Group-think in Gaza

It would almost be comical if it wasn’t so desperately tragic: Much of the informed world is again splitting into two halves with one half detesting the other. The occasion this time is the Hamas-Israel conflict, which has split the world into supporters of Hamas and the State of Israel, respectively. Or – as it is in danger of becoming – into one half supporting Arabs and another half supporting Jews.

Those who lean to the left politically tend to support the Palestinians and those who lean to the right politically tend to support the Israelis. Those who go against the grain and support the side that their political tribe does not are asking to be cancelled, de-platformed, or worse.

The Anti-Defamation League in New York reports that antisemitic incidents in America rose by 388% between October 7th and 23rd compared with the same period of the year before. In Dagestan, an antisemitic mob of hundreds of men recently attacked the main airport in order to hunt down random Jewish passengers who had arrived on a flight from Tel Aviv. Meanwhile, Israeli counterattacks on Gaza have claimed a death toll amongst Palestinians exceeding 8,000, with 1.4 million having been displaced. The often-indiscriminate killing of people from the other side, who are always demonised and de-humanised, thus continues apace.

Taking sides in the Hamas-Israel conflict means that you align yourself with people carrying out some fairly horrendous things. If you side with Hamas, you thereby endorse the killings and hostage-taking of politically clueless Jewish teenagers and old grannies. If you side with Israel, you will find yourself having to defend the deaths by bombing of thousands of innocent civilians – including children and pensioners – who had absolutely nothing to do with the actions of Hamas.

Unfortunately, the large extent to which people choose to take sides in the Hamas-Israel conflict is just one of a long list of examples where there are deemed to be only two sides to any issue. For those who take sides, one side is deemed unequivocally good and saintly while the other side is deemed unequivocally bad and evil. Some other examples of binary group-think that immediately come to mind are the following:

• Trump vs. Biden
• Foreigner vs. non-foreigner
• Russian vs. Ukrainian
• Left-wing vs. Right-wing
• Muslim vs. Christian
• Hutu vs. Tutsi
• White vs. Black

Mindlessly dividing humanity up in good people (your own tribe) and bad people (everybody else) is a problem as old as humanity itself. This is what most people resort to in matters of politics, religion, sport, and other matters where logic and reason carry little weight. However, I simply refuse to accept that the human brain is incapable of considering non-binary options. Is there another way? Yes, there is, but that involves engaging the brain in order to stop falling for the temptation of group-think, i.e., thinking in collectivist terms.

Group-think – the judging of people according to which group they are deemed to belong rather than their individual views, qualities, or guilt – is the direct route to the killing of innocents. Especially when the levers of a strong state fall into the hands of group-thinkers who can then realise their bigoted antipathies by carrying out genocide in the name of the nation, the people, the King, and/or God. One of the precious few things that states are really good at are genocides.

History is replete with examples of this happening. In recent times, some that come to mind are Nazi-Germany, India in 1947, Cambodia under Khmer Rouge, Rwanda in 1994, and the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar, to name but a few. Conversely, I can think of no genocide that was not perpetrated by a state. Separate individuals seldom have enough power to orchestrate an undertaking as huge as a genocide.

The alternative to collectivist group-think is, of course, individualism. I.e., always judging a person on the basis of his or her individual qualities, opinions, and actions. Consistently applying individualist principles is harder than it sounds, though. For instance, many people happen to identify with a state. They speak of “we” and “us” when they refer to the foreign policy actions of the government of the state in which they live. They even speak of “we” and “us” when they refer to historical events predating their own birth by hundreds of years. Or when they refer to sports events involving the local national team. But the state is not them, and they are not the state. To avoid group-think it is necessary to be absolutely clear about this.

If you want to avoid punishing innocents for the actions of others, you must use an individualist approach. Applying an individualist approach to the Hamas-Israel conflict means not identifying with either side. An individualist approach involves prosecuting individuals accused of having killed other people – whether Jews or Arabs – and punishing them or acquitting them accordingly. With thousands engaged in the killings, it is a huge task to hold each individual to account for his or her actions. However, expediency is hardly a very good moral argument against that approach.

There are often – perhaps even always – more than two sides to any issue. Moreover, your enemy’s enemy is not always your friend. Just because the Israeli military is evil, that does not necessarily mean that the Hamas militia is nice. Or vice versa. The fact that Trump is a scumbag does not necessarily mean that Biden is a saint. Or vice versa. I could go on. However, suffice to say that always putting the individual first would avoid an unfathomable number of gross injustices and deaths in the world. The world is not just black and white. There are many more colours than that.

Does It Hurt Yet?

It is now some six months since the EU and other Western states imposed sanctions on Russia. The sanctions were - at least officially - intended to force Russia to stop the war against Ukraine. Now - half a year later - we can evaluate the effect of those sanctions as some of the results are in.

Firstly, have the sanctions stopped the war, reduced its severity, or limited its scope? No. Not even close. It has, however, thrown Putin’s Russia into the arms of Communist China which does not support any sanctions. It has also heralded the beginning of an era in which countries are seeking to create more self-sufficiency in energy and food supplies so as better to be able to impose and withstand sanctions in the future. The latter is immensely damaging to the long-term prospects of the world economy as basic economic wisdom has it that products and services are best produced in the countries that have a competitive advantage in those specific products and services, irrespective of national borders. That is the basis of international trade, which will be eroded to the detriment of everybody.

Secondly, have the sanctions damaged the Russian economy? Not only have they not had any serious effect, the reduced gas supplies from Russia mean that global gas prices have increase by about 1,000 per cent since September 2021. So of course the limited quantities of gas that Russia still sells command prices that produce significant revenue for the Russian suppliers. Thus, The Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA), a Finnish think tank, has calculated that Russia has earned revenue of EUR 163 billion for sales of oil, gas, and coal since the invasion of Ukraine. Over the same period, they estimate that Russia has spend around EUR 100 billion on the invasion of Ukraine. So Russia is not about to run out of money to finance the war.

