This informal article is a refutation to Imperium Press’ recent article titled Deep Civic Nationalism: Propositionality - An Overview. ¹
The article states that:
‘We began with a question: where does civic nationalism come from? We can now answer it: civic nationalism comes from propositionality — the notion that propositions exhaust a given domain (ethics, religion, nationality, etc.)
What exactly is the definition of civic nationalism?
Civic nationalism is liberal nationalism:
‘… a form of nationalism identified by political philosophers who believe in an inclusive form of nationalism that adheres to traditional liberal values of freedom, tolerance, equality, individual rights and has no ethnocentrism.’
Contrast the Third Reich with Imperium Press’ understanding of civic nationalism. Hitler’s Reich was pan-German, and sought to make Polish people into Germans by removing Polish culture and replacing it; was this an instance of civic nationalism coming to the Polish?
Not at all. Yet the Polish were given the requirement to get out of their foundational identity / given domain: the identity of being Polish. Their ethnocentrism was to become German at the time of the German invasion of Poland.
There is also the Third Reich itself, which argued Germans out of the foundational identity of Prussian nationalism and monarchism and replaced it with something else.
That was the proposition of Hitler: to progress Germany towards a separate identity from what it was tied to in the past, separate from the given domain of being a Prussian. This is why conservative socialists like Oswald Spengler were unsupportive of Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP). ² Hitler said himself:
‘A skull is found somewhere and the whole world says: That's what our ancestors look like! Who knows if the Neanderthal wasn't an ape? In any case, that's not where our ancestors sat in those days! Our country was a wasteland through which they passed at best. When people ask us about our ancestors, we always have to point to the Greeks!’ ³
During an interview, the Belgian Waffen SS member Leon Degrelle stated, about Hitler:
‘He was an Austrian, and also far more than that. He was a man immersed to the entire core of our civilization. And notably Greece. How funny is that? One day we were talking in Europe and I asked him: “In the end…” because he was already beyond the identities of Austria, Bavaria, et cetera… “So in the end, who are you?” He answered: “I’m a Greek.” “I’m a Greek!” That struck me! Greece also had a huge influence on those people. Goring had thirty beautiful Greek sculptures in his palace. But with Hitler, it was about Greek philosophy, Greek wisdom, Greek beauty. He mocked Himmler in front of me, because he [Himmler] had launched excavations to find old Germanic pots. He told him, “Such a waste of time for a handful of mere pots.” When meanwhile there was [the sculptor] Phidias in Greece! For him, that was the peak of civilization of man’s equilibrium.’ ⁴
This is funny, because the article in question writes:
‘… we can see civic nationalism even in antiquity, such as when Isocrates tells us that “the name “Greek” seems to be not that of a people but of a way of thinking, and people are called Greeks because they share in our education rather than in our birth.” The rise of the alt right and now the dissident right is the rebirth of something older, stronger, and deeper even than that.’
And this was used to explain “civic nationalism.”
