Nationalism is a Disease
In a 1929 interview for The Saturday Evening Post, George Sylvester Viereck asked Albert Einstein if he thought of himself as a German or as a Jew. Einstein began his reply by pointing out the obvious, that it’s possible to be both, and then he said that “Nationalism is an infantile disease.” He called nationalism “the measles” of humankind.
If this seems like a flippant remark to you, that’s because in a sense it is. As an internationalist living in the shadow of the rise of a violent and genocidal, anti-Jewish, ultra-nationalist fascism, Einstein undoubtedly had little respect for nationalism. And the implication that nationalism is childish was certainly a clever and accurate pun. However, the statement that nationalism is the measles of humankind was a also an intentionally serious accusation.
It may not seem like such a horrible charge here in the U.S. in the year 2019. Despite recent outbreaks, the disease has been relatively rare here for decades and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has considered it “eliminated” in the U.S. since the year 2000. But measles is a highly contagious, infectious, and deadly disease.
To get a sense of its deadliness, 7–8 million children per year are estimated to have died from measles prior to 1963 when the vaccine was introduced. As late as 1985 measles was still killing over a million people per year globally. Annual global death tolls in the hundreds of thousands are still common.
Just like a global measles epidemic, nationalism is deadly. Today this fact couldn’t be more clear with the hindsight of World War II, the Holocaust, and other genocides inspired in no small part by nationalism. Yet despite this hindsight the disease of nationalism and patriotism still persists in epidemic proportions.
Nationalism germinates in the white supremacy and xenophobia that is baked into the institutions and structures of the U.S. and of western capitalism. It lurks and feeds around the edges of potentially genocidal geopolitical powder kegs that are caused not only by the capitalist competition for limited fossil fuel and other resources, but also by the devastation and forced migrations of climate change that are the inheritance of that often violent competition.
The death toll that the world has suffered at the hands of nationalism would be difficult to calculate, trying to factor to what extent nationalism was a driving factor in any given violent conflict whether international or civil strife within particular nations. But given the various world wars and other imperialist wars that we know were driven by western nationalist and supremacist ideology, the death toll is in the hundreds of millions.
None of these wars have been just wars. They are wars fought for fossil fuel resource out of reactionary competitiveness. They are wars fought to control labor markets and the workers who make up those labor markets. They are wars to control access to customers for corporate products. They are wars to win power and prevent others from attaining power. If nationalism and patriotism are about supremacy, then so are those wars that driven by nationalist ideology.
The more regional European nationalist revolutions and conflicts of the 1800s (themselves fueled in part by European imperialism in Africa and Asia) gave way to genocides in Africa and the imperialist, nationalist world wars of the 1900s. The nationalism that breeds and feeds these capitalist wars is indeed an infectious diseases that spreads across the Earth like a deadly measles epidemic.
Just like our bodies fight to reject infectious diseases, we must fight for the collective rejection of nationalism.
Just like we fight infectious diseases with antibiotics or vaccines, so too we must inoculate our communities against the disease of nationalism.
We must reject nationalism by building grassroots international solidarity movements for justice such as the #BDS movement to end Israeli apartheid against the Palestinian people, and such as movements for the liberation of indigenous peoples and other communities oppressed by systems of nationalist imperialism and white supremacy.
Read “Patriotism is Dangerous: Part 1 of 3 on the moral imperative of rejecting nationalism”
Justin Norton-Kertson is a labor-community organizer and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.
