SCHOLAR ISLAND

"Nationalism is a silly cock crowing on its own dunghill."

Richard Aldington

"Nationality is babyish for the most part."

-Emerson

"Nationalism is the culture of the uncultivated, and they are legion."

-Mario Vargas LLosa

"The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them."

-George Orwell

"The virus of tribalism....risks becoming the AIDS of international politics-lying dormant for years, then flaring up to destroy countries."

-The Economist ,July 6,1991

"A nation is a group of people united by a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of its neighbors."

Ernest Renan

"At bottom, every state regards another as a gang of robbers who will fall upon it as soon as there is an opportunity."

Schopenhauer

On Jurisprudence and Politics

"The public weal requires that men should betray, and lie, and massacre."

Montaigne

Of profit and honesty, Essays

"I love my country too much to be a nationalist."

-Albert Camus

"patriotism is when love of your own people comes first: nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first."

-Charles de Gaulle

"For the very notion of homeland, with all its emotional power, is bound up with the relative brevity of our life, which allows us too little time to become attached to some other country, to other countries, to other languages."

Milan Kundera

Ignorance

"It is not easy to see how the more extreme forms of nationalism can long survive when men have seen the Earth in its true perspective as a single small globe against the stars."

-Arthur C. Clarke

"Nationality.....like the processes of life, digestion and breathing....has no right to be concerned with itself until that right is denied. That is why the Poles, Italians, Hungarians, and all the oppressed Slav peoples, naturally and rightly stress the principle of nationality; and that is perhaps why we Russians concern ourselves so little with our nationality."

-Bakunin

   "Because no single person or group represents everything it means to be human, it is the variety of people within a nation that gives it an irreplaceable unique character-its "national personality." As with individuals, so with nations: it is the diversity of peoples that furthers the process of the world. Although many nations have tried, none may set itself up as the only or the predominant nation, forcing its culture, ideology, religion or political agenda on any other nation. ..."

-Donald Spoto

Joan

"There is a degree of culture where national hatred vanishes, and where one stands to a certain extent above nations and feels the weal and woe of a neighboring people as if it happened to one's own."

-Goethe

"A healthy nation is as unconscious of its nationality as a healthy man of his bones. But if you break a nation's nationality it will think of nothing else but getting it set again. It will listen to no reformer, to no philosopher, to no preacher, until the demand of the Nationalist is granted. It will attend to no business, however vital, except the business of unification and liberation."

George Bernard Shaw

"The nation, with its stress on a beginning and a flow in time, and a delimitation in space, raises barriers to the flood of meaninglessness and absurdity that might otherwise engulf human beings. It tells them that they belong to ancient associations of 'their kind', with definite boundaries in time and space, and this gives their otherwise ambiguous and precarious lives a degree of certainty and purpose."

Regis Debray

"European leaders have turned their backs on nationalism, the tool that has, despite savage interstate wars, brought more good to more people than any other instrument in the toolkit of human organization. In its place they have erected a banal, bureaucrat-ridden, and economically bankrupting supranational authority that combines the French Enlightenment's goal of perfecting man and society, a hysterical animosity toward Christianity (without which of course there would be no entity identifiable as Europe and no reminder in men's minds that only God is perfect), and a pacifism that reeks not of conviction and humanity but of cowardice, sloth, and an insatiable desire for ease. In place of self-respect, tradition, nation, and faith, the Europeans have adopted an appeasing, guilt-ridden multiculturalism, the euro and the Common Agricultural Policy, an unrelenting presentism, and a ferocious appetite for atheism and for ignoring history."

-Michael Scheuer

marching Toward hell: America and Islam After Iraq

"There is something new and alarming going on. There is a kind of nationalism very different from nineteenth-century nationalism in that it is not imperialistic and does not build up the state. Even in the case of Serbia what the Serbs want is not at all that Serbs should rule Croatia or Slovenia. They simply want to have a greater Serbia which is their own-a kind of isolated, autarkic community. In order to do that they think they must kill or drive out people who don't fit into that vision."

Charles Fairbanks

"A nationalistic revolution is sweeping the world today. We will sail into the twentieth-first century upon its waves."

