here to provide a bit of plurality. Plus the reader engagement is off the scale!
If I wanted to read bourgoise mental masturbation, I can get it at the Guardian.
Yeah, annoy the hell out of your customers as a strategy for keeping them loyal. Way to go.
Yes, some red meat for the locals to sink their teeth into
Eagleton is here because he’s too insufferably pompous even for the Guardian. An almost superhuman achievement.
How strange that Terry quotes from The Communist Manifesto, yet he has forgotten that Marx and Engels, in the Communist Manifesto, call for the repatriation of immigrants.
A leftie being selective in his evidence? Well, you could knock me down with a feather.
Is there a quote for this claim?
Much of this read like a head of year berating a secondary school student for misbehaving.
English nationalism is a recent phenomenon produced by (a) the success of Celtic nationalism in being granted devolution (b) the emphasis of British governing elites on sizeable waves of immigration from incompatible cultures and/or of people with high net social coats.
English nationalism drove Brexit because England is the economic powerhouse of the UK and referendum voters realised that they could block the European open labour market where they couldn’t stop non-EU immigration owing to parliamentary political consensus.
“There were patriotic Irish scholars in the 18th century who claimed that Irish was probably the language spoken in the Garden of Eden.”
Yes but Welsh is the language of heaven.
What an absolute pile of complete and total nonsense. Authored by someone with not the faintest idea of what’s going on outside of the increasingly detached minds of the supposedly ‘intellectual’ class. I don’t have the time or the inclination to bother rebutting this vol-au-vent drivel.
Could UnHerd please stop using this guy as click bait. You are better than this.
Considering the garbage written by Eagleton, I would say that even ads would be better than this.
Nah, Eagleton and his ilk are worth reading because they serve as valuable a reminder that
institutionaliseduniversity intellectuals have nothing left to offer the world. The Academy and humanities departments might as well be retire homes.I don’t need reminding.
Pretty much everything to do with culture is built on a lie. We’re apes who tried walking upright and got lucky. Culture is the stuff we make up to try to make sense of it.
That doesn’t mean it’s not real as well. In the sense that stuff like nationhood, religion, ideology etc help shape real actions. What language we speak, what cause we’d die for, how we worship etc etc
Nor is it the case that one lie is inherently more truthful than another. I’ve never seen any evidence that Marx’s internationalism is any less of a fantasy than the sort of nationalism which implies the “people” grew out of that particular bit of soil.
Terry Eagleton and his kind are the reason we are in this mess. They have spent their whole lives benefiting from the practical infrastructures and cultural freedoms of the west to construct their Marxist towers of s*** , while the ālittle peopleā pay their wages, clean their houses, fix their roads etc.
Instead of turning round and giving something back, theyāre hellbent on making those people poorer, less safe and with less and less access to all the things they grew up taking for granted, thank you very much: housing, schools, hospitals, safe streets, etc.
I am surrounded by Terry Eagletons at my place of work. They donāt care about poor people except as pawns in their abstract āintellectualā games.
They do not realise that their wages are also a form of profit. Like any capitalist business, they want to have something left over after expenses. Unlike capitalist businesses, they’re not so keen on achieving this by cutting expenses.
Exactly. Theyāre very keen on having āthe stateā pay for everything, while hating the state and wanting to abolish it.
And they expect politicians to run industries, successfully, when they don’t have any relevant academic or practical knowledge.
Are you kidding? Guys like TE worship collectivism – ie, the State. The last thing they want to do is actually abolish it, as can be seen in every Marxist revolution; they never get beyond socialism to actual communism, because the sorts of people who are ruthless enough to abolish (ie, steal) private property – and kill everyone who resists – are not about to surrender the reins and abolish the State once they come to power.
Well said – he’s a completely hypocritical POS. He’s basically the last person Unherd should be calling on. He’s got nothing to offer. Nothing for the future. Nothing different. Just griping.
Surely the summer’s rioting started in July, in Leeds & Harehill and in Whitechapel?
Why are they overlooked?
And no: Nationalism is not āa thoroughly modern ideology, which stretches back no more than about two and a half centuriesā.
The Kingdom of England was established in the C10.
The United Kingdom of Israel earlier still (an embarrassing detail for the pro-Hamas Left).
As for āthe Romantic desire to affirm your difference, uniqueness and possible superiority as a peopleā, this doesnāt have to do with ethnicity per se but with a shared culture and sense of unity. Does he know anything at all about the founding of the US?
Agree with most there but well, Current Israel is the result of a poll in the UN, with UK not voting “for”, being the ones with the best knowledge about the situation at the time. And conflicts has been ongoing since the very start of modern Israel. I have none whatsoever love for Hamas, and no love for the Likud/west bank settlers either.
The want for the jewish people to find a haven and a country they could call their own, dating back to the mid-1800s is highly understandable, but the way the current state of Israel was created was nothing short of a way to start conflicts. The UN proceedings 1947 were highly understandable too, with all the autrocities the jewish people had to suffer during Nazism but a quick fix is very seldom a good fix.
Hardly a quick fix, when it all kicked off after the 600 year old Ottoman Empire lost in WWI.
The ancient Hebrews lost their claim on “Israel” long before the Muslims came along. Remember Rome? First Pagan, then Christian. Judaism hasn’t been the ruling (or even majority religion) in Palestine for thousands of years prior to the Zionists’ colonialism in the early 20th century.
