That’s the excellent counterargument I expected, bravo. I don’t think all nationalism inexorably leads there, but my counterexamples involve guys who owned slaves or in Gandhi’s case hated Muslims so it’s not the prettiest picture, and I could be wrong.

Nationalism does need to be paired, or pared, with a strong national ethic of liberty, equality, and humanitarianism or it turns ugly, but that’s true of anything.

Thanks for making me continue to think about this one.

The article doesn’t “miss the point”. It’s making its own, related point. One that needed to be made somewhere.

Hitler didn’t use vegetarianism to gain power and push people to support his atrocities. He did use nationalism to do that.

When nationalism keeps getting used as a starting point that leads to xenophobia, racism, anti-semitism etc. then it isn’t all that hard to see why people start thinking it isn’t such a good idea.

Whether Wilhelm, Hitler, Lincoln, Washington, Franklin, Hancock, De Gaulle, etc were nationalists is hardly relevant to anything unless the current debate is between the appropriate balance of national and international power. Generally with nationalism versus internationalism the rational position is to be no more internationalist than average, because being more internationalist than average weakens you more than average and being more nationalist than average alienates you more than average.

People don’t care about Hitler because of the nationalism any more than they do his vegetarianism and socialism. It’s really the racism, genocide and authoritarianism that’s at issue – the banning of books, the creation of ghettos, concentration camps, etc. Which makes this whole debate little more than a giant Godwin Rule violation. The proper thing for Candace to have done with this issue would have been to ignore it for the folly it is.

Now you may say nationalism leads inexorably to the other vices. But authoritarianism has proven far more reliable at this – the USSR was internationalist yet had many of the same or similar evils, as did the Papacy of old.

Trying to hang all the evils Hitler committed on nationalism is really just a shameless political ploy, therefore, by authoritarian internationalists. That isn’t what this article is doing, but it is what Candace is trying to counter. She’s doing this at the level of “Hitler wasn’t nationalist” because perhaps a plurality of the voting public, or certainly a decisive slice of it – can’t reason beyond basic label comparisons. Remember – half the voting public has a two digit IQ. It’s always nasty fighting for their votes and results in silliness like what Candace is doing here.

Best to treat her as a politician and not an intellectual. But someone needs to explain her error for the record, so I’m glad the Doc took care of it 🙂