Ryszard Kapuscinski

"Ideologies can be seen as the daughters of ideas-more complex, more determined, and by far more lethal. A history of ideology teaches us that modern conflicts, especially since the nineteenth century, are grounded in doctrinal roots. Nationalism is the earliest form of militant ideology in the contemporary West, followed by Marxism and fascism. In the Arab and Muslim world, religious fundamentalism took the lead in the nineteenth century, followed by extreme nationalism, which alternated with socialism and Islamism throughout the twentieth century. Similarly, East Asian and African cultures moved among nationalism, religious extremism, and Communism. In Latin America, the pendulum swung between left-and right-wing ideologies."

-Walid Phares

The War of Ideas

In 1992 more boundaries shifted than in the previous 45 years

"Nationalism is today the world’s idolatrous religion."

C. Wright Mills

"Every nation mocks at other nations, and all are right."

Schopenhaur

"I asked Tom if countries always apologized when they had done wrong, and he said: "Yes: the little one does."

Mark Twain

"There is no nation, it seems, which has not been promised the whole earth."

Elias Canetti

"He who has no soil of his own has also no God."

Doestoevsky

"It is a well-known fact that we always recognize our homeland when we are about to lose it."

Albert Camus

"All nationalisms are at heart deeply concerned with names: with the most immaterial and original human invention. Those who dismiss names as a detail have never been displaced; but the people on the peripheries are always being displaced. That is why they insist upon their continuity-their links with their dead and the unborn."

John Berger

"Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self –deception."

George Orwell

"With all my heart I believe that the world's present system of sovereign nations can lead only to barbarism, war and inhumanity, and that only world law can assure progress towards a civilized peaceful community."

Albert Einstein

"Without Country you have neither name, token, voice, nor rights, no admission as brothers into the fellowship of the Peoples. You are the bastards of Humanity, Soldiers without a banner, Israelites among the nations, you will find neither faith nor protection; none will be sureties for you. Do no beguile yourselves with the hope of emancipation from unjust social conditions if you do not firs conquer a Country for yourselves."

Giuseppe Mazzini (1805-72)

The Duties of Man

"Nationalism is often treated as a political phenomenon of the same order as socialism. But the fact is that its roots are deeper; and the sources that feed it are those remote and subtle elements in the soul that bring together in a curious kinship those who laugh at the same kind of joke or pronounce with the same inflection and modulation the words of their language. Nationalism can be defined as the bond of common purpose that unites those who have the same language, the same background of nature, the same rituals of life: one or more of these is necessary, but the patch of earth is all but indispensable, if only to serve as common ground in the imagination-and a common speech, a dialect if not a language is part of it. Clusters of forms about such ways and objects; and nationalism overcompensated for the general neglect of emotion by giving it full sway."

Lewis Mumford

The Condition of Man

   "On our one and only planet, there were at the time about 80 separate and sovereign political and economic units.(1946) Today there are over 175. Some are rich, some poor. Some are large, others small. But all are the same in one respect: each claims absolute political power over its citizens. Like a body with 175 (now more) separate brains, each gives different orders to the various organs. If the Earth was a single human, we'd call him an uncoordinated idiot. As it is, the absence of a "world brain" is a state of being one can quite reasonably label global idiocy. And the United Nations? Wasn't it created in order to be the brain of humanity--an inclusive coordinating authority? Despite the noble convictions and imposing facade, the answer is a clear no. One of the clearest pieces of evidence is its complete failure to prevent war. Out of the 200 wars fought thus far in the 20th Century, at least 75 occurred after the founding of the UN."

Garry Davis

Passport to Freedom

   "A world of nation-states is essentially a lawless, anarchic world in which conflict is the defining political and social force. For the nation, "national security" is another word for repression. War is a way to protect the "common welfare," often by destroying it. Environmental degradation is defined as merely a "trade off" for progress. And "human services," managed by government and dominated by a repressive ethic, are programs that quite often promote moral and social disintegration. Leaders are commonly liars and criminals; commercial institutions are machines that market violence for profit. In the nation-state, the social contract called "national citizenship" becomes a collective suicide pact. We simply don't know when we'll be asked to die-or for what."

