Extremely wise words by Shivshankar Menon, India's former Foreign Secretary and National Security Advisor. Asked by the host what worries him about India - what is a burden of history for India - he replied that "there is such a thing as excessive pride in your past." He explains that talking of "your glorious golden ages in the past" to "feel good about yourself" is ok - a normal aspect of building an identity for yourself - but "when you then carry it on into victimhood and into revenge for history" and when that becomes a driving force for today's actions, then it becomes "dangerous." He takes the example of people in India speaking about "a thousand years of slavery" (meaning Muslim and then British rule) or of Chiang Kai-shek writing every night in the top right of his diary "never forget national humiliation" (I checked and he actually wrote 雪耻 - xuě chǐ - which means "avenge the humiliation": thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forwa…, he did it from 1928 until his last diary entry in July 1972). It's a wise point in general: when you think about it, nationalism isn't necessarily destructive in and of itself. But it becomes so when you convince yourself as a nation or people that you are a victim and that there is a guilty party. Because, as Menon puts it, it makes you "stop dealing with reality as it is" and leads to "counterproductive policy and ideas." All the more dangerous because it’s so easy: nothing easier as a people, or as the ruler of a nation, than to blame others for what’s wrong. It spares you the much harder work of looking at your own failings, and absolves the rulers of responsibility. And the inverse is really hard: nothing harder when you have indeed been a victim than to resist turning that grievance into a political program, and to instead focus on what you can actually build today - which often involves working hand in hand with the guilty party. Which is, incidentally, why what China did was so impressive. It could have turned national humiliation into policies of revenge and hatred but instead chose to define it largely as China's own mistake for having been weak enough that foreigners could take advantage of that (Xi Jinping himself defines it that way in his book: xitter.cf/RnaudBertrand/status/2…). Which is constructive, because then the objective isn't revenge but building yourself, and China did that working hand in hand with the West. We’re seeing some version of victimhood drive policies in too many countries around the world. Europe is, sadly, a case in point: Russia and China have become the all-purpose explanation for almost every problem on the continent, from energy prices to deindustrialization. Very practical for EU leaders who never have to answer for their own choices... It's a good rule of thumb to have: if any politician builds his message around blame, take it as a red flag. That's what you reach for when you won't build. This is the source video, by the way: youtube.com/watch?v=IQ2ns6-C… On the WorldView Postcast of my friend @Hansong_Li