Aug. 28, 2025 - Epoch Times
03:11
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Nationalism and imperialism are actually opposite things. | |
| Nationalism is a theory of political order. | |
| It's a theory that says that the world is governed best when there are many independent nations, when different peoples can make their own decisions, they'll have their own constitutional traditions and religious traditions, their own language and their own legal systems, and they'll do things their way and they'll try to improve their lives according to their lights. | |
| That's nationalism. | |
| And this is very much, I think, the worldview of the Trump administration, that there can be many different countries, and America can wish them all well so long as they're not a threat to the United States, and they can be allowed to proceed the way that they want to proceed in dealing with their own politics on the basis of their own traditions. | |
| By the way, that was George Washington's policy. | |
| That was the founding foreign policy of the United States. | |
| And that view is the opposite of imperialism, which is a view that says, no, peace and prosperity will come to the world when there's global governance, when there's a single elite with a single set of principles and values, and those are imposed by soft power, if necessary, by war on as much of the globe as possible. | |
| Why do people confuse them? | |
| It's actually pretty simple. | |
| Adolf Hitler wrote a book called Mein Kampf. | |
| Hitler's worldview is what you could call biological imperialism. | |
| He's concerned with races as the fundamental building block of politics, the different races competing with one another. | |
| And the goal is for the highest race, the master race, to become Lord of the Earth, this is a quote from Mein Kampf, Lord of the Earth and Mistress of the Globe. | |
| That's his theory. | |
| Does that theory leave any room for nationalism, for a world of independent nations? | |
| No, that Hitler thought that it would be convenient to take the word nationalism, which had meant a world of independent nations, and to, I guess today people say, to appropriate it. | |
| So he appropriated the word nationalism for himself. | |
| Instead of saying, I'm a biological imperialism, but the word is nationalism. | |
| Liberal and Marxist writers pounced on this opportunity to say, look, nationalism is, you know, it's the ultimate evil. | |
| It's the devil itself, because Hitler used that word. |
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