Garry Davis

Passport to Freedom

"Again and again it has been proved, that it is war which turns a people into a nation, and that only great deeds, wrought in common, can forge the indissoluble links which bind them together."

Heinrich Treitschke

"Nationalism conquered both the American thesis and the Russian anti-thesis of the universalistic  faith. The two great federated experiments, based upon a revolutionary concept of the destiny of all mankind, have ended, in counterpoint, as the two most powerful nation-states in history."

Barbara Ward

"Of all the assumptions I have discussed, that which takes nationalism for granted is perhaps the most deeply rooted and the most tenacious."

Henry Steele Commager

"By 2004 I was more than ever convinced that, in addition to providing an unbiased consideration of up-to-the-minute textual evidence, a fresh look at this extraordinary life might show the profound significance of Joan of Arc for our own time. We live in a twenty-first-century climate of international fear and suspicion, and to us this fifteenth-century European girl has something startling and important to say.

   Joan fought and died to preserve the identity and particularity of a sovereign place; she dedicated herself to the unique and irreplaceable soul of a country. She did not believe that it was right for her country to be-as it had already become in part and was dangerously close to becoming completely-simply a fiefdom of the kingdom of England.

   To use modern terms, she was horrified at the thought that the integrity of her country should be sacrificed to foreign empire-building. Whatever France was not yet and whatever it needed to be, she dedicated herself to its enduring existence. Joan was an unwitting architect of the idea that ever nation is inviolable-that no people may be over-run, dominated, suppressed or brought to the brink of annihilation by an outside force. She stands for the injunction, later ratified by declarations, treaties and covenants signed all over the civilized world, that no nation (without direct provocation and an immediate threat to its survival) may invade, much less annihilate, another country in order to turn it into a cog in the machine of a mightier people eager for economic exploitation and territorial expansion. In this regard, Joan speaks clearly to the political life of the twenty-first century.

-Donald Soto

JOAN: The Mysterious Life of the Heretic Who Became a Saint

"Purging away the evils of the West,

Let us be faithful to our land.

Stalwart, giving no ear to traitor's pleas,

We shall hand down our great cause

Without the least fear of death."

Yukio Mishima (One of the greatest Japanese writers of this century, Yukio Mishima, wrote the script for his own death and played it perfectly. Calling upon Japan to turn away from Western ways and return to its proud and honorable past, on November 25,1970, dressed in a military uniform, he committed public ritual suicide. Mishima, who had been born into a samurai family, was still a vital forty-five-year-old at the height of his professional career. It was a magnificent gesture.)

When the history of a people develops into the history of a land, it almost inevitably becomes teleological. The land is represented as having a destiny or, in religious terms, as having been promised by God to a chosen people. The most famous example is in the Old Testament, but whether expressed or implied, the idea is fundamental to the concept of a nation. No people can be a nation unless it can project itself into timelessness by linking its history to a particular land, and it has no chance of doing that unless it believes the link to be true. That is why nations are so often said to be ‘gaining consciousness of themselves, as if they had always been in existence though unconscious of the fact."

R.H.C. Davis

The Normans and their Myths

"The nations of the world are like a great organ. And in that organ there are many pipes. Each pipe is a nation, and each pipe has its own music that is the life of that nation. Now one pipe sounds and now another."

Yeats

"National fanaticism is essential to the nation but at the same time a threat to humanity."

Qaddafi of Libya

"A nation does not die like a man, at any single moment. It has its language, its way of doing things, its religion, and , above all, its purpose or vision that impels it onward. Even if conquered by others, the nation will not perish unless those sustaining forces are lost."

Harold Lamb

Hannibal

"Altogether, national hatred is something peculiar. You will always find it strongest and most violent where there is the lowest degree of culture."

Goethe (1830)

"Nations are like men; they love that which flatters their passions even more than that which serves their interests."

Tocquevillle

"There is only so much that can be said about nationalism in general. It is not one thing in many disguises but many things in many disguises; nationalist principles can have dreadful consequences in one place, and innocuous or positive ones in another place."

Michael Ignatieff

Blood & Belonging

"As long as there are sovereign nations possessing great power, war is inevitable. There is no salvation for civilization or even the human race, other than the creation of a world government."

