Patriotism & Nationalism:
A Response to Sarah Silverman
Garrett Deasy
We stood somewhere near a local subway stop. Except for the girl, I didn’t know any of these people. Besides me there was just one another guy, he was tall, wore sunglasses and pink shorts, and put on a charade of friendliness and familiarity that Europeans often say is typical of Americans. There was what looked like a boy, but used a girl’s name, so I avoided addressing him/her/it. One girl was asked what type of music would be played on the party boat:
“Top 40, unfortunately,” she said with disgust. The whole night was a strange educational experience for me. They way in which she and her friends avoided the people around us was palpable. Her friends seemed to shrink away and went to move off on their own. Even as rising college seniors they had accepted that this was their place in what Jordan Peterson refers to as “the dominance hierarchy”, for which we might as well substitute the term sexual market value. The music was familiar to them, and they associated it with the more attractive people taking up the space around them. Comparatively beautiful women walked and danced, soaking up the attention as the sun made its way below the ocean. Those things that most people associated with fun, they associated with their feelings of social inferiority. I have argued that those feelings of inferiority are inklings of the fear of death, which appear all throughout our social lives.
To glimpse this dynamic it helps to explain the sentiment behind Sarah Silverman’s recent Monologue on Nationalism. She describes an ex-boyfriend who she witnessed setting up an American flag:
“I instantly felt very weird. It didn’t make sense, but I feel this feeling of…I felt scared.” She goes on to say that she went inside to call her sister, who “knows shit because she’s a rabbi in Israel”, who tells her: “Dude, nationalism is innately terrifying for Jews. Think about it: flags, marching, blind allegiance, these things tend to ring a bell for us”.
Now without dwelling too deeply on this, I think we can all appreciate that A) Silverman did us the favor of highlighting the oppositional quality of Western nationalism toward Jews, and B) doing this and mentioning Israel in the same breath, which of course exists as an explicit expression of Jewish nationalism. These are the little things that help move the Overton window.
The interesting thing about Silverman’s bit is the way she contrasts the inclusive nature of “patriotism” with the more exclusive “nationalism.” Firstly, she points out the obvious fact that while the sight of a police car will appear comforting to some (“white people”), it might appear threatening to others (“like, say, unarmed black children playing in a park”). She also adds, “Oh, and I guess like the Duke boys,” which serves as a way to elicit laughs while also feeding the anti-white lie that if white guys are being pursued by the cops, they probably did something to deserve it. She then makes another obvious claim that we have all heard from Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and countless others, that “Nationalist movements tend to kind of exploit patriotism for their own cause.”
I don’t think any of us would bother to deny that Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen, and many other right-wing political figures have used national feeling for their own goals. But as usual this claim by leftists relies on a false conception of nationalism being a constant threat across the decades and centuries, as if it never arose in reaction to real trends. Liberals after all are sometimes surprised when their analysis shows that support for Trump is based not primarily on economic pressures, but what they ignorantly and naively refer to as “racism.”
“Take a slogan like ‘Make America Great Again’, or ‘America First’. They go down easy, they sound patriotic, and that’s because taking an undeniable statement of patriotism and lumping it into your cause is like the ultimate cheat.” The title of her show then appears on the screen, at which point Silverman makes one of her typical comedic, smug facial expressions. It gets laughs because it is ironic, which also gives away the game: Silverman is also exploiting a cheap statement of patriotism in order to attack American identity!
“But patriotism and nationalism to me are very different things. Like, patriotism is loving your country. I’m a total patriot, I love my country. Whereas nationalism has this like ‘We’re number one’ vibe. And I fear that that ‘We’re number one’ nationalism is an old bed buddy of racism and xenophobia…”
This moment exemplifies the moralistic character of leftist comedians, who are often left in the awkward position of trying to insert quick goofy comedic moments into what is otherwise a barrage of denunciations directed at American conservatism and implicit racialism. Every time these people complain about us, they sound a little more like they’re warning high schoolers not to drink on prom night.
In the 2008 German movie Die Welle, there is a scene set in a contemporary German gymnasium in which a leftist student expresses her disgust for displays of national feeling. She recalls a sea of German flags displayed at a large soccer match, which she implies is reminiscent of Second World War-era nationalism. Such an example does not translate to the American experience, in which leftist contempt for the American flag has only recently begun to encroach on national dialogue.
