Death to Nationalist Kitsch!
Why fake symbols can’t defend real culture
Nothing captures the spiritual death of modern (civic) nationalism like watching Dutch patriots wave polyester flags made in Chinese factories, while chanting English slogans about defending their heritage.
But it’s not just here. This template of commodified, or Kitsch nationalism seems to exist everywhere.
I started this newsletter because I care deeply about European, and especially Dutch civilisation. Seeing nationalists destroy it with Temu flags and surface-level understanding hurts more than leftist vandalism. At least leftists are honest about what they’re destroying.
You cannot reject globalism by waving globalised symbols.
But I don’t blame the protestors/lay men. It is right-wing politicians that failed these people by importing American-style nationalism instead of defending actual Dutch culture. Tommy Robinstein rallies (or any ‘nationalist’ rally) look identical to MAGA rallies because they follow the same mass-produced resistance sold to different markets. Even “hardcore” ethnonationalists wave the same polyester crap and empty slogans.
This is what nationalist kitsch is. It’s when defending your people becomes a flag show.. Where some symbols matter more than the martyrs, heroes and heritage shaped your ancestors. When identity is something you purchase rather than inherit.
Again, it was engineered to be this way. That’s why we must reject it.
The characteristics of syncretic; kitsch nationalism comes down to six key characteristics:
Generic Templates: The same visual language (flags, rhetoric, banners) regardless of its national history
Consumerism: Cosplaying identity requires purchasing rather than inheritance. I would argue that all naturalisations are part of this consumerist behaviour as well.
Linguistically Colonised: Using English slogans to defend native culture.
Mass Produced: The products are made in the countries with regimes you claim to oppose.
Aesthetically Poor: Polyester instead of linen, plastic instead of wood, printing instead of craftsmanship
Historically Shallow: They references political symbols rather than deep cultural foundations
Kitsch nationalism emerges from the market economy, it’s when nationalism becomes a product/commodity, rather than a culture. These characteristics reveal why this type of nationalism always fails, and why the path back to authentic culture requires abandoning everything these movements represent. But how did we end up where we are now?
The Origins of Syncretic Pseudo-Nationalism
Our civilisation was founded on a synthesis of pagan and Roman foundations. Those were elevated through Catholic sacramentality, and were expressed in guild craftsmanship and lived through liturgical rhythm and Pagan-origin feast days. A friend of mine calls it ‘Gesamttradition’.
A lot of people I see that turn to Traditional Catholicism think it’s merely about aesthetics. But what we’ve lost during the ages is a complete worldview, where both material and the spiritual interpenetrated seamlessly. This is what they call ‘the dark ages’ in school. Every carved stone, feast day and local devotion/Christianised tradition carried transcendent meaning. It was rooted in its place and community.
The Reformation completely shattered this synthesis, yet is glorified by many rightwing people. The theological heresy stretches back into the late medieval period. But for now I take 1517 as the watershed moment. It was when Martin Luther started a new religion. Yes, he was partly right in his critique, but his intentions were evil.
His movement eventually led to the Beeldenstorm from 10th of August up until October 1566. In those months fifteen centuries of accumulated Christian artistic tradition was shattered. Mysticism, devotional art, and the entire concept of Sacrality was ripped. It was when kitschification began, as kitsch is there to imitate and mock.
It was not just the physical demolishment of Christian artifacts, but also the Sola’s, the pillars on which Protestantism is build. The iconoclasts not only destroyed images, but demolished the spiritual frameworks that had given meaning to centuries of craftsmanship and technique.
In the Netherlands particularly, this represented a catastrophic loss. The Devotio Moderna and the rich traditions surrounding saints like Gerlach, Servatius, Willibrord, and Ludger. All of our organic spiritual culture was suddenly branded as superstition and shall be eliminated.
It was the beginning of our Gilden Age. Yet the ironic and paradoxal part of it, is that the real wealth was limited to a small group of people.
Farmers and commoners had no refuge anymore. All the monasteries were abolished and the Catholic gentry fled. Farmers and commoners impoverished and were exploited by the elites.
The Protestant replacement religion, with its stark simplicity and suspicion of decoration, was essentially the Le Corbusier of religion.
It made ornament in religious context synonymous with vanity. It created a worldview where physical objects and humans could no longer bear spiritual meaning. What emerged was a purely utilitarian relationship to material culture. It was a flattening of reality of which we still face the consequences today.