Albert Einstein

"Perhaps the most significant moral characteristic of a nation is its hypocrisy."

Reinhold Niebuhr

"Nationalism is the venom of our age. It has brought Europe to the edge of ruin. It drives the new states of Asia and Africa like crazed lemmings. By proclaiming himself a Ghanaian. A Nicaraguan, a Maltese, a man spares himself vexation. He need not ravel out what he is, where his humanity lies. He becomes one of an armed, coherent pack. Every mob impulse in modern politics, every totalitarian design, feeds on nationalism, on the drug of hatred."

George Steiner

A Kind of Survivor

"Nations are products of nature, history is the progressive continuation of animal development. Applying our moral standards to nature will not get us very far. She cares naught for our censure or our praise. Our verdicts and the Montyon prize for virtue do not exist for her. The ethical categories created by our individual caprice are not applicable to her. I think that a nation cannot be called either bad or good. The life of a people is always true to its type and cannot be false. Nature produces only what is feasible under the given conditions: all that exists is drawn onwards by her creative ferment, her insatiable thirst for self realization, that thirst common to all living things."

Alexander I. Herzen (letter to Michelet, Sept 22,1851)

"This, in fact, is one of the miseries of history. Every nation remembers how things were at the time of its maximum extent and power, which is what it considers just and natural. Naturally, these are overlapping in every direction and the territorial quarrels never end."

Isaac Asimov

Asimov’s Chronology of the World

"The closer one gets to either the eastern or the southern fringe of the German-speaking World-the closer one gets, in other words, to the threatening and more numerous Slavs-the more insecure and dangerous nationalism becomes."

Robert D. Kaplan

Balkan Ghosts

"No man has a right to fix the boundary of the march of a nation; no man has a right to say to his country, "Thus far shalt thou go and no further."

Charles Stewart Parnell (1846-91)

Irish nationalist speech 21 Jan 1885,Cork, Ireland

"….As a Crimean Tatar nationalist told me in Ukraine, only a man who has no mother knows what a mother means. Only a man without a state knows what a nation-state means."

Michael Ignatieff

Blood & Belonging

"Statelessness is a state of mind, and it is akin to homelessness. This is what a nationalist understand: a people can become a complete human, completely themselves, only when they have a place of their own."

Ibid

"Since Cain and Abel, we have known that hatred between brother is more ferocious than hatred between strangers. We say tritely that this is so because hatred is a form of love turned against itself. Or that we hate most deeply what we recognize as kin, or that violence is the ultimate denial of an affiliation we cannot bear. None of this will do."

Ibid

"Nationalism is blamed for this century’s wars, but nationalism need not mean militarism. And the nation-state has been the laboratory of liberty."

George F. Will

The American Idea Abroad and at Home

"A nation is a body of people who have done great things together."

Ernest Renan

"Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind."

Albert Einstein

"One would expect people to remember the past and to imagine the future, but in fact....they imagine the past and remember the future."

Lewis Namier

"Born in iniquity and conceived in sin, the spirit of nationalism has never ceased to bend human institutions to the service of dissension and distress."

Beblen

"Whether we wish it or not, we may soon have to make a clear choice between the special nation to which we pledge our allegiance and the broad humanity of which we are born apart."

E.B. White

"It was partly due to a theory, so absurd that not even its direct opposite has any chance of being true, that nationalism is always anti-democratic and aggressive, and that internationalism is always liberal and pacific. yet nationalism is simply the determination of a people to cultivate its own soul, to follow the customs bequeathed to it by its ancestors, to develop the traditions according to its own instincts. It is the national equivalent of the individual's determination not to be a slave."

Rebecca West

"We are now become so much Englishmen, Frenchmen, Dutchmen...that we are longer citizens of the world....An exemption from prejudice....ought to be regarded as the characteristical mark of a gentleman; for let a man's birth be ever so high, yet if he is not free from national and other prejudices, I should make bold to tell him, that he had a low and vulgar mind....And in fact, you will always find that those are most apt to boast of national merit, who have little or no merit of their own to depend on."

Oliver Goldsmith

The Citizen of the World

"National fanaticism is essential to the nation but at the same time a threat to humanity."