In my experience, other than warfare and firearms, Germans hate displays of national feeling more than anyone else. When once asking a teenage German about those who willingly serve in Germany’s defense, I was told that they are almost universally despised. Americans by contrast usually take the more balanced view by disapproving of the needless wars while maintaining a conditioned respect for the idea of the American soldier. Defeating ‘Nazism’ was the excuse we needed to have pride in our military. I always think back to Jonathan Bowden:
“This is always the trick: that they will use the ideology of the Marine Corps to fight for a liberal, a humanist, and a Democratic purpose. That’s the trick”
Nationalism is always something to be afraid of because anti-Semitism is always something for Jews to be afraid of. This fear is the animus of the far left’s raison d’être: to be so devoted to ‘dismantling oppression’ that one sees oppression around every corner. The profound feeling that utopia can one day be achieved through enough progressive social will and mutual understanding becomes in effect an evolutionary strategy to always look under your bed for Nazi shadows, and then to create them. I think of young Mao Zedong, who once ran from his father during a distressing argument, until he came up to a lily pond in which he threatened to drown himself. The power of ‘the establishment’ not only fuels the rebellious nature of the leftist activist; it provides him comfort that would otherwise find itself replaced with overwhelming nihilism. He criticizes corporations, the religious, ‘structural inequality’, and the government because they lend him the identity he lost by rejecting loyalty to anything eternal.
Those of us who are not just nationalists, but White Nationalists must acknowledge that there is a similar paradox in our own character: that we have entered this subculture because we found ourselves to be the villains in the story the mainstream tells us, even as we aspire to metapolitical hegemony. We all have a deep sense of religious fervor that usually goes unused, because it feels silly to actually be the thing we are labeled by a media that is usually two steps behind our memes. Being “fashy” became a way we mocked their interpretation of us, and the more they sound the alarm, the more fun it gets. But our goal is to be there for all the white people with real patriotic instincts, as the left continues to berate them.
“As patriots, I think we should strive to see ourselves in each other, whereas I feel that the nationalist view is to see yourself, and then others…Out of many, one. That is what the country is about, ok?. There’s a very, very far distance from the very similar sentences of ‘We are one’, and ‘we’re number one. There’s like a willing blindness in saying ‘we’re number one’…I love America. I think it’s great to love America.”
There is that reference to blindness again, as if Trump voters were simply mesmerized by their devotion to American symbolism and cannot make autonomous decisions. I find it hard to imagine what Silverman ‘loves’ about America besides the fact that she has achieved wealth and fame here, and that it does not view her as an outsider.
One final whitepilling anecdote feels necessary here: several years ago at a college party, I stood in a grassy area that linked the porches of several townhouses. The place formed a kind of insulated rectangular shape. It was a weekend night, and people had been drinking for a few hours. I don’t know how it started, but suddenly people were cheering: USA! USA! USA! They weren’t reacting to something they had seen on TV, nor was it a national holiday. They were simply in high spirits at the end of a semester, and this was the natural way to express it.
Yes, this kind of tendency among Americans is not always deliberate or based on reasoning. Maybe one could call it “blind.” But these are our people, as flawed and naïve as they are. They are the minds we are on this Earth to mold into real patriotism, which is working for yourself and your own future. The extension of loving yourself is excluding those who do not belong; those whose love for your country depends on your tolerance of their subversion. Real patriotism in the end is nationalism. By loving ourselves and our own imagery, we will appear as a threat to those who can do nothing but meme us into their terrifying shadow. We are number one.
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17 comments
Thank-you for pointing out her stunning hypocrisy of receiving wisdom from her Israeli sister about the evils of nationalism. It’s like learning about the joys of celibacy from a practicing prostitute.
Making politics a contest of feeling guilt invariably favors the group which is least susceptible to it and the most willing to exploit it. The group with the most chutzpah will win that contest.
We have to make politics into a contest involving an ideal that empowers whites which is a weakness of our enemies.
I tend to think whites will get more ‘conservative’ when economic and social decline demand it too obviously. A lot of groups get lazy when it isn’t clear they’re losing power, and as Mike Enoch put it a few days ago: We need to promote the narrative that we’re the underdog.
“Making politics a contest of feeling guilt invariably favors the group which is least susceptible to it and the most willing to exploit it. The group with the most chutzpah will win that contest.”
Well, is that really what you wanted to say ?
chutzpah definition:
Chutzpah is the quality of audacity, for good or for bad. The Yiddish word derives from the Hebrew word ḥutspâ, meaning “insolence”, “cheek” or “audacity”.
So, have Ms Silverman and her tribe won ?
That’s how she has become rich (she is paid for that …).
A well written piece that I enjoyed reading.
Nice piece. But where does this “nationalism” end?!
I’ve heard that in some cities, they have things called “teams” and people root for them (get this) just because they’re local!!! Then I heard the same thing happens with schools!
In all seriousness, the whole idea of people siding with their hometown, home team, or homeland is instinctive. Unfortunately, Silverman and people like her are trying to pathologize what’s natural.
“Nationalism” is the latest volley. Before this, it was “racism” and “sexism” — two words that made thought crimes out of how people naturally felt (i.e. preferred their own kind and though of men and women as different).
The left wins culture wars because they find ways to weaponize the language. Mocking them and exposing their tactics is one way to punch back. That said, I wouldn’t be surprised it “nationalist!” becomes a career-ending insult in a few years, like “racist!” is now.
