Leo Tolstoy, more than Gandhi, Nehru or even Tagore, is the one person whom the nationalists should fear the most. He can be called the Father of anti-nationalism.
This essay by Tolstoy is one that I keep revisiting.
I have shared the first quote before. I am sharing a few more excerpts, though the whole essay is a must read and sounds more relevant than ever.
It definitely challenges the whole
world order and sounds too idealistic and impractical. It is difficult
for us to imagine an alternative in the foreseeable future. But setting
aside our set notions and conditioning, this essay deserves a deep
reading from everyone. It challenges and provokes. As he says, humanity
is ‘irresistibly moving from lower to higher ideas’. Whether it is true
or not, it is a good belief to hold. And it is a warning bell that
needs sounding in this self-destructive ultra-nationalist phase across
the world.
======
“I have already several times expressed
the thought that the feeling of patriotism is in our day an unnatural,
irrational, and harmful feeling, and is the cause of a great part of the
ills from which mankind is suffering; and that, consequently, this
feeling should not be cultivated, as is now being done, but should, on
the contrary, be suppressed and eradicated by all means available to
rational men. Yet, strange to say, though it is undeniable that the
universal armaments and the destructive wars which are ruining the
peoples result from that one feeling, all my arguments showing the
backwardness, anachronism, and harmfulness of patriotism have been met,
and are still met, either by silence, or by intentional misconception,
or by a strange unvarying reply to the effect that only bad patriotism
(Jingoism, or Chauvinism) is bad, but that real, good patriotism is a
very elevated moral feeling, to condemn which is not only irrational but
wicked.
As to what this real, good patriotism consists of
nothing at all is said; or, if anything is said, instead of explanation
we get declamatory, inflated phrases; or, finally, something else is
substituted for patriotism, something which has nothing in common with
the patriotism we all know, and from the results of which we all suffer
so severely.”
—
“the maintenance and defence of any
nationality—Russian, German, French, or Anglo-Saxon, provoking the
corresponding maintenance and defence not only of Hungarian, Polish, and
Irish nationalities, but also of Basque, Provençal, Mordvinian,
Tchouvásh, and many other nationalities—serves not to harmonise and
unite men, but to estrange and divide them more and more from one
another.”
—
“One would expect the harmfulness and
irrationality of patriotism to be evident to people. But the surprising
fact is that cultured and learned men not only do not notice it for
themselves, but they contest every exposure of the harm and stupidity of
patriotism with the greatest obstinacy and ardour, though without any
rational grounds; and they continue to belaud it as beneficent and
elevating.”
—
The small oppressed nationalities which
have fallen under the power of the great States,—the Poles, Irish,
Bohemians, Fins, or Armenians,—reacting against the patriotism of their
conquerors, which is the cause of their oppression, catch from their
oppressors the infection of this feeling of patriotism,—which has ceased
to be necessary, and is now obsolete, unmeaning, and harmful,—and catch
it to such a degree that all their activity is concentrated upon it,
and they, themselves suffering from the patriotism of the stronger
nations, are ready to perpetrate on other peoples, for the sake of this
same patriotism, the very same deeds that their oppressors have
perpetrated and are perpetrating on them.
—
All the
peoples of the so-called Christian world have been reduced by patriotism
to such a state of brutality, that not only those who are obliged to
kill or be killed desire slaughter and rejoice in murder, but all the
people of Europe and America, living peaceably in their homes exposed to
no danger, are, at each war—thanks to easy means of communication, and
to the press—in the position of the spectators in a Roman circus, and,
like them, delight in the slaughter, and raise the bloodthirsty cry,
“Pollice verso.”[1]
Not adults only, but also children, pure,
wise children, rejoice, according to their nationality, when they hear
that the number killed and lacerated by lyddite or other shells is not
seven hundred but one thousand Englishmen or Boers.
And parents (I know of such cases) encourage their children in such brutality.
But that is not all. Every increase in the army of one nation (and
every nation being in danger seeks to increase its army for patriotic
reasons) obliges its neighbours to increase their army, also from
patriotism, and this evokes a fresh increase by the first nation.
—
A government, therefore, and specially a government entrusted with
military power, is the most dangerous organisation possible.
The
government in the widest sense, including capitalists and press, is
nothing else than an organisation which places the greatest part of the
people in the power of a smaller part who dominate them; that smaller
part is subject to a yet smaller part, and that again to a yet smaller,
and so on, reaching at last a few people, or one single man, who by
means of military force has power over all the rest. So that all this
organisation resembles a cone, of which all the parts are completely in
the power of those people, or of that one person, who are, or is, at the
apex.
—
They are afraid of Anarchists’ bombs, and are
not afraid of this terrible organisation which is always threatening
them with the greatest calamities.
—-
Understand that
the question, who manages to seize Wei-hai-wei, Port Arthur, or
Cuba,—your government or another,— does not affect you, or rather every
such seizure made by your government injures you because it inevitably
brings in its train all sorts of pressure on you by your government, to
force you to take part in the robbery and violence by which alone such
seizures are made, or can be retained when made. Understand that your
life can in no way be bettered by Alsace becoming German or French, and
Ireland or Poland being free or enslaved;
– Tolstoy
Posted by Kannan 
Loud Thoughts 