Qaddafi

The Green Book

"You might ask mockingly: 'A flag? What's that? A stick with a rag on it?' No sir, a flag is much more. With a flag you lead men....for a flag, men live and die. In fact it is the only thing for which they are ready to die in masses, if you train them for it. Believe me, the politics of an entire people-especially a people scattered all over the earth-can be manipulated only through imponderables that float in thin air. Do you know what went into the making of the German Empire? Dreams and songs, reveries of black, red, and gold banners, all in a very short time. Bismarck merely shook the tree that the visionaries had planted."

-Theodor Herzl (1860-1904)

"Again and again it has been proved, that it is war which turns a people into a nation, and that only great deeds, wrought in common, can forge the indissoluble links which bind them together."

Heinrich Treitschke

"….Like other ideologies, nationalism is a power-grabbing, potentially dominating form of life that feeds upon preexisting sense of nationhood but in so doing disfigures it into a bizarre parody of itself. Nationalism is a pathological form of national identity. It has a fanatical core that destroys the heterogeneity of a nation by squeezing it into the Nation. Nationalism requires its adherents to believe in themselves and to believe that they are members of a superior community of believers known as the Nation. Nationalism tends to crash into the world, crushing or throttling everything that crosses its path, defending or claiming territory, always thinking of land as power and its native inhabitants as a clenched fist. Nationalists are driven by the feeling that all nations are caught up in an animal struggle and that only the fittest survive. Nationalism revels in macho glory and fills the national memory with stories of noble ancestors, heroism, and bravery in defeat. It feels itself invincible, tracks down enemies, despises foreigners, waves the flag, and if necessary, eagerly bloodies its hands on its enemies."

John Keane

Tom Paine a Political Life

"A forest also reminds one of so many things; a nation, for example. But not for the simple reason that it is a crowd of plants; there is something deeper and more significant about it. The trees that shine in the sun or whisper in the wind or seemed absorbed and thoughtful in the sadness of the mist are the image of that part of a nation that lives visibly in the daylight. But every forest is double. There is the forest that we see, and the invisible forest, that of the roots; a forest of crowded trunks and branches that no wind ever moves, on which no sun ever shines., that never knows the splendor of the snow, the singing of birds, the cries of woodmen, or the voices of children; a buried, motionless, slow-growing, mysterious forest, winding its way between the stones like myriads of snakes. It is this forest which is the primary one; the other forest draws its sap, its life, from the roots. It is the same with a nation. Underneath it, concealed from sight, there is a powerful, obscure, terrible, inverted forest of primordial impulses, traditions stronger than reason, fixed tendencies that never rise up to consciousness but condition acts, unleash wars, lead to atrocities, or alternatively to self-sacrifice and heroism."

Fosco Maraini

Secret Tibet

"In the last two centuries or more we as humans have gravitated into nations. There is little doubt that nationalism has become the greatest focus of loyalty. Thousands and hundreds of thousands of human beings have sacrificed their lives and their health fighting terrible wars on behalf of national causes. And to reinforce out patriotisms we have invented histories and legends and even religious commitments to sustain our heroisms and hatreds. In many cases we in effect turn ourselves into separate ethnic species. It is as if we are justified in shootings and ethnic cleansings and purges and massacres, when we are dealing with others. We have perpetrated racisms, and often scarcely treat one another as human beings. These appalling crimes seem, alas, sometimes quite natural to us. But the message of the great religions is quite different. We should treat each other with brotherliness and sisterliness, with love and compassion, with the universal human heartedness. It is of course above all the Christian message that we should love one another, and love our enemies as well as our friends."

Professor Ninian Smart

Ultimate Visions

"Nationalism on this reading, therefore, is a language of fantasy and escape. In many cases-Serbia is a flagrant example-nationalist politics is a full-scale, collective escape from the realities of social backwardness. Instead of facing up to the reality of being a poor, primitive, third-rate economy on the periphery of Europe, it is infinitely more attractive to listen to speeches about the heroic and tragic Serbian destiny and to fantasize about the final defeat of her historic enemies."