It is likely that the Western politicians knew perfectly well that the sanctions were never going to work. The sanctions were pure virtue-signalling designed to please the media and the voters who were baying for Putins blood at the time of the invasion. Also, one could be forgiven for suspecting that the politicians introduced the sanctions well knowing that they would cause sky-rocketing energy prices and therefore create an artificial need for governments to intervene with more “generous” government handouts (of people’s own money), more government borrowing, and - eventually - more government taxation, thus expanding the scope of the state yet again. I.e., in much the same way as the government-induced pandemic lockdown panic did. But perhaps that is giving the politicians too much credit as their ability to predict obvious consequences may not be all that impressive.

It is certainly a fact that the scope of the state is rapidly increasing due to the sanctions. France is now completely nationalising EDF, the major French energy company, and price caps, rationing, and subsidies proliferate as if we were already in World War 3. The expansion of renewable but heavily taxpayer-subsidised energy sources such as wind and solar power is accelerated, using self-sufficiency and lack of Russian fossil fuels as pretexts. All this in the holy name of sanctions that are not fit for purpose, and that cause untold suffering and pain to the civilian populations and businesses at both ends of the sanctions, i.e. both in the East and in the West.

In addition to being ineffective and even counterproductive, the immorality of the sanctions are on such a scale that it beggars belief. Almost the entire world population - not just the populations of the sanctioned and sanctioning countries - are suffering under eye-watering gas prices, fuelling rampant inflation that quickly erodes the value of people’s hard-earned assets. Sanctions are the collective punishment of innocent people for the purpose of ‘sending messages’ to national leaders. Messages that are happily ignored by people such as Putin who will personally suffer no adverse consequences of the sanctions. On the contrary, he is understandably very happy that it gives him an opportunity to manipulate the energy markets and earn billions for deliveries of much less gas.

So what to do about Ukraine? They way to go would seem to be continued support for the Ukraine by voluntary groups and organisations that should be allowed to send the Ukrainians any supplies needed to continue the resistance against the Russian forces, including weapons. One could then hope that Russia eventually tires of the war in the same way that the Soviet Union (and later the US) tired of war in Afghanistan, leading to withdrawal. But as it should be painfully obvious from the above, sanctions are clearly not the answer.

The Taliban Victory

I have so far not commented on the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban. This is partly because my comment could be summed up in the few words ‘I told you so’.

From Day 1, there was never any doubt in my mind that the Afghan government created by the US and her allies would not last much beyond the Western military occupation of the country. Looking back through history, there are numerous examples of Western powers trying to force their own puppet regimes and their own values on other countries very different from their own. Usually, such efforts have failed miserably sooner or later.

This is hardly surprising, given that it is a basic human instinct to group together against others who speak different languages, who come from very different cultures, and who have very different values. Especially when such others are occupying your country militarily and are trying to force through changes based on their culture rather than yours.

Now, after 20 years, at least a trillion dollars of taxpayers money, innumerable unnecessary deaths, and immense suffering, the Western powers have learned anew the hard lesson outlined above. Hopefully, it will finally sink in, although I am not holding my breath, knowing the nature of governments.

This is not to say that I applaud the victory of the Taliban. The Taliban is about as nasty as its worst detractors claim. However, Westerners need to understand that there are parts of the world that they simply cannot control. If they really want to help the unfortunate Afghans who want a life different from the one stipulated by the Taliban, there is, however, one thing they can do: Open the borders!

Allowing the persecuted Afghans to escape from the Taliban is the one obvious and humane solution that simultaneously avoids the West getting entangled in Afghanistan. However, surprisingly few of the people who claim to have the best interests of the Afghans at heart are open to this solution. Yes, they want to help the Afghans, but only if the Afghans stay well away from them. Such is the hypocrisy of the West. No wonder if the Afghans find such Western values rather lacking in both sincerity and consistency.

The Cost of Xenophobia

In the afternoon of 28th March 1997, the Albanian motorboat Kateri i Radës sailed towards Italy with some 142 people on board. They were all desperately trying to escape the political and economic mayhem in their home country and make a better life for themselves abroad. Still within Albanian territorial waters, the boat was challenged by the Italian naval vessel Sibilia on suspicion of carrying ‘irregular migrants’. The Italian vessel ended up colliding with the motorboat, causing the boat to capsize and sink. Some 83 people, aged between 3 months and 69 years, drowned as a result. Thus, 83 Europeans were arbitrarily killed by other Europeans in just one such event of the supposedly enlightened 1990s.

 

The wreck of the Kateri i Radës was raised and for years laid neglected in a corner of the Italian port of Brindisi. It was eventually converted into a memorial with the fitting title L'Approdo. Opera all'Umanità Migrante (The Landing. A work dedicated to Migrating Humanity):

 

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Fast forward to 2020 and the development of the first approved vaccine against Covid-19. The vaccine was created by two scientists from the German company BioNTech. But the scientists - Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci - are, in fact, 1^st and 2^nd generation migrants from Turkey. In other words, they are not even of European extraction.  

 

This beggars the question how many brilliant minds are lost to the world due to the paranoid fear in Western countries of migrants from elsewhere. How many Uğur Şahins have drowned in the Mediterranean Sea or died of thirst on the US-Mexican border? How many parents of Özlem Türecis have been prevented from leaving their blighted home countries in search of better lives, thus condemning their children to lives in obscurity?