A new religion also meant a new identity.
The Birth of Manufactured Identity
The Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 crystallised this Humanist-Protestant transformation by creating abstract political units (countries) that require manufactured symbols.
In Medieval Europe we used to have an organic iconography that grew naturally from centuries of local devotion and embedded cultural practice. But now these manufactured nation-states needed identity markers, which were created by the bureaucrats and intellectuals of its time.
This marked the moment when organic nationalism began its transformation into a syncretic replacement religion. It aimed to unite the different sects of Protestantism, and, depending on the country, Catholics could join too and vice versa.
The Kitsch nationalism came complete with its own liturgy and iconography. But lacked its own authentic spiritual foundations. Essentially, it was somewhat sophisticated branding, but hollow.
Fast forward to the 1800s and the last remains of our guild system collapsed. Labour unions emerged as its imitation. Mass manufacturing made symbols cheap, globally available and worst of all: identical. No matter if they came from England or Holland; industrialisation abolished regional identity.
We can see the endpoint of this process today in polyester flags people carry at nationalist rallies. They were made by some Cambodian thousand of kilometers away. He has no connection to the end user, and nor does the end user have to what he think he fights for. But again: I never blame individuals for mass psychosis.
Aesthetics have become democratised. Craftsmen barely exist anymore, not even elites and so-called ‘luxury’ brands have them anymore. Regional differences flattened as families moved across the country, which made politics nationalised. Completely divorced from the local. The last bastion are farmers, but the elites want them gone too.
The Spiritual Vacuum
The catastrophic brother wars of the past century completed what the Reformation had begun. Nietzsche’s declaration that “God is dead” became literal as Europe witnessed industrialised manslaughter on a grand scale.
Post-war Europe found itself castrated by its own traditions. It was unable to draw on the spiritual resources that had sustained Europe for millennia.
Decolonisation, the tyranny of the Marshall Plan, and the imposition of American style templates in architecture, art, politics and consumerism created a spiritually dependent continent. The USA only had never experienced the deep cultural synthesis Europe had once known. Europeans began copying American methods, because American-designed algorithms favor American-style engagement. Adriano Celentano proved this point when he released an American sounding song with fantasy words. It became an instant #1 hit.
Today Silicon Valley platforms optimise for the kind of rapid-fire, emotionally charged discourse that characterises American politics. Making ‘populism’ an inevitable political strategy.
The death of identity
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 the last systematic alternative to pure market logic fell. With its collapse, identity in the developed world became a consumer choice, rather than an inherited tradition.
The explosion of subcultures between 1950 and 2000 was the final stage of our cultural transformation. Still… individuals had a somewhat unique identity, which is very uncommon nowadays. Plain Jane normies are the majority now.
Nationalism, which already has become a replacement religion, now competes with a complete lack of anything. Everything nowadays is lukewarm, even ‘extremists’ are often not that extreme.
The Compounding Effect
Nationalist kitsch is the inevitable result of a process that began five centuries ago. What we’re left with is an empty crown. We have the buildings, the Cathedrals. But now they become another Starbucks, or a padel court.
The flags and other imagery is not a return to tradition, but a final evacuation of meaning. The sad part is that for most people on the right they just want to preserve their country. For the more ‘extreme’ that means a predominantly white neighbourhood. That’s where it ends.
It’s sad that movements like MAGA (and similars) are the only forms of cultural assertion available to those who sense something essential is lost. They lack the spiritual vocabulary to name what that ‘something’ was. They grew up in a world where identity can be purchased. Symbols are mass-produced (Hitler already did this), rather than organically developed. We traded our souls for efficiency and lost both that and our culture.
Each of the ruptures made authentic culture more impossible. First the spiritual foundation has been destroyed. Then we manufactured its replacement and lastly we commodified everything to be interchangeable. That’s why ‘nationalists’ flee their own country, since they can’t name our raison d’être anymore.
So we now live in an impossible paradox of contemporary movements attempting to defend European civilisation. And somehow we have no choice but to use mass-produced, globally-sourced, American-template symbols.
We’re fighting globalisation with globalised tools because the cultural infrastructure for creating authentic alternatives has been systematically destroyed over five centuries. In the 1960s and 1970s this came to its peak. So don’t blame boomers, Antifa, or even leftwing politicians. You should hate their ideology, but this is the inevitable situation of centuries of secularisation and heresy.
