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Old September 24th, 2017 #1
littlefieldjohn
Senior Member
 
Join Date: May 2009
Posts: 8,105
Default Russia Has Been Fighting For European Nation-Building Since the 13th Century

Quote:
How Russia the Motherland of Mammoths, became the Fatherland of Patriotism.


A Brief History of Russian National Sentiment
by Egor Kholmogorov

Translated by Fluctuarius Argenteus and Anatoly Karlin

Original: https://um.plus/2016/04/09/rossiya-r...v-i-patriotov/
https://um.plus/2016/04/09/rossiya-r...v-i-patriotov/



The conventional view of nationalism has long held to be a product of mass literacy and the modern state, underpinned by schoolbooks and Tombs of the Unknown Soldier..


.Recent years have seen challenges to this historiographic consensus at both a general level (e.g. Azar Gat’s Nations), and with respect to specific peoples (Robert Tomb’s recent The English and Their History comes to mind).


Our latest translation of Russian conservative intellectual Egor Kholmogorov is more than just a Russian contribution to this debate.

It makes the much more radical argument that not only was Russia not a laggard in the process of nation-building, as European historiography has long claimed, but was in fact always at the very forefront of this process, from Novgorod’s implicit devotion to the Russian commonweal in the 13th century to Russia’s defense of a “Europe of Fatherlands”
……………
against the homogenizing globalist tide of national annihilation today.


RI Editor's note: Egor Kholmogorov is one of the most prominent and popular Russian conservative publicists. He has a weekly TV show on the conservative Russian Christian channel, Tsargrad TV. In August, Anatoly Karlin, part of the team who did this massive translation (Thank you Anatoly!), wrote an article in Unz Review introducing Kholmogorov to English speakers:

In my opinion, Kholmogorov is simply the best modern Russian right-wing intellectual, period.

He is a realist on Soviet achievements, crimes, and lost opportunities, foregoing both the Soviet nostalgia of Prokhanov, the kneejerk Sovietophobia of Prosvirnin, and the unhinged conspiracy theories of Galkovsky.

He is a normal, traditional Orthodox Christian, in contrast to the “atheism plus” of Prosvirnin, the mystical obscurantism of Duginism, and the esoteric experiments of Krylov. He has time neither for the college libertarianism of Sputnik i Pogrom hipster nationalism, nor the angry “confiscate and divide” rhetoric of the National Bolsheviks.

Instead of wasting his time on ideological rhetoric, he reads Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century and writes reviews about it on his website. And about 224 other books.
We are delighted to present this excelent, long (4500 words), and important article.

Sometimes I hear that saying “patriotism as a national idea” is akin to saying that water is wet. However, this argument comes from people with a very superficial understanding of how difficult it is to be patriot given that, unlike a comfortable cosmopolitanism, patriotism is the path of struggle.

Also, they fail to realize how important the contribution of Russia and Russian culture is to shaping the very phenomenon of a patriotic consciousness in the modern world. The Russians developed patriotism as a national idea far earlier than most European nations. And it is Russia that keeps its faith in a “Europe of Fatherlands” or a “World of Fatherlands” in today’s age of identity erasure.

“Russia is the Motherland of elephants.” This zinger, coined as a mockery of Russian patriotism, is, however, entirely true, with a slight correction: Russia is the Motherland of mammoths. It is thanks to the hunt of those majestic beasts that the first humans on the Russian Plain, then half-concealed by the Great Glacier, created a culture highly developed for its time. Nowadays, archaeologists even speak of a “mammoth hunter civilization.”

Indeed, even nowadays the remains of long-term housing built out of mammoth ivory, exhibited at the museum of Kostenki village, Voronezh Oblast, are no less amazing than some stone ruins from Oriental or European antiquity. Overall, it seems that the mammoth joke is on the jokers.

With the same minor correction, one can claim that Russia is the Motherland of patriotism. Of course, patriotism is a word of Latin roots, also hearkening back to Greek. Of course, the cult of pride for one’s country, its history and its heroes, was developed in Greece and Rome, and new European nations learned this art from the ancients (for example, Old Rus’ via Byzantium).


But there are different kinds of patriotism. “The thrust of the Greek notion of freedom was directed at their closest neighbors: being free meant not being dependent on them”, as noted by Robert Wipper (1859 – 1954), one of our foremost Classical scholars.

Only two or three times out of the entirety of Hellenic history the Greeks showed a capacity for working together and for a Pan-Hellenic patriotism, but even 300 Spartans, defending a bottleneck that led to the heart of Greece, believed they were fighting for “Laconic law.” The Greeks saw Hellas not as a common home country but as a common home country but as a common space for competing hometowns, peaceful if possible (at the Olympic Games).



Roman patriotism was more similar to ours. It was a not solely urban but also imperial patriotism, that of a city turned superpower. The history of a city that defended its freedom from foreign invaders and domestic tyrants, vanquished all of its neighbors, and transformed into a worldwide Empire formed the archetype of a patriotic myth for future generations.

…….Russian patriotism existed long before the rise of Moscow, and had at its forefront not the City, but the Land. Russian patriotic consciousness is the oldest national consciousness among European peoples.

Those three elements – Land, People, Empire – are, in their unity, the true formula of Russian patriotism, inherited by Russia from the times when Western European peoples had no patriotic consciousness to speak of.



http://russia-insider.com/en/politic...entury/ri20928
 
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