 

As Johan Norberg writes in his book Open - The Story of Human Progress:

 

If people were allowed to move to the place where their labour is paid the best, the gains to world income would be astronomical. According to a back-of-envelope calculation, world GDP would increase by around $80 trillion, in effect doubling world GDP, and those gains would be accrued every year.

 

Abolishing all barriers to goods and services would increase global GDP by a couple of percentage points – nothing to be sniffed at – but abolishing barriers to people would increase it by 60 - 150 per cent, according to several different estimates. And even partial eliminations of barriers to labour mobility could increase global wealth by trillions. This is why economists talk about ‘trillion-dollar bills on the sidewalk’ when they refer to the simple policy of allowing people to go and work where they want to go and work. …

 

… it is startling that no policy in today’s world could be more controversial than picking up trillion-dollar bills on the sidewalk, especially since new cultures often inject energy into our own, and it helps people to escape poverty and hopelessness, flee persecution and to be with their loved ones.”

 

Even so, the world seems to be going in a different direction. Witness, for instance, the recent end of free movement between the UK and the remaining countries of the EU, and Trump’s relentless campaign against migrants from Mexico and Muslim countries.

 

So when you encounter a taxi driver or a peasant by the roadside on your next visit to Morocco, Turkey, or Mexico, please do remember that they are not lesser beings than you, and that they might have been even more successful than you if they had simply not committed the unforgivable sin of being born in the wrong country.

Collectivists and the Coronavirus

Collectivists give the group priority over the individual. They are happy to violate individual preferences, liberties, and property in favour of the ‘needs’ of the collective. Socialists, nationalists, populists, and environmentalists are prime examples of collectivists. They have plenty of reasons to be happy with the advent of the coronavirus:

The socialists celebrate the return of Big Brother. Worldwide, governments have committed themselves to increased spending of trillions of dollars. Some for-profit businesses will be forced to close. Sensible austerity is out the window. State intervention, tax increases, price control, rationing, and nationalisations are beckoning or already underway.

The nationalists rejoice in the closed borders they have yearned for for so long. No more arrivals of brown people. Government officials and soldiers once again guard the internal European borders against individuals who have had the temerity of being born on the wrong side of them.

Populists applaud the strong leaders who offer simplistic solutions to complex problems. Lengthy states of emergency with dictatorial powers for the national leaders, and popularity-seeking strongman policies with few or no positive effects are the order of the day.

Finally, environmentalists cheer all the cancelled flights, the immobile cars, and the prospect of thousands of deaths that will result in a reduced world population, thus reducing mankind’s carbon footprint.

Many people belong to more than one of the above four categories of collectivists. They self-identify as part of the state, because ‘the state is all of us.’ They say ‘we’ did this whenever they speak of action taken by the national government. They think of themselves – and, by extension, the state of which they consider themselves a part – as saintly and infallible as long as action is taken ‘in the common interest’.

However, there is nothing about the coronavirus that suddenly makes states saintly or infallible, that suddenly invalidates the laws of supply and demand, or that suddenly discredits private businesses as the backbone of the global wealth that we currently enjoy. Thus, it is private pharmaceutical companies that will produce the medicine, ventilators, and other equipment needed to treat the coronavirus, private businesses that feed us during the crisis, and private research and enterprise that will eventually develop a vaccine against the virus. Governments are simply too incompetent to be trusted to save people’s lives.

The response of states to the pandemic has been somewhere in the range from panic-stricken knee-jerk reactions on one side, to cynical, calculated power grabs on the other. Exactly where we are in this range matters little, as the negative consequences of the governmental interventions are the same, regardless of intent.

An example of this is the recent lockdown in India. India currently has 1,251 recorded cases of the virus and 31 deaths. Now a country of 1.35 billion inhabitants is being closed down by the government because of a virus that has killed just 0.000002% of the population. So many Indians are barely surviving as it is. If those Indians are not allowed to leave their homes, millions of them will die. Of starvation, thirst, exposure, and preventable diseases, that is, not of the coronavirus. “The kind of devastation that is going to be faced by the bottom 50 percent of the workers in the informal sector is unimaginable,” says Jayati Ghosh, an economist and professor at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi.

We are now entering a global recession because of such government interventions. People are not trusted to generally take the right decisions to protect themselves, their families, and their businesses. Notoriously incompetent and nefarious governments, on the other hand, are trusted unconditionally. Therefore, the greatest casualties of the coronavirus are reason, prosperity, and freedom. That is why collectivists love the virus.

The False Security Of Closed Borders

Today, Thursday 19th March, the media reports queues of lorries and cars stretching back some 60 km from the German-Polish border. Lorries face a 30-hour wait to cross the border. Families with children suffer a 20-hour wait during which they have no access to food or toilet facilities. The goods transported by the lorries are greatly needed at their destinations, where the lack of them causes disruption and deprivation.

Meanwhile, Australia and New Zealand are today closing their borders and thus follow in the footsteps of the US, Canada, Poland, Germany, Denmark, and many other European countries. In most cases, the corona virus is present on both sides of the closed borders in roughly equal measure. Germany and France is an example of this. In some cases such as Denmark, the virus is more prevalent in the country that has closed its borders (Denmark) than in the countries from which entry is denied (Sweden, Germany). The Danish health authorities (‘Sundhedsstyrelsen’) sensibly advised the Danish government that there is no evidence that closing the borders would have any positive effect. The government chose to ignore this advice and went ahead with the border closure regardless.

In an age of rampant nationalism, xenophobia, and authoritarianism, closing national borders is blatant virtue signalling as there is little or no real reason to do so on health grounds. However, the damage to the economy and the unnecessary hardship caused by the border closures are real enough.