So, youāre prepared to say that sovereignty can be acquired by brute force, which has the power to extinguish prior claims?
Not only have Jews lived continuously for thousands of years in what is left of ancient Judea, today called Israel, but also in what today is called ‘the Occupied Territories’, but in reality is the ancient Northern Kingdom of Israel.
The Samaritan Jews have lived continuously in Samaria since Joshua (who lived about 1355 BCE, BC).
What is not getting enough attention, in my view, is the link between Nazism and the ongoing strife in the region. Please let me explain.
Israelites lived on the land 1,658 years before the ancestors of Palestinians. Palestinian ancestral land is the Arabian Peninsula. ‘Syria Palaestina’ was the name given to Judea by the conquering Romans (after the Jewish revolt of Bar Kochba). As has been noted by others here, it is a place that has been conquered and ruled over by many different peoples since then: Byzantian Christians, Arab Muslims and, until the end of WW1, Ottoman Turks, but has always been shared by Jews, Christians, Arabs and others, until certain Salafist Muslim leaders started to pursue a pan-Arab, anti-Zionist agenda.
When the Ottomans fell in WW1 and the British moved in, establishing the Palestine Mandate (1917 – 1948), many Arabs from Jordan, Syria and Egypt emigrated there to work for the British. Simultaneously there was an increase in Jewish immigrants wanting to return to their ancient homeland – many still with familial ties to Jews already living there – especially as the Holocaust took hold across Europe. (In fact, the British restricted the entry of many Jews fleeing the holocaust.) Appalling clashes ensued incited by, among others, Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, arguably, the Father of Palestinian Liberation, a pan-Arabist and rabid anti-Zionist. He led the 1920 Nebi Musa riots against the Jews and was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment, but was pardoned by the British, who appointed him Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, a position he used to promote Islam and rally against Zionism. E.g. as Mufti he began a campaign (in 1928) to ‘reassert’ Muslim rights over the Western Wall. In 1929 Husseini’s activists handed out fliers suggesting that Jews were planning to attack the al-Aqsa mosque and urging Muslims to avenge ‘the honour of Islam’. Hundreds of Muslims organized by the Supreme Muslim Council converged on the Western Wall and Arab villagers armed with sticks and knives began to attack Jews in the Old City of Jerusalem and burn shops in whatās known as the massacre of Hebron. NB this was before the establishment of Israel.
Husseini was also a leader in the Arab revolt against British rule (1936-1939) before he fled, taking refuge in Lebanon, then Iraq, then fascist Italy, then N*zi Germany, France, and Egypt. He was paid by the Third Reich throughout WW2 to translate and spread anti-Jewish propaganda throughout the Middle East. We know he met with Hitler on 28 November 1941 to ask for help opposing the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine at the height of the Holocaust. Apparently Hitler told him that, after Germany had āsolved its Jewish problemā with Europe, āGermany’s objective would then be solely the destruction of the Jewish element residing in the Arab sphere under the protection of British powerā. (Das deutsche Ziel wĆ¼rde dann lediglich die Vernichtung des im arabischen Raum unter der Protektion der britischen Macht lebenden Judentums sein). Browning, Christopher R. (2007). The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939 ā March 1942.
There are photos of al-Husseini touring the concentration camps. There is also a surviving Telegram to him from Himmler, dated 1943, saying: ‘The great N*zi Socialist movement of Great Germany has, from its inception, rebuffed its struggle against world Jewry. For this reason it closely follows the struggle of the freedom-loving Arabs, especially in Palestine, against the Jewish invaders. The common recognition of the enemy and the joint struggle against it are what form the solid foundation between Germany and the freedom-loving Muslims all over the world.’
As we all know, the British attempt to divide the land of Palestine between the Jews and the Arabs was resisted, violently, by all involved (first the 1936-9 Arab revolt, then the 1944ā1948 Jewish insurgency ā both of which led to Britain giving up the Mandate and leaving the area). But what really was the solution? The Mandate tried to put into effect the Balfour Declaration’s ‘national home for the Jewish people’ alongside the Palestinian Arabs with a separate Arab emirate to be established in Transjordan.
The United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine, adopted by the UN General Assembly on 29 November 1947, recommended the creation of independent Arab and Jewish States linked economically and a Special International Regime for the city of Jerusalem and its surroundings. Jewish organizations cooperated with the UN throughout deliberations, while the Palestinian Arab leadership boycotted them and neighbouring Arab states and the Arab League declared they would intervene to prevent its implementation. The partition plan might even have worked had not, the day after the UN vote on the Partition Plan, the Arab states surrounding Palestine – Egypt, Transjordan, Iraq and Syria ā invaded, attacking Jewish settlements and murdering Jews. The Jews then declared the Establishment of the State of Israel and the 1948 Arab-Israeli War ensued, which Israel won. Israel was admitted to membership in the United Nations on 11 May 1949.
