This controversial topic incorporates a huge variety of interlocking themes both real and imagined. It is impossible to separate the complex and interwoven thoughts, ideas, beliefs and emotions stemming not just from history and politics but debatably and possibly more importantly culture and its diversity including education, literature, music to national dress and celebrations. Not to mention other influencing factors of ethnicity, national symbols and heroes and language. What does it mean to say that there is a national history of consciousness, for example in the light of WWII can a 21st century Jew share an innate feeling of nationality and pride in the nation as a Caucasian German?

How and what constitutes a nation? Was there a particular time when nationhood emerged and does the commonly held view that the 1789 French Revolution was the definitive moment for the emergence of nations as we know them today still hold to be true? Some my propose that a nation is little more than a set of national boundaries on a map, others may argue that it is a group of people sharing common beliefs and pasts. What cannot be denied is that there are three different approaches to this issue pr

Just as the Russian Foreign Minister Dimitar Dimitrov argued that “the fascists are rummaging through the entire history of every nation as to be able to pose as the heirs and continuators of all that was exalted and heroic in the past” Smith similarly acknowledged that national history and identity can be manipulated and twisted to suit whatever political or social aspirations deemed appropriate. The wave of German propaganda effectively distributed by Dr Joesph Goebbels allowed and maintained sporadic growth of the Nazi party through the 1930’s-1940’s based on the notion of an elite Germanic race descended for the Dorian’s. Although such nationalism is induced hype Smith is encapsulated by the fact that people actually respond to it and the effect that it has on their lives. Whilst there is not one shred of evidence to support the existence of a pure Aryan race the Nazi propaganda machine new that people would respond to ethno symbolic mass hysteria and the polarized truth from reality that Germany had always existed and the denial that it was not until 1871 when Germany became politically united as one country even then with split allegiances between the unified states and country for example Bavaria, Baden, Hanover, Pomerania and East Prussia. The German people believed because they wanted to believe the nation had always existed, it gave them peace of mind, future, pride and hope.

This psychological brain washing sparks the emotional attachment to the nation and it is for these reasons why Smith proposed the nation had to have pre existed nationalism-one cannot deny this innate anthropological spiritual attachment and desire for belonging to something greater than mans own microcosmic community. Hitler himself saw the potential in this when in 1933 he wrote German people may not have been a united nation by Smith’s own definition yet they certainly desired to be and the extensive torchlight parades, marches in party formations, music and speaking at Nuremberg is but a fragment of the ethno symbolic nationalism that ultimately has to be condemned as dangerous when seen in the brutal, ugly, monstrosity created by Adolph Hitler.

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