Although few people realise it, damaging the global economy kills. This is an indirect effect that is hard to measure and it is therefore largely ignored as it cannot be explained to the public in the 5-second sound bites favoured by politicians. The French economist Frederic Bastiat wrote of “That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen”. In the current crisis, what you see is authoritarian governments taking action that they claim is in the best interests of the citizens. What is not seen are the negative effects of such actions, which are often indirect and all but impossible to measure. But less economic growth – or, worse, economic recession – means less money for medical treatment, health insurance, medicine, and medical research. This translates into deaths. Thus, I feel fairly convinced that the number of deaths caused by the damage to the global economy resulting from the virus and – especially – from ham-fisted and often ineffective government intervention, will far exceed the number of deaths that are caused by the virus itself.

It should be obvious to any but the most casual observer that the only thing that really works against the virus is self-isolation. That means isolating yourself in your private home. But a nation is not a private home, even though populist, nationalist, and socialist politicians would love for people to think of the motherly state in exactly such terms.

Unfortunately, it seems that the politicians are succeeding in making people think in collectivist terms. It is thus exceedingly difficult to find people who are not clamouring for the state to save them from the virus by way of various draconian interventions. Even people who have previously been sceptical about the state’s role in society jump on the bandwagon.

In many ways, this resembles a collective Stockholm-syndrome. The state, which almost always has a history of economic mismanagement, blatant discrimination, devastating wars, and often genocide, is the go-to solution for more than 99% of the world’s population whenever they want to be ‘saved’. They want a ‘strong leader’ and are then surprised whenever they subsequently face the destruction caused by the same strong leader.

Perhaps people act in this way not so much out of ignorance as out of fear. Fear of the unknown is a very powerful force. ‘Better the devil you know’ seems to be the attitude among people who cannot conceive of solutions that are not provided by the state. In the current crisis, safety and security are the concerns that governments are using to expand the scope of the state unopposed by way of ‘temporary’ curbs on individual and economic liberties. Unfortunately, such ‘temporary measures’ have a nasty habit of becoming permanent.

Let us hope and trust that individuals taking individual decisions to self-isolate is what will eventually destroy the virus. Clearly, people who do not self-isolate as much as possible may live to regret it since many of them will get sick and some of them will die. But trusting the government to save you by way of closing national borders not only imparts a false sense of security, it also endangers the essential liberties and economic progress that we – in spite of government actions to the contrary – have enjoyed in recent decades.

Nationalism On The March Again: The Re-emergence Of European Right-wing Collectivism

WHY NATIONALISM?

1.    The definition of nationalism in Encyclopedia Britannica is ”an ideology based on the premise that the individual's loyalty and devotion to the nation-state surpass other individual or group interests”.

2.    So why are so many people attracted to nationalism, given that it is an ideology that puts the state above the individual? It seems that it happens whenever people – quite naturally - look for a shared identity or bond with other individuals.

3.    Karl Popper, the famous 20^th century philosopher, coined this desire to bond with other individuals as “the Spirit of the Tribe”. In Popper’s view, the Spirit of the Tribe is the source of both nationalism and religious fanaticism. Maria Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian Nobel Laureate in literature, investigates the concept further in his recent book entitled “The Call Of The Tribe”. He writes, among other things, that “The tribal spirit is the source of nationalism, which has been the culprit, together with religious fanaticism, of the biggest massacres in the history of mankind".  

4.    The politicians and civil servants in positions of power, who all have a vested interest in the existence of a state, design the state as a receptacle for this tribal spirit. Flags, anthems, and national myths are all being used by politicians, powerful civil servants, and favoured business corporations to make ordinary people identify themselves with the tribe, i.e. the nation state.

5.    What politicians and civil servants want to achieve is that the individual becomes unable to distinguish between state and country, between state and society, and between state and individual.

6.    When that happens, people become nationalists. When the state becomes more powerful, nationalist individuals feel that they themselves, as persons, become more powerful.

7.    As the British author George Orwell wrote: “The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit into which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.”

8.    This is somehow considered virtuous behaviour by most people. As John F. Kennedy famously said, ”Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” That quote is a prime example of nationalism, where the individual is asked to subordinate his own life to the needs of the state.

9.    But is a state really a community of willing individuals? The late Benedict Anderson, an Irish political scientist, did not think so. He described modern nations as “imagined communities” — imagined because people are drawn together within them who have not met and never will. In other words, people imagine that they have a lot in common with other people of the same nationality – but they will never know for sure because there is no way that each individual will ever get to meet more than a tiny fraction of the total number of their fellow countrymen. It is the power of such imagination that allows an essentially modern doctrine like nationalism to feel so deeply rooted in the past, which it is not.

10. Nationalism increases in line with how serious an external threat is perceived as being. States make full use of this, creating or exaggerating external threats in order to increase their control and power over their citizens. In business parlance, this is also known as Management by Fear.

11. Perceived external threats from other countries – which are almost always threats to the state, not threats to the country as such – are particularly useful when it comes to justifying compulsory military service, also known as National Service, conscription, or the draft.

12. National Service is, of course, the forced training of young men to kill for the state. Because that is what it really is, when you think about it. Did Germany and Japan disappear off the face of the earth when they lost WW2? No. Apart from some relatively minor losses of territory, all that happened was that their governments changed. So all the young soldiers who “died for their country” did actually not die for their country. They killed and died simply to prevent a change of government.

13. Obviously, this is not how it is portrayed by the media or by the state. As you know, the 6^th commandment of the Bible is not “You shall not kill, except if you kill for the state”. How can the media and the state justify to a mother who has lost her son in battle that he just died to defend a bunch of megalomanic politicians rather than the country as such? They cannot. Therefore, they engage in the fairy-tale make-believe illusions of dying - or “falling” - for one’s country.