A further point to note about āindigeneityā. In the 3 years that followed the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, about 700,000 Jews immigrated to Israel, residing mainly along the borders and in former Arab lands, i.e natives to the Middle East (not Europe). Only around 136,000 were some of the 250,000 displaced Jews of World War II. Between the war until the early 1970s, 800,000ā1,000,000 Jews left, fled or were expelled from their homes in Arab countries; while approximately 711,000 Arabs left, fled or were expelled from what became Israel. A stark contrast is that those Arabs who stayed in Israel were given Israeli nationality by the Jews, many of whom remain there to this day, while those Jews who stayed in the surrounding Arab nations were persecuted.
Today there are 2,080,000 Arabs living in Israel, 21.1% of its population, while the Jewish population in the Middle East is estimated to be only 12,700 in Arab countries and Iran, and 14,800 in Turkey. This is a significant decrease from 1945, when the Jewish population in Arab countries was around 866,000. Between 1948 and the early 1970s, 856,000 Jews were forced to leave their homes in Arab countries due to persecution ā a ānakbaā you donāt hear much about.
So, despite the fact that Jewish presence in what are now Arab lands goes back to Biblical times, long predating Islam and the Arab conquest of the Middle East and North Africa, they have become a tiny minority in their own land.
As for an Arab state of āPalestineā, it has never existed. It is a political fiction adopted for the cause of anti-Zionism. As recently as the 1960s Gaza was Egyptian and the West Bank Jordanian. Even the Palestinian flag displays the pan-Arab colours which were first combined in the current style during the 1916 Arab Revolt. It was officially adopted as the Palestinian people’s flag when the Palestine Liberation Organization was founded in 1964. But, as recently as 1977, the former head of the PLO bureau of military operations, Zuhair Mohsen, said the following:
‘The Palestinian people do not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians and Lebanese; we are all members of the same nation. Solely for political reasons are we careful to stress our identity as Palestinians. Since a separate State of Palestine would be an extra weapon in Arab hands to fight Zionism with. Yes, we do call for the creation of a Palestinian state for tactical reasons. Such a state would be a new means of continuing the battle against Zionism, and for Arab unity.’
“certain others will wrap themselves defensively in the Union flag.”
From the headline, I thought that the article was supposed to be about English nationalism.
“In a long historical perspective, this summer’s rioting happened because a section of the British working class had imbibed all too well the propaganda of it’s social superiors.”
I disagree. I find this article pompous intellectualising of a shocking horrific atrocity, and it’s aftermath, by someone who seems to have lost their humanity. The murders and violent assaults by people of colour on white people are increasing, from Lee Rigby in 2013, London Bridge 2019, Nottingham 2023 to the spate of attacks this summer culminating in the deaths and potentially ruined lives of little girls.
I do not think the rioters have “imbibed” anything except beer. The British white working class are the most inarticulate and marginalised group amongst us, they responded to the atrocity with frustrated fury and I don’t blame them. I am sorry individual police officers suffered and those responsible should be brought to justice, but if you sign up to police on behalf of the state, which has allowed millions of people from elsewhere to come here against many of our wishes, it is not surprising if you get the full force of the rioter’s anger.
This article is just one more politically motivated ‘rational’ explanation for something that was emotional, visceral, and absolutely understandable in human terms.
Hear hear. And despite being āthe most inarticulate and marginalised group amongst us,ā they see all the social engineering efforts go to everyone but them: all the DEI initiatives in the workplace, the āclosing of BAME attainment gapsā in universities, the special education measures in schoolsā¦
Eagleton admits that he considers the working class incapable of thinking for themselves … typical condescending far left wing intellectual.
The dismissal of Tommy Robinson simply as a “lout”, while hardly unique to Terry Eagleton, is instructive. He’s been placed firmly beyond the pale in “civilised” discourse, not worth consideration, his complaints simply too uncouth and dangerous to contemplate (even typing this feels somewhat risky). Whereas actually it seems to me he fairly articulately expresses many of the issues at hand from a genuinely valid perspective. I think the (very successful) campaign to completely ostracise him and suppress that viewpoint contains dangers.
The biggest danger with suppressing (and distorting) the speech of people like “Tommy Robinson” is that when people accidentally encounter what he’s actually said, they might come to the conclusion the Establishment has plainly lied to them about him… and, thus, probably about a lot of other things as well.
āPeople who previously thought of themselves in concrete terms as tenants of a feudal landowner and more abstractly as loyal servants of the monarch had to learn how to become French or British or Portuguese citizens. Their identities had to be remoulded and reoriented.ā
Huh?
How about:
People who previously thought of themselves – or, even, didnāt āthink of themselvesā but just ālivedā – as tenants of a feudal landowner, members of families and communities with a shared history, shared language, shared culture, shared god, and more abstractly as loyal servants of the monarch had little to no remoulding to do in Britain until the 1990s brought a critical mass of people with completely different histories, languages, cultures and gods, some of whom very clearly started to assert _their_ sense of superiority over native Britons.
As for:
āthere is no organic bond between an ethnic group and a specific terrainā¦ no stretch of soil belongs by divine or natural right to those who speak a particular language or have a certain skin-colourāā¦ this is literally the OPPOSITE claim to the Leftās usual mantra of decolonisation and indigenous rights.
Yes, it is the international timber industries who are ādisappearingā Amazonian tribes for wanting to remain in their ancestral homelands of thousands of years. Thatās why Iām on the side of the Amazonian tribes in the Amazon, the Jews in Judea and the Brits in Britain. Anyone who disavows the bond between a people and the land has spent too much time with their head in a library, office (or even smaller space), not enough time looking outside themselves.
