Waxing poetic on Nationalism

I share with you an excerpt from Louis de Bernieres' Birds Without Wings:

"Leonidas was a nationalist in the days before the erosions and landslips of time exposed the miserable stupidity of nationalism. If he had lived three generations later, an intellectual like Leonidas would would have thought nationalism and religion as the unholy spouses from whose fetid conjugal bed nothing but evil can crawl forth, but these were innocent days, when orthodoxy was the sole and innocent truth, and nationalism was still romantic, reputable and glorious. Dry and cantankerous as he may have been, Leonidas was the highest romantic, and his tears were those of a romantic who has seen all his aspirations crushed." (p. 531)