14. But nationalism doesn’t just highlight the differences between countries, it also thrives on the anger within them. Michal Bilewicz, a social psychologist at the University of Warsaw, explains this anger in terms of what his profession calls “agency”, by which he means the power to control your own life. Nationalism is determined not by patriotic ardour, he argues, but by self-esteem. Men and women lacking in, or deprived of, agency look to nationalism to reassure them that, in their own way, they are as good as everyone else—better, even. It’s just that the world does not give them the respect they deserve.

15. An example of this can be seen in a 2016 survey done in Saxony, one of the poorest parts of Germany. 18% of the 1,013 respondents fully or partially agreed with the statement that “Germans are naturally superior to other nationalities.”  So this sort of answer is coming from the poorest Germans, who have little education and who have poorly paid or no jobs. How can they possibly feel that they are more successful than, say, the Swiss or the Japanese? Because nationalism provides them with a convenient and socially acceptable way to claim - and make themselves believe - that they, as individuals, deserve more respect for no other reason that they are German. In the words of an Internet meme doing the rounds on Facebook: “Nationalism teaches you to take pride in stuff you haven’t done and hate people you have never met”.

16. Interestingly, 29% of the respondents of the same survey also fully or partially agreed that Germany needs a dictatorship, 39% fully or partially agreed that all immigration of Muslims should be banned, and 58% fully or partially agreed that foreigners dominate Germany to a dangerous extent.

17. This ties in with the evidence that people who vote for nationalist parties are often from relatively poor rural or post-industrial areas with a surprisingly low number of immigrants. Those areas voted for UKIP in Britain and for Trump in the US. The same goes for countries as a whole. Only 1.7% of the Polish population were born outside of Poland. Yet in Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Bulgaria, and other Central European countries where the actual number of refugees and immigrants is extremely low compared to Western Europe, migrants are vilified like never before since WW2. The main conclusion one can draw from this is that the fewer immigrants you interact with in your daily lives, the easier it is to dehumanise and demonise them.

18. The weird logic that you are better than others just because you are of a certain nationality is also what is behind the publicly expressed desire of many European politicians to boost birth rates. Birth rates are too low, the politicians say – we need to increase birth rates so that we get more Danes, Poles, Italians (or whatever the nationality is of the politician saying it) so that we can get more young workers to pay taxes in order to support the welfare state and the rising cost of state pensions for older people. This is quiet literally national socialism as the same politicians deliberately disregard the obvious solution to the problem – which is to open up the borders! There are masses of fit, young, healthy, people just south of the Mediterranean Sea who would like nothing more than to be allowed to do extremely hard work at extremely low wages. These are people who are ready to work from day 1 in the country. Unlike a new-born Dane or Pole or Italian, the immigrants do not need to first spend 15-20 years in kindergarten and school before they are ready to work. What’s more, the International Monetary Fund calculated in 2016 that each 1% rise in the immigrant share of the population tends to raise income per inhabitant by 2%. So what’s not to like?

19. Sadly, logic plays no part in the minds of the nationalists. Several European countries are short of labour. I know for a fact that this is the case in both Denmark and the UK.  Even so, extremely qualified foreigners are still denied access. Between December 2017 and March 2018, 1,226 IT specialists and 383 engineers were denied visas to take up jobs they had already been offered by UK businesses. In addition, 1,876 medical practitioners and healthcare workers, 197 teachers, and 584 from other professions were unable to take up their job offers in the UK. The reason given is that “the number applying exceeded the monthly limit allowed to enter the UK”. This insane policy was introduced by none other than Prime Minister Theresa May in her time as Home Secretary. So just because nationalist Daily Mail readers want less dark people in the UK, British businesses and the qualified people who want to work for them, all have to suffer. Needless to say, this causes damage not only to the parties directly involved, but also to the national economy and the world economy as a whole, and thereby also to the racist nationalists who are the cause of such extremely damaging policies.

CONSEQUENCES OF NATIONALISM

1.    Someone once said: “Nationalism always starts off with folk-dancing and ends up with barbed wire.” Although this is a slight exaggeration, there is much truth in that.

2.    Just within the past 100 years of European history, nationalism – combined with other collectivist ideologies and religions - has resulted in WW1 in the 1910s, the Irish Civil War in the 1920s, the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, WW2 in the 1940s, the Cypriot civil war in the 1960s, the Troubles in Northern Ireland and the partition of Cyprus in the 1970s, the Basque guerrilla war in Spain in the 1980s, the Balkan Wars in the 1990s, the wars in the Caucasus in the 2000s, and the current conflict in eastern Ukraine, to name the ones that come to mind.

3.    Even now, European nationalism causes the deaths of thousands of people every year. I am, of course, referring to the people from Africa and Asia who seek a better life for themselves in Europe, or who simply try to survive by escaping from war and conflict. In 2013, 700 people drowned in the Mediterranean Sea, trying to reach Europe. Since then, the number has risen every year. In 2016 the death toll was a shocking 5,143 dead individuals, including children. For comparison, the death toll in the 9/11 attack on the New York World Trade Center was 3,000. But it gets worse. The U.N. International Organization for Migration estimates that at least double the number of migrants that drowns in the Med dies in the Sahara on their way to the Med. That takes the death toll for 2016 to more than 15,000. This number includes many women and children who, as the physically weakest ones, are more likely victims of not only dehydration and exhaustion, but also robbery, rape, and murder.

4.    These people who died needlessly in the Med and the Sahara are people who could simply have purchased a cheap ticket on Ryanair or Wizz, and who would have been alive today, had it not been for the European immigration barriers. Immigration barriers which, in turn, are a direct result of nationalism and socialist welfare state policies.