Even the NSDAP’s Hitler Youth literature, on the subject of race, referenced Hegel, who stated that race was the ability to think in a certain way. ⁵ There were even members of the NSDAP who were not born German, but were born as Russians, and moved to Germany to become and think like Germans: Alfred Rosenberg ⁶ (one of the biggest ideological influencers in Hitler’s movement) and Sergei Taboritsky. ⁷ They would go on to think like Germans and act like Germans. Hence, they became Germans. Taboritsky and an accomplice had committed a pro-monarchist attack on a political rival in Russia before becoming a member of the NSDAP:
‘For the prosecution another Balt, Hans Vorst, appeared as a witness to the murder and claimed that Taboritsky had fired the fatal shot while Nabakov grappled with Shabelsky on the auditorium floor. Taboritsky repeatedly denied this, and said he had come to the lecture only to lend “moral support” to his friend Shabelsky. In the end the court found both men guilty and sentenced Taboritsky to fourteen years in prison, Shabelsky to twelve. Neither, however, served out his sentence, and both were active assistants to Biskupsky and Alfred Rosenberg after the Nazis came to power.’ ⁸
There is also the fact that there was a movement within Russia, in the early 1920s, that supported pan-Germanism:
‘For Vorwarts the Reichenhall congress was a “New Bavarian - Old Russian Alliance” of “Russian Pan-Germans” and “German Pan-Russians” which was directed at the colonization of Russia by Germans along the lines suggested by Scheubner. The threat to the Weimar Republic from these forces was clear. Only in Bavaria could the congress have been held, where Munich was becoming a “new Coblenz” for the emigres. “The Russian emigration",” Vorwarts complained, “finds its support not only from Herr Pohner [the Munich police president] but also from Ludendorff and his adventurous palladins. The Bavarian witches’ cauldron of German nationalism has now received from the outpouring of Russians a new ingredient of fermentation.”’ ⁹
Was this proposition to make non-German born people become German in their culture and thinking a form of civic nationalism? Not in the slightest. They did not adhere to traditional liberal values of freedom, tolerance, equality and individual rights, despite their proposition to exhaust the given domain of “Russian.”
We can also consider the Confederated States of America: their proposition was to remove Americans from their foundational identity of liberalism, which carried with it a free trade philosophy within economic matters, so as to instead continue economy with the State institution of slavery. ᴵᴼ
Was this instance of the Confederacy arguing people out of their foundational identity an example of civic nationalism? Not at all.
And considering that Imperium Press is familiar with, and most likely more likely to support (in place of the United States), the Confederacy (judging by the fact that they sell Sociology of the South by George Fitzhugh, a book which I recommend to readers from this publisher), I doubt that Imperium Press would be happy to consider the Confederacy as “civic nationalist.”
It is worth mentioning that the author of this response article does not like civic nationalism either, and is, in fact, an ethno-nationalist. It just happens to be worth noting that civic nationalism does not come from just any variant of propositionality. It comes from a proposition that is specifically tailored towards protecting “liberal freedoms” and “human rights.”
If one propositions to deviate from a foundational identity that is liberal or simply inferior to the proposed new identity, then it is not inherently “civic nationalist.” We see this with the Confederacy, the Third Reich, and any anti-liberal nation or empire that sought to engage in continental imperialism or secession from a liberal power.
¹ Imperium Press, Deep Civic Nationalism: Propositionality - A Brief Overview, date accessed Sep. 20 2022
² Kerry R. Bolton, Oswald Spengler: An Introduction to His Life and Work, a preface to Oswald Spengler, Prussian Socialism and Other Essays, Black House Publishing Ltd, page 5.
³ Adolf Hitler, Monologue on the 18th and 19th of January 1942, from Monologe im Führerhauptquartier 1941–1944: Die Aufzeichnungen Heinrich Heims, ed. Werner Jochmann.
⁴ https://t.me/paganfascism2/50, date accessed Sep. 20 2022 (this video shows a clip from the cited interview with Degrelle) - Note that the author of this response article does not endorse a “pagan” variety of fascism
⁵ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Faith and Action https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/glauben.htm, date accessed Sep. 20 2022
⁶ Robert C. Williams, Culture in Exhile: Russian Emigres in Germany, 1881-1941, Cornell University, pages 170-172.
⁷ Ibid, page 212.
⁸ Ibid.
⁹ Ibid, page 180.
ᴵᴼ Michael Brem Bonner, Confederate Political Economy: Creating and Managing a Southern Corporatist Nation, Louisiana State University Press, page 24.
Ethno-Nationalism, and negation of "Civil Nationalism", or any idea that a nation or a person's nationality can be founded on something beyond race/ethnicity or land ownership is where the "Conservative Revolution" ultimately leads towards. It is an attack on the republican/city-builder/Westphalian conception, in favor of a return to empires or a rationale to Balkanize and break up larger countries (such as Russia, China, India, Iran, or even the United States) into smaller, ethno-states, which is a gleeful delight for British geopoliticians.