Michael Ignatieff

Blood & Belonging

"How To Destroy a Nation: We're already well underway by Richard D. Lamm

Mar 14, 2005 The American Conservative

   I have a secret plan to destroy America. If you believe, as many do, that America is too smug, too white-bread, too self-satisfied, too rich, let's destroy America. It is not that hard to do. History shows that nations are more fragile that their citizens think: no nation in history has survived the ravages of time. Historian Arnold Toynbee observed that all great civilizations rise and fall and that "an autopsy of history would show that all great nations commit suicide."

Here is my plan:

1. We must first make America a bilingual/bicultural country. History shows that no nation can survive the tension, conflict, and antagonism of two competing languages and cultures. It is a blessing for an individual to be bilingual; it is a curse for a society....." (See article)

                      Will You Become Your Own Nation?

                                  By Samuel P. Huntington

"The Nation-State is a rare and recent phenomenon in human affairs. Nation-states emerged in the West with the invention of the printing press and the proliferation of publications in vernacular languages in the 16th and 17th centuries. Slowly people in Western Europe acquired the rudiments of national identity, defined at first largely in religious terms.

   In the 19th century, national consciousness spread throughout European societies. In the 20th century, Third World students of Western nationalism returned home to lead national-liberation movements. Meanwhile, the concept of the nation-an ethnic or cultural community-had become linked to that of the state-a purely political organization. No reason exists in logic or experience, however, why sources of identity and authority should coincide, and through most of human history they have not.

   But while the nation-state has been the pre-eminent institution of the modern world for several centuries, it is now seen to be in a condition of decay. Throughout the world, people are reconsidering what they have in common and what distinguishes them from others. Modernization, economic development, urbanization and globalization have led people to shrink their identity. People now identify with those who are most like them, those with whom they share a common language, religion, tradition and history. Today Scots, Kosovars, Catalonians, Chechens and others are all affirming their identity and seeking a political voice.

    In the 19th and 20th centuries, nationalism was promoted by elites who developed sophisticated appeals to generate a sense of national identity among those whom they saw as their compatriots and to rally them for nationalist causes. Now, however, the emergence of a global economy, plus the arrival of transnational coalitions (on issues such as women's rights or the environment), has led many elites to develop a more cosmopolitan identity. Yet the average citizen in most countries remains strongly nationalistic and often strongly opposes elite views.

   Waking up to these developments means a number of things. First, it suggests the need to question the linkage of identity and authority implied by nation-states. No reason exists why-in addition to states-nationalities, diasporas, religious communities and other groups should not be treated as legitimate actors in global affairs.

    At the same time, it's worth recognizing that the efforts of the U.S. government and others to get people to live in multinational and multiethnic communities are more often that not of exercises in futility. Instead, it is often wise to accommodate those pushing for ethnic separation, segregation and homogenization-even if that means partitioning entire nations to reduce violence.

   Global politics is growing more complex. States will remain the principal actors in global politics. But they are being joined by many other actors, including failed states such as Sierra Leone, suprastate organizations like the European Union, interstate organizations like the International Monetary Fund and INGOS (international nongovernmental organizations) such as Greenpeace.

   Global politics is, in a sense, coming to have the pluralism and diversity typical of politics in democratic countries-with one crucial difference. Democratic societies recognize and accept the people as the ultimate source of sovereignty and some government institutions, usually the legislature and courts, as the ultimate sources of authority. In the emerging global politics, however, sate sovereignty and authority are withering, and no alternative, such as some system of world government, is about to fill the vacuum. The result is almost certain to be chaos. The basic issue for the next quarter-century is whether statesmen will have the patience and wisdom to manage this chaos in peaceful rather than violent fashion."

Samuel P. Huntington

Time Mag

   "At this point, we can locate the Devil in his actual place in the modern nation state, which is quite different from his familiar presence in old-fashioned country districts like Burns's Ayrshire. There will always be learned toadies-lawyers and academics-ready to praise Leviathan and his System: the Napoleonic post-Revolutionary secular state, Stalin's Russia, or the globalizing activities of the mighty multi-national corporations. The System deals out Justice, based on carefully pondered rational principles or it flourishes pseudo-rational Business Plans. Because it perceives that its own security depends on being respected and, if at all possible, loved, it is generous to those who play along with it and serve it unreservedly. It usually offers some variant of the Welfare State, in which no one is to be allowed to starve or die of hypothermia if this can be managed without undue inconvenience to the rich. All the price that it charges for its handouts and fringe benefits is docile conformity."

