Angels of the Nations?

Abstract

Nationalism is not, one could argue, an unmitigated evil. It provides a bonding force to unite highly diverse tribes and peoples. It furnishes a sense of collective identity capable of drawing people out of themselves and their family groupings into a larger whole. It is one of the sole forces capable of standing up against the economic onslaught of the transnational corporations. It prevents the great empires from imposing their wills without resistance. More might be said on its behalf, but what makes nationalism so pernicious, so death-dealing, and so blasphemous is its seemingly irresistible tendency toward idolatry. In the name of this idol whole generations are maimed, slaughtered, exiled, and made idolaters. More than one hundred million lives have been offered on the altar of this Moloch thus far in the twentieth century, and we are now watching in a kind of mesmerized horror as terrorism sweeps the world. Only a god could command such madness, carried out with such lucid rationality by some of the brightest minds of each nation, and that is where the irony begins: modern people do not believe in gods.