Quite. I am holding my breath for TE to apply “The country was never yours to claim back” while visiting (deep breath):
– Israel
– Gaza
– Ukraine
– Myanmar
– Kurdistan
– Bosnia
– Sudan
– Chad
– Lapland
– First Nations reserves in the US
– Indigenous sites in Australia
– Xinjiang
And everywhere else people are being or have been displaced.
Mind you, TE thinks “almost all so-called nations were ethnically hybrid, with the odd exception such as China” which will be news for the Uighurs.
“Thatās why Iām on the side of the Amazonian tribes in the Amazon, the Jews in Judea and the Brits in Britain”.
The vast majority of Jews in “Judea” have lived there fewer than four generations: ie, they’re the invaders.
If you really believe that living somewhere for many generations confers ownership, then you should side with the Palestinians.
Is there now a demonised insider?
Mr Eagleton wears the world like a hair shirt. At least for the Christians their country is not of this world.
Finally, none of us, not even āthe loutā Tommy Robinson, resent Afghans or Syrians, for knocking at our door. We resent them only when they start to spit on our returning soldiers, burn poppies, deface public statues, rape women and girls, run drug cartels, and murder people in our streets. Robinsons Oxford Union address (2015):
https://youtu.be/_YQ94jFg_4A?si=-idSJoIOKLvWXmWf
Given the Brits’ interventions in Afghanistan and Syria (directly invading in the case of the former, and funding jihadis in the case of the latter) I find it hardly surprising the resultant refugees don’t have a lot of love for us or our military.
ie: wrecking their countries was a bad idea, and then letting them into ours in large numbers afterwards was an even worse one.
āNational unity is still politically and culturally imperative, but it is increasingly out of step with the contemporary global marketplace.ā
That sentence marks Eagleton as a member of the elites right there.
Firstly, the idea that “global” renders “national” obsolete is very Islington, isn’t it?
Secondly, the winners of the Globalisation game worldwide are themselves fiercely nationalist. The local oligarchs making out like bandits are a byproduct.
The nation state emerged from the overthrow of monarchy. It was about people living together geographically, and so having shared issues of resources, taxes, power structures, coming together to make something of their shared existence. Switzerland is one of the oldest examples – a mix of languages, ethnicities and religions pacting together to throw off the Hapsburgs – peoples with shared interests.
The English were similar. They kept their kings, but undermined their powers – from the Magna Carta to the Civil War to the regicide of Charles 1 to the Bill of Rights.
Shared geography and shared struggle is important – international action doesn’t improve working conditions by decree – it is too distant (as the US keeps finding out in it’s continual wars for freedom) – only local people working together make change happen and make change permanent, and they get there by learning to throw off tyrants.
Writing as I do from outside the parish, I cannot help noting how parochial and mean-spirited many of the comments are. For instance , 15 agree with the insulting ‘what an insufferable smart assed sophist Eagleton is’. If this, and the other sneers, are representative of British educated opinion, then you are in trouble; British anti-intellectualism is no fiction. Eagleton’s analysis is hardly remarkable. Who disagrees that democracy depends on an over-arching solidarity that contains the deep divisions and sharp conflicts of interest so avoiding civil war and settles for the endless, messy business of politics whereby one unsatisfactory compromise is replaced by another? Who disagrees that this solidarity is threatened and unsettled by an economic order whose internationalising dynamic frees it from the trammels of the state? Enough manifestations of anti-intellectualism, more observations on why the intellectual resources underpinning the solidarity appear to be weakening, more consideration of how adequately secular visions replace the unifying consolations of protestantism. I wrote of the ‘endless business of politics’ but, of course, it is not ‘endless’, it stops when solidarity evaporates. How viable is democracy without politics?. We should thank Eagleton for raising serious questions even as we question his answers.
āIf this, and the other sneers, are representative of British educated opinion, then you are in troubleā
Weāre not all British. So I guess thereās no trouble. Itās easy to pull out a few lines from the story that seem to make sense. Perhaps the disagreement isnāt with those lines.
You think Terry Eagleton is a real intellectual ?
Some of us have been reading his output here for at least a couple of years and come to the opposite conclusion. The fact that he’s a senior academic at least partially funded by us does not automatically make his an intellectual. Nor does it mean that those criticisng him are any more or less intellectual than he is.
I’m not sure what the problem with trying to judge an article on its merits is.
Calling someone an insufferable smart assed sophist is, I suggest, a strange way to judge an article on its merits. Perhaps there is a special British way of critical analysis of which I am unaware?
Do you have a problem with the British? Because youāve focused on them a few times.
Not sure what “critical analysis” actually is.
I think it’s simply the tradition of robust British free speech. Much as the author dimsisses someone as a “lout”. If he hands it out, he’s got to take it.
It’s not the language I’d use, but it’s fair comment for me based on having read many of Prof. Eagleton’s essays here.
For the last 30 years the “progressive” Left have abandoned objective truth for narrative and subjective truths. Sophistry and fallacy have replaced logic and evidence. You cannot have conversations with “bad faith actors”.
Quite. It’s the Eagleton’s who’re anti-intellectual. I wonder if he, or someone like him, “taught” Litton.
