To see parallels on today’s world political stage, the best thing would be to look at the election of Trump for president and the so-called Brexit. These are events that often are described as reactions to the negative sides of globalization and immigration, in which one can detect a will from the people to strengthen their national identity and their country’s sovereignty. In other words, it is nationalism that we are witnessing.

Just like communism back then, nationalism today is acknowledged to be a power and one that is growing only stronger and stronger. This, one can be sure of, is despite the setbacks with the elections in Austria, the Netherlands and France. According to many experts, these European elections, in fact, do not do much to mask the inevitable: nationalism is on the rise and it still has a very good chance of taking over in these and other countries.

As a natural consequence of this – if we are now to connect back to the beginning, namely what a resistance can lead to – a trend has now appeared, resembling what Marx in the communists’ case described as an “exorcism” by a “holy alliance.” It was a “holy alliance” that felt threatened by communism then which led to efforts to clamp down, and it is a liberal establishment that is feeling threatened by nationalism now which is leading to this trend. This is something that bodes good for the nationalists, since we can see that there is something of an instinct involved when people’s ideology is rooted in their identity, which in turn can lead to one or two things as we will see at the end of this article. But first we will highlight this trend with several examples. It is a trend that can best be called “a delegitimization campaign against nationalists.”

One example of this delegitimization campaign is the portrayal of nationalism’s successes in recent times, when the liberal media talks about “quick fixes.” So called “quick fixes” are what the nationalists have as one of their great appeals, while the so-called normal politicians, whose followers are depicted as those who unlike nationalists “can read and write,” don’t seem to like these “quick fixes” and actively avoid them.

The problem is that according to the liberals these “quick fixes” are nothing but empty words from the nationalistic leaders, who thereby are portrayed as frauds, and nationalistic voters end up looking like easily fooled, stupid and impulsive. The nationalists are because of this delegitimized. But the truth is that there is something very dishonest about this portrayal, which is one of the proofs for that there exists a delegitimization campaign. This, of course, is thanks to the obvious reluctance of the liberal media and politicians to acknowledge the positive aspects of these proposed, as well as existing, “quick fixes.”

Without doubt, the liberal portrayal is prevailing in the public conscience. But the truth is that there is no objectivity among the liberals that is worthy of the name. Thanks to their portrayal, the people are not allowed to learn the truth. In the case of “quick fixes” the truth is that they work. To take one good example, there is how Hungary now has the lowest level of unemployment in its entire history; this after having thrown out the International Monetary Fund, one of globalism’s main enforcement mechanisms, something which can’t be called anything other than a “quick fix.”

This example would seem to prove that “quick fixes” work and that the problems that are presented by the media as complicated and nuanced really aren’t complicated and nuanced. You don’t need a political expert to chew it over for you: simple solutions like banning migrants and banning globalist organizations, some of the nationalists’ goals, can achieve results. The delegitimization is only depending on a distorted picture that is presented by the media.

It is a delegitimization campaign that we see that is primarily about making nationalists look ignorant, which the media seems to do every day in their reporting. George Orwell wrote this quip about nationalism which many today would take out of its context and endorse without even thinking twice: “Every nationalist is capable of the most flagrant dishonesty, but he is also unshakably certain of being in the right.”

The truth is that we today know more about these sort of things thanks to social science experiments. Thanks to these, we now have a term called “confirmation bias.” It has been proven by experts that people tend to focus on certain facts that confirm their view of the world. In the same experiments, it has been shown that people think less of facts that do not fit their preconceived narrative. More importantly, there is nothing that says that this only applies to nationalists. But this is what the liberal media and politicians would like to have you believe.

In the case of liberals who take Orwell’s words out of their context and endorse them, the safest thing would be to call them arrogant. It is what most of the liberals have become these days when they claim that all nationalists are ignorant, when in fact ignorant people, thanks to what is called “confirmation bias,” can be found on all sides.