We could try to attack (((them))) by making “Zionism” a dirty term. “Zionism” would mean :1) The Jewish endeavor to create and maintain a Jewish state in the Middle East at the cost of the indigenous Arabs, 2) The Jewish endeavor to attain world dominance by controlling finance, politics and media. Accusations of “Zionism” should become as much embarrassing as accusations of “racism”.
This is definitely happening by itself. The younger generations who are largely brainwashed with what they call progressivism are anti-Zionist.
Leftist anti-Zionism is also already a feature of French politics, and being critical of Jews there is more normal (as evidenced by the popularity of the comedian Dieudonné). The leftists there don’t understand race, but they know that the bankers and warmongers are largely Jewish. This can happen in America.
Unfortunately most “anti-Zionists” are so for the wrong reasons. They see “Zionism” as a kind of “racism”. They view Israel as a colonial settler state of white people in a country of brown people. They would view White Nationalists as bad as Zionists, therefore such people cannot be our allies. A person like Jeremy Corbyn is fiercely anti-Zionist, but at the same time he is in favor of mass non-white immigration into the UK.
The best strategy is to interpret “Zionism” mainly as the Jewish endeavor to attain world dominance by controlling finance, politics and media. As for the Israel part of “Zionism”, we should stress the Jewish hypocrisy of keeping Israel exclusively Jewish, while at the same time trying to make the West multicultural. This is the strategy of David Duke and is the most promising. The best defense is attack !
If this war is going to be won, it will be won in the minds of the average person. From what I see, the average person doesn’t know or understand what “Zionism” even means. But they know what antisemitism is. So, score one for the Jews.
Maybe a better way is to try and expose that a lot of Jewish causes and ideas are actually anti-Christian bigotry dressed up in pseudo-intellectual mumbo jumno. That’s a phrase the average Joe and Jane will understand. The phrase “War on Christmas” caught on, and it’s got an undercurrent of “anti-Christian bigotry” as a concept, so this does work.
What Silverman is saying here is really an “eff you” to Christian America: “Nationalism for me, but not for thee.”
The same goes for the concept of “bigotry” pertaining to the B.S. concept of hate speech and hate crimes. They can say anything they want. We can’t. So it’s “Free speech for me and not for thee.” Plug in any cause most Jews back and you’ll get that same concept.
The final thing we have to ask ourselves is: Why does America insist on making people like Silverman and Amy Schumer stars? Maybe because that’s who Hollywood pushes. The quicker people ditch Hollywood, cable TV, and the publishing industry the better. Pull the rug out on all that, and we won’t have to have this discussion because there will be no new Sarah Silverman to tell these kinds of stories.
As usual, a member of the chattering elite gets us wrong. WN are among the only people who do not consider the doctrinaire “American Exceptionalism” to be correct or desirable (in the US’ current formation). We are not so exceptional to be able to absorb the multicultural hordes and lend credence to the lie, “diversity is our strength”, as we are bound by nature to adhere to certain laws. The “we are #1” crowd believes in this as a point of faith, not of evidence. “American Exceptionalism” relies on the idea that our productivity, endless altruism and enchantment with “the other” can endure our smiling displacement, with a sea of third world humanity as the resultant demographic. It will not. We are bound by natural law to exist in a state of conflict and competition. We are decidedly not #1 with this weakness on the horizon.
It never ceases to amaze me how, despite being such a self-obsessed and navel-gazing group, Jews are so utterly lacking in self awareness. She calls her sister in Israel, a militaristic ethnostate housing arguably the world’s oldest nation, to kvetch about how scary nationalism is!
Rhetorically, I think we should never stop hammering away at this, especially when you are arguing with Jews and white gentiles are watching. The cognitive dissonance and hysteria in the Jews’ reactions will make people in the audience think.
Yes, there are plenty of people who have no issues with Jews who will get fed up with things like AIPAC. Responses to that exacerbate a positive feedback loop in which Jews meme the goyim into their enemies.
Steve-O: Yep, and the jews in Israel (all over the world, actually) advocate total prohibition on race mixing (in Israel) but then jews demand it in White/Gentile countries. Unbelievable hypocrites.
“In my experience, other than warfare and firearms, Germans hate displays of national feeling more than anyone else. When once asking a teenage German about those who willingly serve in Germany’s defense, I was told that they are almost universally despised.”
Would have been nice if the author had the decency to mention that this attitude is exactly the result of brutal US re-education/de-nazification techniques after the war.
Perhaps he didn’t, because he would have to admit that Silverwoman’s arrogancy would be inconceivable without the system his own grandfathers set up dooming the white race.
Failure to mention this was by no means deliberate. I don’t deny that my grandparents and their peers helped ruin Germany. We have to work with what we have.
If they only “helped to ruin Germany” there would be no site like CounterCourrents. In fact, US entry in two World Wars ruined the white race.
As your article shows, those you wanted to defend in the name of whatever liberties, now are restricting yours: they tell you what is allowed to be proud of and what not.
As we say in France:
“La révolution dévore ses enfants”
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