āWe should thank Eagleton for raising serious questions even as we question his answers.ā
Right, because no one else could possibly have considered those questions and answers themselves. Thereās nothing enlightening in this article, If Unherd want to pay him, fine, but donāt expect us to give it more merit than it deserves. What is clear is that the common man is stupid and just not good enough for the new world determined by those who know whatās good for us.
Lots of great posts today, Brett. Is it weetabix?
Stuck inside with bad weather.
I do agree with your initial remark, I did not like the wording “insufferable smart…”. I do however do find the analysis of Eagleton incomplete even if not maybe remarkable. For the article to be readable you have to mention the obvious problems of integration and different cultures living close together. Without saying that immigrants in any way should be worse people than others.
Eagletonās analysis is hardly remarkable
Except in the sense that it reflects absolutely no self-awareness or recognition whatsoever of the role that his own class plays in the current discontents.
Thank you all for comments. I will file them under reasonable argument and vulgar abuse in British public discourse: evidence
I will not go into discussing the subject at hand but I will say that nonconformity is often expressed by groups in ways that are increasingly conformist and dogmatic, ironically. There is actually some nice quantitative research that shows this phenomenon. We could also call it herd behavior…
It is often illuminating to see how definitions change over time. I just consulted my (1961 edition) dictionary and it defines “Nationalist” thusly – A person who favours or strives after the unity, independence or interests of a nation.
My online dictionary more than slightly alters that by defining a nationalist as – a person who strongly identifies with their own nation and vigorously supports its interests, especially to the exclusion or detriment of the interests of other nations. (my underlining)
It offers, as synonyms, the following terms : chauvinist Ā· jingoist Ā· jingo Ā· flag-waver Ā· isolationist Ā· xenophobe.
When, How, and (perhaps more pertinently) Why, did the word become a pejorative?
Interesting. Australian Aborigines might object to being labelled xenophobes or chauvinists. They might also object to a challenge to their status as āfirst nation peopleā.
I shall pass on my printed, paper, books to my grandson, to keep him grounded.
“Only adolescents obsess about who they are.”
He then goes on to obsess about class. And makes no observations about identity politics.
Terry Eagleton’s lack of self-awareness is something else.
Picking these essays apart is like shooting fish in a barrel.
Take this:
“Some of those who recently threw bricks at the police showed the anger and frustration of a neglected underclass, while some of them just hated foreigners and wanted to beat them up. The grotesque irony of the formerās behaviour is plain: who do you target if you are poor, humiliated, excluded and without a future? Why, the only social group (refugees) who are even poorer, more excluded and more humiliated than you are.”
Wrong.
The anger is because these people are receiving preferential treatment and actively being rewarded for breaking the law (illegal immigration) and having made no contributions and the protestors are being treated as second class citizens in their own country.
The author states that nationalism ‘can also free you from oppressive imperial powers’. Such as the EU and the global governancers who are undermining sovereign nation states and democracy.
A bit muddled in thinking, in my opinion.
I take issue with a number of ideas in this piece. One is the notion that nationalism is at most 250 years old. If you read Elizabeth Iās speech at Tilbury it is appealing very much to an English nation. Japan was exceedingly nationalist well before then. Of course, borders were less static and monarchs owned nations, but these aspects did not alter the essential fact of national identity, pride and protectiveness.
One should not confuse the concept of nationalism and the nation state with the existence of nations or even tribalism.
I doubt leaders would rally their troops with phrases like ‘true born Englishmen’ if they had no concept of nationalism. Whether they would have defined it the way a modern political philosopher might is a wholly different matter!
Oh dear, how is it that we still have so many Marxists when he so wrong about so much. It blinds them to reality.
ļ»æAn almost jaw-breaking yawn.
In a long historical perspective, this summerās rioting happened because a section of the British working class had imbibed all too well the propaganda of its social superiors.
No, Terry, this summer’s rioting happened because, for twenty years, you, and people like you, have been pauperising the ‘British working class’ in order to enrich yourself with artificially inflated house prices and the output of low wages. The problem isn’t their ‘delusion’, it’s your greed. It’s quite astonishing that someone as supposedly educated as you still hasn’t acquired the thimbleful of self-awareness required to understand that.
For all the paradoxes and contradictions of nationalism, Terry, your āMarxist internationalismā is the biggest lie and pure doublespeak. Internationalism is free co-operation BETWEEN nations and their peoples. Marxist āinternationalismā, in contrast, is the supranationalism of empire builders who seek the global dissolution of nations.
Continents overarch nations, nations overarch tribes, tribes overarch families. Add to this that man is concurrently an individual and a social being. This is how we organise ourselves. There is us and there is other. Not to say that with an impeding threat from outer space, we would all conglomerate as us. None the less we are swiftly moving to another state of being and that is AI. With both falling birth rates and one of the other AIs – artificial insemination, the bastion of our organisation, the family, will be obliterated. It is no coincidence that so much attention has been brought to LGBTQ+. We don’t dance as pairs anymore, music is electronic – we are parting from biology. It is in this way that nations (the notion of which is far deeper and real than that idiot Eagleton admits) will become irrelevant. As a p.s. I cannot believe that further education lies in hands like his. Or maybe I can.