5.    Sadly, all these deaths have not received anywhere nearly as much media attention as they should have. 10 people killed in a US school shooting gets way more attention in the European media than 500 people who drown in the Med right here on our doorstep. But it is a very, very ugly business. One particular sinking occurred on 19^th April 2015 between Sicily and Libya and saw more than 800 people dragged down to their deaths when their ship capsized. Italian coast guard divers subsequently dived the sunken ship in order to recover all the dead bodies. Among the horrific underwater scenery of 800 dead bodies, divers reported how they saw the body of a woman who had been giving birth on the lower deck of the ship when it sank and she got trapped. The divers saw her dead baby floating in the current, still attached to the dead mother by the umbilical cord…

6.    I have not been able to find a picture of this dead woman and her baby. But if you take nothing else away from this speech, this is the mental image that I would like you to remember every time you meet a nationalist who speaks out in favour of immigration restrictions. Make no mistake, nationalism means death, blood, and the destruction of innocent lives. Even in this day and age.

7.    The European indifference to these deaths is caused, as I have suggested, by the existence of the European welfare states. Because Europeans – with some justification – expect their welfare state to collapse if an unlimited number of immigrants are allowed to claim tax-funded social benefits, unrestricted immigration is perceived as a threat to the national welfare states. So people just shrug it off and say that these deaths are a necessary evil. But the welfare state is not a necessary evil – it’s an unnecessary evil - and therefore these deaths are completely pointless and unbelievably tragic.

8.    The existence of the welfare state quite clearly dehumanises people. When the media showed a picture of a small, dead boy in the arms of a Turkish border guard on a beach in Turkey back in 2016, there was a great outpouring of sympathy in Europe for the Syrian refugees. Why? Because the foreigners were suddenly given a human face by the media. A few months later, that sympathy had evaporated amidst reports of new refugee camps paid for by the welfare state, i.e. the European taxpayers. This is in spite of the fact that the creation of the European welfare states is entirely the responsibility of the European voters. The prospective immigrants can in no way be blamed for this for the simple reason that they have never had the right to vote in Europe.

9.    The so-called New Patriotism argues that “modern democratic states committed to a degree of equality rely on the willingness of citizens to make sacrifices for the common good, be it in terms of the everyday redistribution of income to meet welfare needs or the provision of collective goods and services such as education or health care.”

10. My native Denmark is one of the European countries with the largest welfare state. It is also one of the countries in which the inhabitants identify themselves most strongly with the national welfare state. Most Danes will tell you that they are proud of the Danish welfare state. Most Danes also see immigrants as a threat to the welfare state and therefore as a threat to Denmark. Thus, I recently read an article by Mr Munk-Bogballe, a candidate for Parliament for the Conservative People’s Party, which is generally considered to be only moderately right wing. In the article, the Candidate proposes to build “Fortress Europe”. As you may know, this term was invented by Hitler’s Nazi Germany to describe the defensive fortifications along the Atlantic Coast during WW2. And here we have a so-called moderate politician who unashamedly uses the same terminology to propose keeping foreigners out of Europe.

11. Unfortunately, it doesn’t stop there. The leader of the largest political party in Denmark, Mrs Frederiksen of the moderately left-wing Social Democrats, says that “non-western immigration is the biggest challenge for Denmark”. This is obviously completely out of proportion. Other senior politicians from the Danish main parties speak of “self-defence” when proposing further immigration restrictions. The terminology has become decidedly war-like.

12. Speaking of defence, a private group of European, so-called identitarians named “Defend Europe” last year chartered a ship at a cost of $178,000 in order to prevent private charities from rescuing migrants from drowning in the Mediterranean Sea.

13. The media backlash against this racist group has been very modest. The average citizen – and therefore also the media – is no longer appalled by public displays of hatred against immigrants. What was an extreme position 20 years ago has now become mainstream. Suddenly it is OK to be racist, Islamophobic, and nationalist, as long as you are so out of concern for the preservation of the nation state. Sadly, most Europeans see themselves as part of the nation state, and perceive foreigners as threats to that state, both economically and culturally.

14. A clear example of this is the new Italian nationalist populist government, which in June this year followed in the footsteps of the “Defend Europe” identitarians by refusing the private charity ship M/S Aquarius with 629 refugees rescued from the sea permission to dock in Italy. The result was an instant increase in support for the extreme nationalists in the governing political party called Liga. This has been followed by the rejection of several other refugee ships and talk from Liga’s leader, Interior Minister Salvini, about “defending Europe”. Much like Mussolini, Salvini also wants to “cleanse” Italy of Romas without Italian citizenship and create a special register for the Italian Romas. Next, they’ll probably be made to wear the Roma equivalent of a yellow star.

15. Unfortunately, nationalism doesn’t stop with xenophobia. Like Trump, the new Italian government is also protectionist, and consequently want to repeal the free trade agreement that is currently in force between the EU and Canada. In Poland, state-owned companies are buying up banks just to ensure that they are Polish-owned. The Polish government also wants to re-nationalise things as diverse as shipbuilding, the provision of medicine, and the publication of newspapers. Although the Polish government is generally considered right-wing, it favours economic interventionism and expansion, not reduction, of the socialist welfare state. This is what they call “economic patriotism” and “pride in Polish companies”.

16. So, as Maria Vargas Llosa says, ”the great danger in our age is nationalism, it’s no longer fascism, nor communism.”

EUROPEAN NATIONALISM TODAY

1.    These days, the most successful nationalist parties – in fact, the most successful parties in general - are not the traditional fascist or ultra-conservative parties. Instead, a new wave of nationalist populism has been sweeping across Europe in recent years. This populism is difficult to pin down in the traditional two-dimensional left/right political spectrum as it borrows views from both the left and the right. But unlike libertarianism, which combines the very best traits from the left and the right, the nationalist populism combines the very worst.

