Not necessarily. Most people I know in resistance movements didn’t need to be told they were being wronged—they came to that conclusion themselves after having their property confiscated, their friends and family imprisoned, tortured or killed, and their language, culture, and history suppressed.

Oppressed people don’t need to be told they are oppressed; they live the reality of it every day of their lives. There’s no need for them to take cues from “elites” when their present condition is staring them in the face.

I can see that you take a pretty narrow understanding of the libertarian view of freedom, so I suggest you keep reading.

Or, it could be the libertarian view of freedom is itself an extremely narrow idea of freedom.

The elites can be the oppressors but they are also the leaders of the oppressed. The leaders of oppressed groups are the ones who have the most to gain by filling others with hopes of freedom and using them to gain power. That is how it works.

And I don’t know what the geopolitical status quo is but given the number of liberation movements in the world, I would not say the one you are talking about will last forever. I am not in favour of it either.

I have not laid out my vision of freedom, and I am not a full scale libertarian, but I can see that you take a pretty narrow understanding of the libertarian view of freedom, so I suggest you keep reading.

There’s a vast difference between finding meaning “in what others want us to do” and finding meaning in a context that goes beyond the individual self. Even if I choose to sacrifice myself for others, I am still making a choice, and hence I am not sacrificing my “liberty”. Nationalist struggle and conformity are too very different things.

In fact, I would argue that nationalist struggles represent precisely a nonconformist streak. If these people were really so willing to sacrifice their individuality and liberty as you claim, they would not be resisting the power structure in the first place. Many nationalist struggles exist because people are trying to preserve distinct a distinct culture, language, etc. against an oppressors that wants them to give up their unique particularities and “conform” to the geopolitical status quo. Armed resistance against oppression is precisely one way that people assert their adherence to an meaning that is internal to their culture, as opposed to being imposed externally by an oppressor or occupier.

Your notion of “elites” strikes me as being rather confused. In the context of violent conflict, the “elites” are the colonizers, the oppressors. On the whole I would say you are trying to take a theory dealing with the micro-world of individuals and trying to apply it to the macro-world of cultures and nations. It also seems to me you are having difficulty because you are unwilling to acknowledge the meaning of causes beyond the individual.

But maybe there are some things that are worth sacrificing one’s life for, and that an ultimate definition of liberty must also take into account liberty from one’s own narrow, selfish desires. Freedom means more than simply doing whatever we want. Unfortunately, the libertarian notion of freedom you subscribe to does not acknowledge this, and ultimately only allows for the fulfillment of private desires.

Besides, we are not just talking about survival of individual. We are talking about sacrificing the individual for the sake of ideals like nation and race. Separatists and counter-separatists alike give up their individuality and with it, their liberty. I would probably take up arms against an oppressor who kills innocent people because of their race and I thought my friends and family would be next. But the elites are not the ones who pull the trigger. It was the unquestioning soldiers following an elusive ideal of some kind, given them by the elites. They are all suffering because of collectivist nonsense.

And I would not call Viktor Frankl a bourgeois WASP but a doctor of great insight into the human condition. I am just applying his theory to the context of violent conflict.

You are also assuming meaning must be a clear cut case of “internal” or “external”, as if these categories were entirely separate from each other. I would suggest that outside of psychology textbooks, life is more complex. Meaning likely has both internal and external aspects. Inevitably, we each bring our own personal angle to broader struggles. You completely underestimate the personal motivations for which a person might decide to engage in armed resistance. Perhaps it’s easier for you to rationalize such decisions as the mechanical decision of unthinking “slaves”, but the truth is inevitably more complicated than that.

In many cases that people fighting for a homeland aren’t fighting for “self-actualization”. They are fighting for survival, for a better life for themselves, for basic human rights. These struggles are not an abdication of “internal meaning”; on the contrary, they are an attempt to secure the necessities of life and certain rights which have elsewhere been described as “inalienable”. There is a powerful dignity in these struggles you completely overlook.

You are essentially applying a bourgeois, WASP-ish framework of private “internal meaning” to third world struggles, and are essentially asking them to forsake their political ambitions for a purely”internal” search for meaning. A cynical commenter might question your motivations for doing so, since this essentially serves the interests of the hegemonic powers resistance movements are fighting against.