Kitsch is the only form of identity formation possible in a post-christian, post-traditional, consumerist world.
When the sacramental worldview and idea of sacrality collapsed we had two options: secular materialism or consumer-based identities. We chose the last, that’s why there are over 200 (notable) denominations of Protestantism; all claiming to be true.
But now we live in the unholy synthesis. We attempt to create meaning through consumption rather than through inheritance, tradition, and spiritual practice.
This is why our politics fail so utterly. We cannot create authentic resistance to modernity using the tools of modernity. Kitsch nationalism strengthens what it claims to oppose by making “tradition” into another consumer choice. Another brand preference in the big marketplace of ideas and identities.
Materials Matter
When I start about materials people always start calling me a snob: ‘it’s too expensive now’ etc. But they fail to understand why it matters so much. Not just in fashion, but especially in this context. A symbol of a tribe should be considered sacred. As much as I hate islamisation, we should not burn Qurans for the same reason.
To understand why the current form of nationalism fails so completely, you need to grasp what we lost when we abandoned the Catholic understanding of matter and meaning.
Before the Reformation we held a sacramental worldview that physical reality could bear divine meaning. Because if God became flesh, that meant materials mattered spiritually. The bread and wine became the Body and Blood, the relics carried the power of saints, and craftsmanship itself was spiritual practice. Making beautiful objects honored both God and the craftsman’s skill.
Every object in Catholic life carried weight: linen, stone, gold, and wood each had proper uses that honoured their nature. Heirloom pieces bore the prayers and care of previous generations. Beauty was never a consumer luxury, but was necessary for proper worship of God. Not just the Churches, but every part of life was elevated to meet this shared goal.
Our ancestors’ aesthetic standards expressed their understanding of creation’s goodness. Even in its more primitive form: the Pagans believed in the sacredness of certain trees, objects etc.
Protestantism completely severed these connections. Under Sola Scriptura, only words could convey divine truth. Physical beauty became distraction. Matter in itself was rendered spiritually dead, utility became more important than beauty, and decoration became vanity.
It created an inevitable progression: from Pagan-origin tradition and Catholic sacramentality to Protestant iconoclasm to secular materialism to consumer capitalism to kitsch nationalism.
A polyester flag manufactured in a communist country shows nothing but contempt for what a nation represents. But on the flipside it does make sense, because it shows that the carrier does not know what it is they’re defending. Just like the polyester it’s synthetic, unworthy of genuine craftmanship, made by the machines that embody the globalism it supposedly resists.
Style and material don’t only matter in fashion. They show an understanding of metaphysical foundations. Without it, the (imitated) ritual proceeds, but the spiritual substance is evacuated.
The Only Alternative
I believe the Catholic understanding of physics and metaphysics offers the only coherent foundation for resistance. It alone preserves the belief of sacrality: that places and materials matter, craftsmanship is sacred, that object can carry meaning across generation and that beauty is a necessity, not a luxury.
Without such a foundation all preservation becomes mere aesthetics: shallow phenomena that strengthen the systems they oppose.
That’s why Traditional Architecture accounts, that drool over Disney-like copycats, are complete losers. Because real nationality requires a physical culture that embodies a spiritual character. We can’t re-produce or simulate it, because spirituality cannot be commodified.
It requires us to treat symbols as sacred, deserving of the finest materials we can afford (we deserve more than polyester), and crafted by men who understand what they’re making with techniques that connect to tradition and sanctification.
Even with all the baroque-kitsch during the Contrareformation, St. Ignatius of Loyola spoke the wise words: Ad Maiorem Dei Gloriam, which means all from the most complex to the very simplest thing you do should be glorified.
A lot of traditional religious fail to understand this too. Above all it’s a spiritual crisis, which many can’t handle or can fully grasp. But it’s the only way to preserve and reinstate both our metaphysical and practical knowledge for genuine culture creation.
Because if substance doesn’t matter, then nothing does.
-Robbert
Goede analyse, al is traditioneel Rooms Katholicisme natuurlijk niet het enige raamwerk dat restauratie kan bewerkstelligen. ☦️
Dat gezegd hebbende: we hebben al een AI die de geloofsbelijdenis van Nicaea onderschrijft. De moderne tijd brengt soms iets moois.
Slope.is