2.    Populist nationalists are, like the socialists, generally in favour of large welfare states, and against free trade, austerity, balanced budgets, and globalisation. Like conservatives, they are in favour of more surveillance, more police, and harder borders, and are against immigration, immigrants, Muslims, and the free movement of labour (i.e., people). These are much the same views as those held by the nationalists in the 1920s and 30s, except that the new nationalists tend to target Muslims instead of Jews.

3.    As an aside, I think it is interesting to note to what extent that the aims and goals of the jihadists and radical Muslims – which, don’t forget, are a tiny minority of the total number of Muslims in the world – coincide with the aims and goals of the European nationalists. The fact is that they both want to incite as much hatred as possible between Muslims and non-Muslims. They both know that this is the only way they can gain more followers and more support. Every time the European media overflows with sympathy for victims of terrorism committed by extremists, both these groups secretly rejoice. The nationalists because people will flock to their cause, and the jihadists because innocent Muslims in Europe will henceforth be subjected to even more hatred by the native Europeans. These hitherto innocent Muslims will hate those native Europeans right back and therefore become ideal subjects for radicalisation by the jihadists. And so the vicious circle takes another turn.

4.    Going back to the differences between nationalists and libertarians, the only point on which they often – but not always - agree is the need for tax cuts. Thus, pretty much the only good thing that people like Victor Orban and Donald Trump have done – both of them typical populist nationalists – is to cut income taxes. However, left-leaning nationalists like the Scottish and Catalan nationalists are in favour of raising taxes, and even right-leaning nationalists are often in favour of raising tariffs, which are, of course, also taxes.

5.    The Italian national elections in 2018 show quite clearly the breakdown of the traditional left-right political axis. Right-wing parties proposed higher, state-funded universal income than the left-wing parties and were happy to propose expanding the budget deficit by increasing public spending while at the same time lowering taxes.

6.    It seems counter-intuitive that parties with simplistic policies such as these should become more popular now that people are generally better educated than ever before. What has not changed, however, is that many people devote little time and effort to studying politics in-depth or to considering the implications of the policies that they vote for. Most people have busy lives and they know intuitively that their chances of influencing their lives by voting is infinitely small. According to Jim Messina, a former Barack Obama strategist, the average voter thinks about politics for four minutes a week. In such a short space of time, simple tunes do best. Therefore, the voters tend to go with the slogans that at first glance seem to accurately highlight problems or provide solutions to whatever dominates the news. The modern politicians know this and simply tell voters what they want to hear, whatever the consequences.

7.    Another one who knows this is Steve Bannon, the alt-right media executive who is also a former Chief Strategist of the Trump administration and probably the most undesirable American export ever. Since he left the White House, he has been spending time in Europe actively looking to establish a pan-European nationalist/populist organisation called The Movement in order to ensure that nationalism and racism – even more so than now – becomes the mainstream, socially acceptable norm. As he said in a speech to the French National Front back in March: “Let them call you racists. Let them call you xenophobes. Let them call you nativists.  Wear it as a badge of honour!”

8.    But how bad is the situation really right now? It’s pretty bad. The de-humanisation of immigrants and Muslims goes hand in hand with new trade tariffs against the US, new immigration barriers against Africa and the Middle East, and the re-introduction of national service in Sweden, France, and Lithuania.

9.    This map shows where nationalism has, in my opinion, reached extremely alarming proportions. I have based the map on the electoral support for those political parties that have, in my subjective view, recently expressed populist nationalist or extreme nationalist views.

10. I have coloured the map in traffic light colours to indicate the degree of nationalist fervour across the continent, with green showing the least afflicted countries. If we look at specific countries, you will see that some of the very worst are currently Hungary, Austria, and Italy. In Hungary, just the right-wing nationalists alone account for 68% of the electorate. This was achieved on a campaign of scare-mongering about immigrants, of which, as I mentioned before, there are precious few in Hungary. 

11. In Austria, the nationalist Chancellor Sebastian Kurz has recently proposed an “axis” of Germany, Italy, and Austria to curb illegal migration. And yes, he did use the term “axis”. Disregarding Japan, these countries were exactly those that formed the original Axis Powers in September 1940. Hungary joined the Axis Powers in November 1940. All this may just be a coincidence, but I do find the historical similarities to the proposed axis of 2018 rather scary.

12. Anyway, when looking at a regional level, nationalism has also reached high levels in some places, with the Basque Country, Catalonia, Corsica, and Northern Ireland all at well over 50% of the vote, and Bavaria and Scotland very close to 50%.

13. Obviously, all these figures do not provide the full picture since nationalist, anti-immigrant sentiments have also infected moderate right-wing parties and have even reached deep into left-wing parties that were traditionally more tolerant towards immigrants.

EUROPEAN NATIONALISM 80 YEARS AGO

1.    The most notorious example of nationalism is, of course, National Socialism, also known as Nazism. Although I presume that no-one in this room need convincing that Nazism is bad, I think it is instructive to compare the policies of National Socialism with the welfare state patriotism that is on the rise in Europe these years.

2.    According to National Socialism, the nation state is the most important entity in life, and although businesses and individuals should be allowed a certain amount of freedom, these should always be subordinated to the needs of the state.

3.    The German National Socialism of the 1930s promoted a welfare state that included a national labour service, state-provided health care, and guaranteed pensions, to name but a few of their collectivist policies.

4.    Hitler distrusted capitalism for being unreliable due to its individualism, and he preferred a state-directed economy subordinated to the interests of the nation state.

