(Oh, and Twain counters your last objection before he lays into Scott. He acknowledges the wrongs done in the name of Bonapartism and Jacobism, but points out that these can hardly be rectified by rejecting the good things they produced.)
The same can be said for Romanticism. What good came from Bonapartism? I could see a defense of the American Revolution, but I've never been able to find much positive about the French, which I generally consider a botched affair that led to a dictator taking power and conquering half of Europe.
That's rather an odd defence of an ideology: It causes a massive, intractable problem, but, in doing so, it also offers a means to exacerbate the problem.
That was my hamfisted way to acknowledge the problems with the ideology as well as the benefits. I'll agree that nationalism is not the greatest (or least blood-stained) ideas ever created by humanity, but I don't think it's completely worthless, either.
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momijizukamori
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Date: 2005-04-08 04:30 pm (UTC)The same can be said for Romanticism. What good came from Bonapartism? I could see a defense of the American Revolution, but I've never been able to find much positive about the French, which I generally consider a botched affair that led to a dictator taking power and conquering half of Europe.
That's rather an odd defence of an ideology: It causes a massive, intractable problem, but, in doing so, it also offers a means to exacerbate the problem.
That was my hamfisted way to acknowledge the problems with the ideology as well as the benefits. I'll agree that nationalism is not the greatest (or least blood-stained) ideas ever created by humanity, but I don't think it's completely worthless, either.