A Southern nationalist is not a person who wants to create a Southern Nation. A Southern Nationalist is one who wants independence for the already existing Southern Nation. No one can create a nation.

I am now in Russia, and all I know about the place comes from books. I doubt I will know anything much about it when I leave. But the simple sentences above make it possible for me to understand a lot of what Russians say about Russia.

In Eastern Europe, "nationality problems" are common. But to official Western opinion, a "nationality problem" just means a dispute over territory. In today's parlance, a nation is just a politically united piece of territory, not a living entity made up of a particular people.

In the real world, very few of the serious nationality problems are disputes over a piece of ground.

To understand what the conflicts and attitudes in Russia are, you have to be able to empathize with what a Russian means when he uses that word. To him, there are many non-Russians in Russia, and relations between Russians and non-Russians in Russia is an important part of life.

But what they call non-Russians speak Russian, have Russian citizenship papers, and reside inside the political unit designated on the map as "Russia." To a Western "intellectual," they are all equally "Russian."

If anyone disagrees, they pull out the big gun. They point out that anyone who says a particular culture and racial group constitutes a nation is anaziwhowantstokillsixmillionjews. This protects them from having any idea of what is really going on.

To many Americans, the Soviet Union was synonomous with "Russia." Our self-styled "intellectuals" made fun of this confusion.

But the "intellectual" point of view is the one I just discussed, where "nation" just means a piece of ground. That is at least as provincial as the one they make fun of. What is more, the "intellectual" approach is far more hopeless because professors cannot imagine that THEY could be provincial.

These self-styled intellectuals are a perfect illustration of Oliver Hardy's point that, "Nobody is as dumb as a dumb man who thinks he's smart." And nobody is as hopeless as a bunch of inbred academic bureaucrats who think they represent True Intellectualism.

History books tell us that there were two Russian Revolutions in 1917. There was the February Revolution which overthrew the Czar. Then there was the October Revolution which imposed Communist rule.

But the fact is that almost no Russians were leaders in the October Revolution. The second Revolution in 1917, the Commmunist one, was not Russian.

Communism is based on hate. The October Revolution was led by those who, often for good reason, hated Russians. Stalin was a Georgian, which even an intellectual would understand is not a Russian. In terms of what a Russian would see as a cultural or national Russian, only a tiny handful of the founders of the Soviet Union -- and I mean a TINY handful -- were of Russian NATIONALITY.

This is not surprising. Communism is an expression of violent hatred of everything traditional and basic to a nation. China's Cultural Revolution attempted to kill and demolish anything that seemed Chinese. As in America, where leftists hate America and white people, the largest driving force behind the Bolshevik movement was a hatred of Russia.

Today's Russian Communist Party wants a second chance because, they say, they are "real Russians," not the old Communists. Westerners are not allowed to understand what they are talking about.

Leon Trotsky's first criminal offense, for example, was destroying Christian symbols when he was a boy. Russian Jews, both at home and abroad, saw the Bolshevik Revolution as a chance to revenge all the historical crimes Russians had committed against them, whether they realized it or not.

This mutual hatred of Russia bound Lenin, who was no Slav, to Stalin, who had hatred of Russia in his Georgian blood. It is no accident that the man who understood the Soviet Revolution best, the man who took it over, was Lenin's Official Expert on Nationalities, Joseph Stalin.

Trotsky sublimated his hatred of the Russian nation so well that he actually believed all he cared about was Marxist ideology. Stalin knew better. He saw clearly that Bolshevism was a vehicle for group enmity.

He won by using those resentments as only one who saw the real picture clearly could use them. Stalin understood the game, so he played Jews and other nationalities against each other and took power.

Stalin beat the far more brilliant Trotsky because he saw Communism for what it is. Communism, like all modern leftism, is a vehicle for the enemies of the nation in which it exists.

To today's required ideology, just to see the world as a Russian sees it makes one anaziwhowntstokillsixmillionjews.