5.    Hitler declared that "every activity and every need of every individual will be regulated by the collectivity represented by the party" and that "there are no longer any free realms in which the individual belongs to himself".

6.    Reichskommissar Himmler justified the establishment of a repressive police state - in which the security forces could exercise power arbitrarily - by claiming that national security and order should take precedence over the needs of the individual.

7.    Nazi Germany successfully dehumanised and demonised the Jews, the gays, the romas, and just about every other small minority you can think of. The new nationalists in Europe and the US are successfully dehumanising and demonising migrants and Muslims. Different targets, same principle.

8.    Demonising groups of people that are unable to defend themselves gives the native voters a sense of shared purpose and thereby a shared identity. It’s us - the “civilised” European welfare states - against them - the “uncivilised” hordes of foreigners from Africa and the Middle East. The migrants – most of whom have no right to vote – have no recourse and are unable to properly defend themselves in the public sphere. That makes them ideal scapegoats for the nationalist populists in the same way that the so-called subhuman Jews were the scapegoats of the National Socialists.

9.    Interestingly, even most of the German soldiers in the Jew-murdering Einsatzgruppen on the Eastern Front during WW2 were, in fact, initially decent people. Many had families and children of their own, and several of the officers held postgraduate degrees. But like the German civilians, they were brainwashed into identifying themselves with the German state to such an extent that they sincerely thought what they were doing was for the good of the nation – and therefore, by extension, for the good of themselves.

10. As I said earlier, states aim to make their citizens unable to distinguish between individual and state, between individual and country, and between individual and society. So disobeying the nation state of which they considered themselves an integral part did not seem like an option to most Germans. It was the German nation against the Untermenschen – the “sub-humans” - and in the minds of the Nazis, killing these “sub-humans” (i.e., Jews, Slavs, Romas, etc) was unpleasant but necessary in order to defend the nation and, thereby, themselves and their families. Unfortunately, I see very unpleasant echoes of this mind-set in the Europe of 2018, where talk of building Fortress Europe and “defending” Europe against migrants is generally accepted. The “Spirit of the Tribe” is alive and well.

INDIVIDUAL OR STATE

1.    In the beginning of this speech, I mentioned the definition of nationalism in Encyclopedia Britannica, which is “An ideology based on the premise that the individual's loyalty and devotion to the nation-state surpass other individual or group interests”.

2.    Just from this one definition, it should be clear that nationalism is the antithesis of liberty. You cannot claim to support the freedom of the individual and at the same time defend the existence of a powerful nation state. The concept of individual liberty is diametrically opposed to the concept of nationalism.

3.    In the end, it is all about control. Should you control your own life or should the state? The slogan that probably won the UK Brexit referendum for the Leave-side back in 2016 was the term ‘Taking back control’. The Brexiteers spoke about ‘Taking back control of our borders’, ‘Taking back control of our laws’, ‘Taking back control from Bruxelles’, etc, etc, ad nauseam. Whichever spin-doctor came up with the term ‘Taking back control’ probably deserved his bonus as it was extremely effective. However, I actually agree. I agree that we should take back control – but by that I mean that we should take back control from the state! The state, on the other hand, should not take back control of anything whatsoever.

4.    Nationalism discriminates individuals on the basis of their nationality, not on the basis of the qualities of each individual. Given that people have very little influence over which nationality they have, this amounts to extreme discrimination. It will happen often that talented people are discriminated against, and untalented people are rewarded – solely on the basis of their nationality.

5.    As I grow older, I have started to notice how utterly unique each and every human being is, and how difficult it is – or should be – to pigeon-hole any one individual. Humans are incredibly complex, and if some seem similar, it is only because they put on a façade that will enable them to interact with their peers more easily. Go out into the street, choose any random person, and ask for their life story. Then do the same again, and I can almost guarantee you that one life story will be very different from the next. In my experience, each life story – especially those that cover many years – would qualify for its own Hollywood movie. The deeper you dig, the more fascinating a person becomes.

6.    It is said that when a person dies in old age, the brain contains data that corresponds in size to the contents of a medium-sized public library. This combination of information, feelings, memories, music, opinions, images, and much more is absolutely unique to each and every individual. Therefore, it is an immense injustice to collectively judge any individual on the basis of their nationality, religion, or skin colour. And that is exactly what nationalism does. It judges people collectively, not individually. That is why the term right-wing collectivism is so very appropriate to describe nationalism.

CONCLUSION

1.    In conclusion, I would say that people should satisfy their natural desire for belonging to a group by supporting groups that are less lethal and less destructive than nation states. These could be groups with shared interests in languages, traditions, sports, or any other subject. It is not a necessity of life that you identify yourself with a nation state, although for the past couple of centuries we have pretty much all been brought up to do so.

2.    I am a citizen of two states – Denmark and the U.K. So where does my loyalty lie, you may ask? Well, I’ll tell you – it lies with myself. The reason that I have two passports is simply that it gives me more freedom than just having one.

3.    When I am asked which country I am from – which happens frequently when one travels – I am sometimes tempted to reply to the person asking, that that is none of his business. Although I have never actually said that, I don’t really want people to judge me on the basis of which passport I happen to carry. People tend to keep in their minds little virtual boxes with the names of countries on them and a certain set of preconceptions, generalisations, and prejudices about people from that country. Now, I do not want to be put in a box like that as part of the very first interaction that I have with a given person. Rather than be judged on my nationality, I want to be judged on my personal characteristics.

4.    There are many different kinds of nationalism, but they all have one thing in common: The individual is always subject to the will of the state.  That is why nationalism – even the more innocuous-sounding patriotism – is not, and can never be, a philosophy of liberty. The single individual, not the collective and therefore not the state, is - and must always be - the supreme entity!