Which brings me to Ukraine and the treason of the nationalists.
In Putin’s tirades about Ukraine, he makes it clear that he subscribes to a pre-nationalist, pre-popular sovereignty, pre-modern theory of politics. He thinks that because Ukraine wasn’t a country in the ninth or 13th century it can’t be a country today—at least not if he doesn’t want it to be.
This is contrary to everything nationalists today claim to believe. And that is what is so disgusting about Putin’s purportedly nationalist amen choir. Putin is not a nationalist, he’s an imperialist. But the contemporary nationalists who wax righteous about rejecting the “imperialism” of the globalists and their institutions—the U.N., the EU, the World Bank, Davos, whatever—either cheer, mumble pro-forma objections, or simply stare at their shoes in silence as Putin attempts to erase a sovereign nation. The Ukrainians have their own language, their own culture, their own national history, and have been a nation for centuries. What they want to be is a country. And the allegedly nationalist Putinphiles are too ignorant or sycophantic to respect that desire because it conflicts with the ambition of a mass murderer and tyrant.
Putin’s apologists demonstrate that the real point of nationalism is the pursuit of power. Ideological nationalism is an attempt to provide a permission structure, to construct the slipperiest slope possible to their attainment of power. Nationalism, like “post-liberalism,” is an intellectual pretext, a means toward an end: power.