Eugine_Nier comments on George Orwell's Prelude on Politics Is The Mind Killer - Less Wrong
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Then why didn't anyone come up with these memes in previous empires? Or for that matter in Europe before the mid 20th century?
From what little I know, I blame, at the latest, Widrow Wilson and the notion of self-determination, i.e. the USA making a power-grab after WWI was over and declaring that Imperialism is, in fact, evil. Followed by WWII and the total, ideological war against an enemy whose entire ideology revolved around the most extreme nationalism possible, leading to everyone embracing diverse forms of Reversing that Stupidity, one of them being Anti-Patriotism. But we can go further back, like, say, Kant's insane pacifism (what agenda might he have been possibly pushing?), or even much further back, to the Bible. Egypt deserved to be destroyed by the Plague, and its army wiped by the sea, because they refused to set the oppressed Hebrews free, and it was right for God to do so. I do find it amusing that so few Jewish and Christian hegemonies would see themselves in the role of Egypt, nor wonder whether that's a good place to stand, until so late in the XXth century. You'd think the comparison would be obvious.