“What also proved vital to the nationās sense of shared identity was Protestantism, which was sadly lacking in both France and Ireland.”
wow, what a ridiculous statement!
For one thing, almost all so-called nations were ethnically hybrid, with the odd exception such as China, so why shouldnāt each of these ethnic groups have its own state?
Are you sure? Even today, Finland is about 95% ethnic Finns. Japan is overwhelmingly comprised of Japanese-born and bred nationals. The same used to hold true for most of Europe until the great importation of the third world started. That cultural and ethnic homogeneity is the impetus behind the various policies that lead Americans to ask, “why can’t we do that?” That homogeneity engrains a high degree of social trust and cohesion that makes large-scale initiatives possible.
The road to eliminating nationalism is paved with multiculturalism and the misguided notion that all cultures are equal and that all can peacefully co-exist. No, they can’t. The Middle East makes that painfully clear and that goes beyond Jew/Muslim to the internal conflict between Sunnis and Shias.
A nation exists on language, borders, and most of all, culture. Without that last component, you don’t have a country; you have competing tribes that are constrained by a common border.
It’s not Jew vs Muslims, it’s Jews vs Arabs – ie, the conflict in Palestine/Israel is racial, not religious. The invading Zionists ethnically cleansed Arab Christians as well as Arab Muslims from their lands during the Nakhba, and have been slaughtering Chistians as well as bombing their homes, hospitals, monasteries and churches in Gaza since Oct 7th
If it’s not ‘Jews vs Muslims’ then why is Iran committed to the destruction of Israel? Iranians speak an Indo-European language and are definitely not Arabs.
This is historically illiterate propaganda, as I just explained above.
When the Ottomans fell in WW1 and the British established the Palestine Mandate (1917 ā 1948), many Arabs from Jordan, Syria and Egypt emigrated there to work for the British. Simultaneously there was an increase in Jewish immigrants wanting to return to their ancient homeland ā many still with familial ties to Jews already living there ā especially as the Holocaust took hold across Europe. (In fact, the British restricted the entry of many Jews fleeing the holocaust.) Appalling clashes ensued incited by, among others, Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, arguably, the Father of Palestinian Liberation, a pan-Arabist, Salafist Muslim and anti-Zionist. He led the 1920 Nebi Musa riots against the Jews and was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment, but was pardoned by the British, who appointed him Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, a position he used to promote Islam and rally against Zionism. E.g. as Mufti he began a campaign (in 1928) to āreassertā Muslim rights over the Western Wall. In 1929 Husseiniās activists handed out fliers suggesting that Jews were planning to attack the al-Aqsa mosque and urging Muslims to avenge āthe honour of Islamā. Hundreds of Muslims organized by the Supreme Muslim Council converged on the Western Wall and Arab villagers armed with sticks and knives began to attack Jews in the Old City of Jerusalem and burn shops in whatās known as the massacre of Hebron. NB this was before the establishment of Israel.
Husseini was also a leader in the Arab revolt against British rule (1936-1939) before he fled, taking refuge in Lebanon, then Iraq, then fascist Italy, then N*zi Germany, France, and Egypt. He was paid by the Third Reich throughout WW2 to translate and spread anti-Jewish propaganda throughout the Middle East. We know he met with Hitler on 28 November 1941 to ask for help opposing the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine at the height of the Holocaust. Apparently Hitler told him that, after Germany had āsolved its Jewish problemā with Europe, āGermanyās objective would then be solely the destruction of the Jewish element residing in the Arab sphere under the protection of British powerā. (Das deutsche Ziel wĆ¼rde dann lediglich die Vernichtung des im arabischen Raum unter der Protektion der britischen Macht lebenden Judentums sein). Browning, Christopher R. (2007). The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939 ā March 1942.
There are photos of al-Husseini touring the concentration camps. There is also a surviving Telegram to him from Himmler, dated 1943, saying: āThe great N*zi Socialist movement of Great Germany has, from its inception, rebuffed its struggle against world Jewry. For this reason it closely follows the struggle of the freedom-loving Arabs, especially in Palestine, against the Jewish invaders. The common recognition of the enemy and the joint struggle against it are what form the solid foundation between Germany and the freedom-loving Muslims all over the world.ā
As we all know, the British attempt to divide the land of Palestine between the Jews and the Arabs was resisted, violently, by all involved (first the 1936-9 Arab revolt, then the 1944ā1948 Jewish insurgency ā both of which led to Britain giving up the Mandate and leaving the area). But what really was the solution? The Mandate tried to put into effect the Balfour Declarationās ānational home for the Jewish peopleā alongside the Palestinian Arabs with a separate Arab emirate to be established in Transjordan.
The United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine, adopted by the UN General Assembly on 29 November 1947, recommended the creation of independent Arab and Jewish States linked economically and a Special International Regime for the city of Jerusalem and its surroundings. Jewish organizations cooperated with the UN throughout deliberations, while the Palestinian Arab leadership boycotted them and neighbouring Arab states and the Arab League declared they would intervene to prevent its implementation. The partition plan might even have worked had not, the day after the UN vote on the Partition Plan, the Arab states surrounding Palestine ā Egypt, Transjordan, Iraq and Syria ā invaded, attacking Jewish settlements and murdering Jews. The Jews then declared the Establishment of the State of Israel and the 1948 Arab-Israeli War ensued, which Israel won. Israel was admitted to membership in the United Nations on 11 May 1949.
