Donald Thoresen, Counter-Currents, 18 January 2018
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Rev. ed., New York: Verso, 2006
After the Second World War, a large portion of the academic class went into overdrive dissecting and pathologizing the ideas and forces, both actual and concocted, which served as the foundations for nationalism. In the ensuing decades-long quest to delegitimize nationalism, mediocre thinkers have been pushed into positions of prominence due to little more than their ability to say the correct (i.e. anti-nationalist) things in seemingly intelligent ways. Banal, even childish and stupid ideas, when worded professionally or cloaked in jargon have received praise, and the advocates of such ideas have been propagated as serious and important thinkers.
Perhaps none has managed to remain as continuously lauded or as likely to end up on university syllabi in recent decades as Benedict Anderson. His highly influential book, Imagined Communities, will have been encountered by anyone who has studied history formally in the past twenty years or so. And, for nationalists, it does not take long to figure out why. The clue is in the title itself: national communities are imagined, formed at the intersection of language, technology, and economics with no basis in primordial identity or legitimate group affiliation; nationalism itself then is an ideology without actual substance, a set of myths which arise…