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“It would be a much happier situation if Queen Elizabeth were functioning as an opiate to forestall the coming socialist revolution. The truth is many degrees more dismal. She and her pyramid of lackeys constitute a dead-weight repressing - to so speak - the revolution before last in Britain. Their ideological force is built upon a now ancient loss of radical nerve by the bourgeoisie itself - upon the inner capitulation of last century, mosts strikingly expressed for us by the virtual disappearance of middle-class republicanism in Victoria's reign. The 'magic' of our monarchs is the sweet odour of decay arising from this mountainous dungheap of unfinished bourgeois business.”

“They are parts of a single, overall, modern thought-world. According to the customary image socialists bear with them, Nationalism is the Mr. Hyde of that world. He is the Id of modernity, our revived and delirious archaism, the seductive, yet dangerous fellow from the forests who Marx pilloried back in 1843. 'Germano-maniacs' he called them, 'seeking our history of freedom beyond our history, in the primeval 'Teutonic forests'. Alas, the forests are not so easily disposed of as that, either in Germany or elsewhere. Nor are nationalists allowed to forget the fact. But what about Dr. Jekyll? This is the real question I am putting here, and it is all too rarely posed. We - 'on the left' - are assumed to be on his side. We disregard his oddities. He is a strangely Protestant figure, forever tensed up in an irreproachable piety punctuated with terrible nervous ticks. The slightest forest odour sets his forefinger wagging. Though he takes two baths a day to preserve his demeanour and sense of smell, the world remains permanenly unstatisfactory. This must be -one can hardly help feeling - because there is something unsatisfactory inside him somewhere, of which he may be only obscurely conscious.”

“How may we describe the general outlines of nationalist development, seen as 'general historical process'? Here, by far the most important point is that nationalism is as a whole quite incomprehensible outside the context of that process's uneven development. The subjective point of nationalist ideology is, of course, always the suggestion that one nationality is as good as another. But the real point has always lain in the objective fact that, manifestly, one nationality has never been even remotely as good as as, or equal to, the others which figure in its world view. Indeed, the purpose of the subjecivity (nationalist myths) can never be anything but protest against the brutal fact: it is mobilisation against the unpalatable, humanly unacceptable, truth of grossly uneven development.”