I've been reading Pope Leo's new encyclical. I was very struck by this line: "Indeed, the promotion of the common good can never be separated from respect for the right of peoples to exist, to preserve their own identity and to contribute their unique qualities to the family of nations."
This is literally all I am asserting when I call myself a nationalist-- this and nothing else.
The question is, how is this to be preserved? It seems to me (and, I think it fair to say, to millions of others) that social and cultural forces are at play today which threaten this very right. But I haven't heard any recommendations from the Vatican on what to do about this.
I suspect (perhaps unfairly) that the Holy Father was not thinking of Western or developed nations when he wrote this. But it certainly applies to them, too.
Pope Francis said similar things in his own writings, arguing for "the globalization of the polyhedron" rather than "the globalization of the sphere". But how is this to be achieved?
only western christian peoples ever thought of such a thing as a 'right to exist'. but since the west has forsaken both its westerness and its christianity, then only other peoples have a right to exist. a mind virus of some sort. how to reverse it? i don't know. but once the west goes for good, so goes the very idea of rights, because nobody ever thought of it before and nobody will do so now. that's my pessimistic take. do we deserve a miracle? probably not. but that never stopped God before!
ReplyDelete.Laeth
Laeth, that's pretty much how I feel, although I don't even like the term "the West", which is already too globalist and abstract for me. I care about nations! Or whatever other term you want to use for the cultural units to which we belong: peoples, tribes, ethnic groups, or whatever else. You only have to read the Old Testament to know they've always existed, for all the talk of nations being a modern phenomenon. Whatever the Israelites were; whatever the Egyptians were; whatever the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites were.
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