A further point to note about religion (not race). In the 3 years that followed the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, about 700,000 Jews immigrated to Israel, residing mainly along the borders and in former Arab lands, i.e natives to the Middle East (not Europe). Only around 136,000 were some of the 250,000 displaced Jews of World War II. Between the war until the early 1970s, 800,000ā1,000,000 Jews left, fled or were expelled from their homes in Arab countries; while approximately 711,000 Arabs left, fled or were expelled from what became Israel. A stark contrast is that those Arabs who stayed in Israel were given Israeli nationality by the Jews, many of whom remain there to this day, while those Jews who stayed in the surrounding Arab nations were persecuted.
Today there are 2,080,000 Arabs living in Israel, 21.1% of its population, while the Jewish population in the Middle East is estimated to be only 12,700 in Arab countries and Iran, and 14,800 in Turkey. This is a significant decrease from 1945, when the Jewish population in Arab countries was around 866,000. Between 1948 and the early 1970s, 856,000 Jews were forced to leave their homes in Arab countries due to persecution ā a ānakbaā you donāt hear much about.
So, despite the fact that Jewish presence in what are now Arab lands goes back to Biblical times, long predating Islam and the Arab conquest of the Middle East and North Africa, they have become a tiny minority in their own land.
“In a long historical perspective, this summerās rioting happened because a section of the British working class had imbibed all too well the propaganda of its social superiors.”
Bolleaux. It happened, Terry, because you people have spent the last 25 years crowing about continuous mass immigration and taking the pi55 out of the gammon and the Karens while Pakistani paedophile gangs raped their daughters and the 10m increase in our population took away their housing and their access to public services and squeezed their wages.
no. british identity is not ethnic. it is institutional. Representatives wee first sent to Westminster from the counties. The idea was and is that represntayives from the localities go to Westmminster to legislate. The Crown in parliament is sovereign.
Is the author on drugs? Great academic argument but bares no resemblance to real life.
People have always grouped themselves into like v none like types since before the nation state was ever thought of.
In fact most people just want to be left alone in their own turning circle to live life as they see fit.
No one who rioted has bought into any of your propaganda; in fact they were rioting because they are fed up with it and the constant bombardment of unfair practices between groups with nothing they can do about it is making them ill; literally.
Economies may be global but politics is local. Democratic government canāt function on a global level. This is a fact that globalists make no effort to hide, seeking to impose authoritarian rule and to rig elections against inconvenient āpopulistsā. Perhaps too late, people are waking up to the loss of freedom that globalism brings.
Is China ethnically homogenous? I thought over the past 2300 years very different cultures in Central & Eastern Asia have fought “external” wars & dynastic civil wars, with many integrating into what is now mainland China, like the early very Southeast Asians in modern Canton area, originally much less regimented culture before the Common Era resisting Dynastic control, who migrated into Vietnam peninsula (as did others fleeing mainland rule over centuries). Han are I guess the “traditional Chinese,” but were often considered defeated minorities in some Dynasties. At various times the Manchurians separated then ruled by 1600-ish; there were invasions into Goryeo (Korea); there’s some mystique about the Hakka; and who can forget the Mongols (themselves mixing across modern day Northwest Russia, Iran, India, & China) . . . Wasn’t Mandarin forced onto the disparate ethnicities w/ their different languages as the 20th c communist Chinese state formed, to iron over the differences?
> Nationalism is a thoroughly modern ideology, which stretches back no more than about two and a half centuries. It was only around then that Europe was seized by the novel idea that to be a nation entailed having oneās own political state.
So is democracy, by and large. And obviously the two are intertwined. If the people are to replace the sovereign then we need to decide who exactly are the people. Which is why the 1848 revolutions – democratic revolutions in the most part – are called the springtime of nations across most of Europe. And while itās true that Germany didnāt exist, itās not true that Germans didnāt exist. Nor did Polish people disappear when they were subsumed by the Russian and German empires. Why shouldnāt the Poles govern themselves, exactly?
The Holocaust creates a great shadow over this of course but itās trivial to distinguish between imperialist nationalism and the kind of nationalism that just wants to maintain its borders. After all the Nazis were opposed by Polish, and Russian and French and Belgium nationalists, people who wanted to return to the ānovelā concept of controlling their own affairs.
Yeah. I don’t think the bonds humans feel for their neighbors and “culture” even pre-nation state are so flimsy that they’re formed by distant sellers of goods. Did mass media break those bonds or strengthen them or both? Developing love for a shared history, shared struggles, shared faith & hope & fear & despair, & shared stories elders tell their kids whether around campfires or cold churches or in schoolrooms & television documentaries . . . these aren’t meaningless.
And a connection to land? We’ve established a long common law entitling people to property rights. However evanescent that might seem on a cosmic scale, or “unfair” to long dead or assimilated original toilers of those homesteads who’d acquired the land the same way or after the ice sheets retreated . . . when generations live in a geographic region they develop of agrarian practices & cultural styles & memories that aren’t interchangeable like cash.