-Angus Calder

Gods, Mongrels and Demons

   "The Kurds are the largest nation of people without a state of their own. Up to twenty-five million Kurds are estimated to live in a swath of territory that stretches from Iran through northern Iraq and into Turkey and Syria. They stem from an ancient, non-Arabic tribe that predates Islam. Today, most of them are Sunni Muslims, but Christian, Bahai, and Zoroastrian minorities remain in the region as well. Most of the Jewish Kurds left in the 1950s and early '60s. Some Kurds have light hair and blue eyes, which historians speculate, could date back to the time when the Vikings descended on Baghdad. But opportunities for ethnic mixing were plentiful during the crusades, and in recent centuries as well, given that the Silk Road, used by merchants from all over Europe and Asia, ran straight through the region.

   The fact that the Kurds' homeland is mountainous and difficult of access has been both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, it has afforded them occasional refuge from their enemies. On the other hand, it made their region a natural frontier between the Byzantine Empire to the east, the Persian empires to the west, the Russian Orthodox Empire to the north, and the Arab tribes to the south. The quasi-perpetual state of conflict among these empires meant that the Kurds almost never experienced a time when a proxy war wasn't being fought in their backyard."

-Michael Soussan

Backstabbing For Beginners: My crash course in International Diplomacy

"Goethe wrote (in 1790): "At a time when everybody is busy erecting new Fatherlands, the Fatherland of the man who thinks without prejudice and can rise above his time is nowhere and everywhere."

   But in spite of the ideas which the greatest representative of Western culture held, history took a different path. Nationalism killed humanism. The nation and its sovereignty became the new idols to which the individual succumbed."

Erich Fromm

   "Davos Man" is a term coined by the late Harvard University political science professor Samuel Huntington to describe a group of globalist international elites who have no allegiance to any country. The Davos man, as described by Huntington , views national boundaries as inevitably vanishing, sees nation-state governments as harmful vestiges of the past, and believes national laws and administrative regulations are as detrimental to the world economy as are national currencies."

-Jerome R. Corsi, Ph.D.

America For Sale

"In our days, on a shrinking earth, with a growing interdependence of all people, a dynamic self-centered nationalism becomes the gravest menace to peace (which it despises) and to the progress of civilization (which it denies)....The new nationalism threatens chaos at a moment when all efforts should be bent on building up of universal order....Seen in this light, Fascism becomes and prides itself in being, the counter-revolution against, and the denial of history and humanity."

-Hans Kohn

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Book: "Faith in Nation" by Anthony W. Marx

Book: "The Myth of Nations" by Patrick Geary

Book: "The Rise and Decline of Nations" by Mancur Olson

Book: "Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism" by Benedict Anderson

Book: "The Wrath of Nations" by William Pfaff

Book: "Long Shadows: Truth, Lies and History" by Ema Paris

Book: "On Nationality" by David Miller

Book: "America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism" by Anatol Lieven

Book: "Highlanders: A journey to the Caucasus in Quest of Memory" by Yo'av Karny

Book: "Allah's Mountains: The Battle for Chechnya" by Sebastian Smith

Book: "Encyclopedia of Nationalism" by Athena S. Leoussi,ed.

Book: "Myths and Nationhood" Ed. by G. Hosking & G. Schopflin

Book: "The Morality of Nationalism" by Robert Mckim & Jeff McMahan

Book: "For Love of Country: An Essay on Patriotism and Nationalism" by Maurizio Viroli

Book: "The Road To Verdun: World War I's Most Momentous Battle and the Folly of Nationalism" by Ian Ousby

Book: "Nationalism" ed by John Hutchinson & Anthony Smith

Book: "Nationalism and Nationalities In The New Europe" Ed. by Charles A. Kupchan

Book: "Nationalism, Second Edition" by Peter Altar

Book: The breaking of Nations: Order and Chaos in the Twenty-first Century" by Robert Cooper