Ep 68: Four Patriotisms For Europe

In this episode we delve into the lack of a sense of self that exists in Europe. While the European Union for decades has tried and failed (for, to us, obvious reasons) to provide an erzats-identity to the eroding national ones in (mostly) western Europe we look at the alternatives. While European elites have abandoned the project of building and caring for national identity and are trying to replace it with the more malleable “values” we look back to try and move forward.

In this we provide four rather different takes on patriotism for the Europe of yore. One mystic and christian - while also strikingly french is provided by Simone Weil's The Need for Roots. This is contrasted by the materialistic yet quintessential spiritual Englishness of George Orwell’s The Lion and the Unicorn. The ultimate defence of the very hobbitness of all that is England. Then we move to the liberal-republican Swedish contrarian Vilhelm Moberg and his plea for remembering the generations of toil by the unknown and unheard commoner whose legacy is the history of a nation in Svensk Stävan. Last we move to that prussian anarch, Ernst Jünger and his On the Marble Cliffs where honour and defiance to tyrannical authority is the last knightly virtue as well as a patriotism all of its own.

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