Conceptual analysis of human experience in a long historical context is important, but you seem to have lost the practice of living in your skin, feeling where your feet are, risking the uncertainty of being a common human being among other ones w/ regulated highly rationale upper primate impulses. The impulse to protect one’s lifelong investment in toil for shelter & food let alone the safety of one’s loved ones must be a starting point, not the 19th-century’s addiction to fundamentalist secular-pattern-seeking.
No human community in history simply throws open its village to newcomers who equal 20-50% of their existing population, especially when they are not vetted & assimilated. The WEF-led West’s conceit that they are the most moral in history is a mendacious hypocrisy beyond parody. Do they open their homes to these families? Their bank accounts? Give up flights & second summer homes & vacations & their kids education & even personal safety?
DeSantis bussed migrants to Martha’s Vineyard in the US, fed up w/ deliberate flooding of our border w/ unvetted adult male immigrants as well as children whose DNA testing to ensure they were trafficked, instituted by Trump, was ended by Biden. They were horrified, then fed them, then bussed them right outta there. Why?
17 migrant hotels in poorest parts of Brooklyn, where small business owners, legal migrants themselves are being robbed by newcomers then watching their own goods be sold out on the street in front of them. How many migrant hotels in the Upper East or West Sides? ONE.
If this moron doesn’t believe in nations and nationalism, what passport does he have? And can we take it away from him and see what it means to him?
Justin? Is that you disguised as this Eagleton fellow?
China is not ethnically hybrid? Uh…you need to do more fact-checking before you say things like that.
OPEN LETTER TO UNHERD: We’re not getting anything out of a conversation with Terry Eagleton. He’s a scratched record. Tedious, entitled, repetitive and extremely old hat.
Nationalism doesnāt lead to gas chant. How ignorant is he.
The warped irrationality of the guardians is a wonder to behold. Apparently, there are: Roma communities (peacefully rioting in Harehills); Black communities (Black Lives Matter, victims of institutional discrimination); Somali communities; definitely Muslim communities (Starmer said they need to be protected); there appears to be a “Palestinian” community in Gaza, and, one has to assume, an Israeli community that they attacked. But, according to the guardians, there is no such thing as an English or British community.
This would be an anomaly comparable to the idea of Dark Matter, if it were not so obvious why the guardians choose to believe it.
“There are no exclusively British values which outsiders canāt or wonāt share”
The “can’t or won’t” is just cant! Many communities will put all sorts of values well above any notional allegiance to British state
Many of not most Muslims put Islam well ahead of any other potentially competing claim on their loyalty. I’m not picking on Muslims; it’s just an obvious example. You might add groups of Hamas supporters who also put their support of a radical Islamist state over almost any other political goal, and especially any relevant in any way to a rickety liberal nation state such as the UK.
Here in Yankland, the ladies of the South have a saying, that applies to our friend Terry Eagleton: “bless his heart.”
“Marxism offered working people an alternative to chauvinism.”
Bless his heart. Marxism offered the educated class a “political formula” to justify its political power. Every time the educated class has come to power on the back of Marxism it has messed up the working class. In Britland, in Yankland, in Leninist Russia, in Maoist China. And so on.
Alternative title: the Empire is fighting back. Dressing up what is happening in Marxist language is all very well and interesting but essentially the sins of empire are being revisited on Britain.
The gist of the article is that it is OK for “great tides of migration surging in from abroad” because “The country was never yours” and “There are no exclusively British values”. I concede that migration is a natural human characteristic BUT what is happening to the UK and to all Western Civilizations is not a natural event. We are all under attack by the political elite and the weapon used against us is out of control mass immigration. The goal is to make us a minority in our own country.
Excellent as always from Terry Eagleton. He’s wasted on the UnHerd commentariat.
They forgot to tell this to the Jews.
There has been three major periods of Jewish immigration into the UK, 1650 to1800, 1870 to 1914 from Russia and 1933 to 1939 from Nazi controlled Europe. Those who assimilated quickest were from 1933 to 1939 because they were largely middle class professionals, such as academics, who spoke English. Ernest Gombrich Karl Popper, Hayek and Max Prutz would be good examples. The issue is the immigration of large numbers of poorly educated men, mostly Muslim who do not want to assimilate because they reject the emancipation of women.
Ernst Gombrich – Wikipedia
Well Capitalism and Marxism as well as the idea of a nation state are essentially a Western cultural construct which has at various times spread across much of the planet however Islam is largely untainted by this – its roots are somewhat different, hence the seeds of civil conflict have been sown throughout the West, largely self inflicted. Marx of course always āpredictedā that the ācontradictionsā of Capitalism would result in its own destruction, a kind of self cannibalismā¦or like the Titan Cronus eating his own children ( pick your own metaphor to suit) sooner or later. The question is: what comes next?
āMarxism offered working people an alternative to chauvinismā.
But it gave them repression, poverty and an early, miserable death.
Interesting article but itās fundamentally wrong. Peoples as distinct cultural groups always existed. States were always centred on a particular ethnic group. Multi-ethnic states had hierarchical relationships between the groups. Multicultural communities did not exist sustainably. What Eagleton describes of as nationalism is just the advent and evolution of the Westfalian state arrangement whereby national states are considered to have the right to exist, especially against imperialism.
Nationalism has its problems: irredentism, and disputed borders. But what Terry here is referring to is actually a failure to respect nationalism- imperialism. Hitler was an imperialist. The first world war was caused by imperialism.