Reading a RFERL newspiece about the cult of Stepan Bandera in Ukraine reminded me of a fact I have noticed since long : nationalist movements are in general started by persons of foreign origin ; they use the national culture, reconstruct it, for their personal political interest.

Sismondi whom I studied for my PhD paper at the end of my book From an Einstein Syndrome to the People is a crucial case : he is a Protestant Swiss (of Unitarian tendency, mostly scapegoating against the virgin Mary) and organizes (I say organizes, because he writes a long, very long historical “bible” but almost never says what are his sources) a romantic history of Latin peoples that’s a cradle of Italian nationalism, centered on their wars while excluding Sefarad Jews from his other studies of Latin countries’ literature (as if anyway there was anything to learn from babble by writers).

Stepan Bandera has not an Ukrainian last name, he comes from a Greek Catholic family, and was born in Austrian Galicia but there is a far-right cult organized around him.

Rousseau develops among other things “ideas” for Polish nationalism and encourages the construction of a national culture for Poland. He says this bluntly. Very plain constructivist call. Shameless.

Stalin who fosters Russian nationalism shortly before WW2 (as he was opening the first uranium mine extermination camp in Novaya Zemlya, in addition to the existing gulag system) was a Georgian… Hitler was Austrian.