One could go further in proving this delegitimization by borrowing a word from the Swedish literary scholar and debater Göran Hägg. One’s mother-view, as he called it, is not something people so easily deviate from, after which he took the image in the West of the Serbs as a good example. Good arguments or critiques, according to him, will not affect people because of their mother-view.

As an example, consider the authority that science now has in our society. The word of scientists is viewed as authoritative, so everything that they say about global warming is taken as gospel by many people because it subscribes to their mother-view of the world in which science is the definitive authority.

A mother-view is more or less a part of our identity. This is one of the explanations for why many people refuse to take criticism, even if they are making mistakes or could do better, and this could explain why otherwise intelligent people end up making fools of themselves.

This proclivity to ignorance is precisely what we have seen liberal journalists and politicians fall victim to in Sweden. When attention was turned to migrant crime in their country thanks to Trump and Fox News, we saw this liberal ignorance writ large. They simply could not admit that the nationalists that they had been depicting as idiots were right all along. To do so would admit that they too were ideologically compromised and not objective. This is why it can be claimed that liberals carry on mother-views, in addition to to “confirmation bias,” just like nationalists and this proves further that there exists a delegitimization campaign.

A part of this delegitimization campaign is also the liberal debate on so-called “fake news,” in which nationalistic internet sites and newspapers are pointed out as spreaders of lies and propaganda. But all that is needed to see what it is really about is to take a look at a newspaper or a TV-guide: people that claim to be able to talk to the dead and predict the future are incredibly enough allowed to trick millions of people, even though an American foundation for years has offered a reward of one million dollars to anyone who proves that he or she is not a fraud. We could of course mention Wikipedia as well, where everyone can write anything they want. Then the liberal debate on so-called “fake news” speaks for itself: it is a desperate attack on nationalism and is part of a delegitimization campaign.

We also have the attack on Russia of course to see this delegitimization. Few can claim that Russia has not become something akin to a punching bag, with many liberal journalists relishing the opportunity to bring up the Russian bogeyman. The biggest reason for this attack is of course the country’s nationalistic politics and because it is the country in Europe that has gone the furthest in the dismantling of liberal democracy, which happened because the Russians simply had to break away from Western power structures to maintain their sovereignty. Thanks to this attack, which really is part of a demonization campaign, the Russians end up looking like they are the worthy heirs of Hitler’s nationalistic legacy.

Today it is primarily about portraying them as guilty of “crimes against international law” because of Ukraine. However, it is only required that one looks at Russia’s annexation of Crimea and then at the United States’ invasion of Iraq. The hypocrisy becomes apparent. How little criticism there is now of the ongoing chaos in Iraq that was done in the name of liberal principles as opposed to the annexation of Crimea that was done on the basis of nationalist principles!

The reason for this is that Russia is being used as a political football, and it should be viewed in light of a delegitimization campaign against nationalists. This would be the only way to explain why Sweden’s relationship with Russia is being compared to that of Poland’s, that is to say a country that Russia has been at war with for almost as long as the two countries have existed.

So the attack on Russia that we now see can be explained. Russia has become an avatar of nationalism according to the liberal press, so of course they attack Russia with anything they can come up with. By digging up more facts on this issue, for instance from the documentary “The Masks of Revolution” by Paul Moreira, one will see only more proof of this attack on Russia, and at the same time of the delegitimization campaign against nationalists.

But it is a delegitimization campaign that has started to backfire. We see what these constant attacks on people’s identity leads to. Nowadays, when a nationalistic ideology is portrayed as something that only the worst kinds of people partake in, the nationalists’ identification is instinctively only intensified. It is also in this delegitimization campaign that we can find the source to a calling that is now going out to nationalists – just like the case was with the communists in the 19th century, a movement that slowly grew and would come to make up one of the world’s super powers. It is a calling that says “Unite!” – and we are now starting to see the birth of a mass movement whose time has come.

Alexekin Rockowia
Editor-in-chief of For-Serbia The Website