Israeli lawyer to BBC: “One life of ours equals millions of Palestinians”
“God chose us…it’s a divine command”.
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Systemic, nationalist historiography has always tended to ignore—or deliberately omit—events and patterns of human behaviour that fail to reinforce its central narrative: the supposed sacredness of the Nation, the Homeland, the Country, and the State. Worse still, history is often not merely filtered but inverted. Facts are stripped of their real meaning because an honest interpretation would lead to conclusions exactly opposite to those that nationalist ideology seeks to cultivate.
History offers countless examples.
Ancient Spartan mothers are celebrated for handing a shield to their sons before battle with the famous injunction: “Either with it, or on it.” Return victorious carrying your shield—or return dead upon it. What is, from a biological and human perspective, the profoundly unnatural expectation of a mother urging her child toward death has instead been immortalised as the supreme expression of devotion to the fatherland.
More than two thousand years later, the Japanese kamikaze (“divine wind”) pilots of the Second World War—many of them university students—deliberately crashed their aircraft into enemy warships. They embraced death with fervour, believing they were sacrificing themselves for Emperor Hirohito, the Japanese nation, and their homeland. Their families were taught to regard their deaths as a source of pride, while their fiancées pledged eternal loyalty to their fallen “heroes.”
Adolf Hitler likewise fused his own person with the destiny of the German nation, persuading millions that loyalty to him was loyalty to Germany itself. Countless followers of Nazism marched willingly to their deaths convinced they were fulfilling a noble historical mission, their final cry often being: “Heil Hitler!”
Even today, according to this analysis, echoes of the same political pattern can be recognised in different forms. In the United States, the rhetoric surrounding the vision of MAGA presents national renewal through the image of a providential leader. In Russia, Vladimir Putin has spent years promoting an extensive nationalist narrative portraying himself as the defender of Russia’s historic values against what he depicts as a morally decadent West. Within this perspective, the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war is presented as another tragic example of how nationalist propaganda can mobilise entire societies to accept immense human sacrifice.
For centuries this nationalist fervour has merely changed its vocabulary. The crude doctrine of the divine right of rulers gradually gave way to the more respectable language of patriotism, yet its underlying logic has remained largely untouched. Today it appears to be gaining new momentum through the rise of far-right governments across many countries, governments that openly revive notions of a quasi-sacred Nation and State.
Democratic elections are increasingly invoked as a licence for concentrated power, reviving an ancient political principle already expressed by Creon in Sophocles’ Antigone: “Does not the city belong to the ruler?” (οὐ τοῦ κρατοῦντος ἡ πόλις νομίζεται;)
Under this conception of authority, people—now politely called “citizens” rather than subjects—remain, in essence, a disposable mass, expected to sacrifice themselves whenever the interests of the State demand it, whether in times of peace or war. The State becomes a modern Moloch, forever requiring human offerings to sustain itself.
Our generations have experienced—and paid dearly for—the consequences of this ancient yet remarkably persistent belief in the sacred trinity of Nation, State, and Homeland. We have also inherited the repeated assertion that no human society can exist outside this traditional political framework.
We profoundly disagree.
History itself teaches us that if future generations continue to organise humanity around the Nation-State—and if the unprecedented technological powers now emerging remain monopolised by states—the result will not be greater freedom or security. It will be the gradual emergence of the dystopian societies imagined by George Orwell.
The future of humanity therefore requires more than political reform. It requires the demystification—and ultimately the dismantling—of the myths surrounding the Nation and the State themselves.