DURING an age of malignant political -isms, nationalism was perhaps the most lethal of all the ideological plagues that swept the world. This was true not just from from the perspective of its victims, millions of whom were crushed under its iron heel during the course of the 20th century; nationalism also induced virulent forms of moral amensia and ethical blindness among its own followers. It desensitised adherents to a degree that their critical faculties seemed to atrophy. Somewhere or other George Orwell remarked that nationalists not only do not disapprove of atrocities committed by their own side, they have a remarkable capacity for never even hearing about them.

This has certainly been Bermuda's experience of late.

Neither the leadership of this Government nor its more ardent partisans seem to be conscious of the fact that a domino-fall of recent scandals is causing heads to shake and eyebrows to arch outside the island.

In fact, they persist in denying these events ever happened at all.

They did, of course.

The Bermuda Housing Corporation scandal, a shameful episode which amounted to the wholesale looting of the poorbox, was the subject of the largest fraud investigation in the island's history although not one penny has been recovered and the new Housing Minister has yet to take any action beyond holding press conferences to announce he will be taking action.

The subsequent Berkeley catastrophe - in which $700,000 of public funds was spent on a completion bond that, in all likelihood, was invalid because the company that issued it did not exist - resulted in Government subjecting the Auditor General to a public lynching for doing his job.

The aftershocks of these political earthquakes and the accompanying pattern of official indifference and evasion are now beginning to cause concern outside Bermuda.

Business publications are openly talking about a breakdown in the rule of law in Bermuda. The island's gilded reputation as an off-shore jurisdiction that doesn't fall into the standard tax haven category - sun, surf and sleaze - is beginning to peel.

A recent analysis of the Berkeley scandal, for instance, that is posted at an international business web site reached some damning conclusions about Bermuda. Government attacks on the office of the Auditor General, said the writer, and the Premier's refusal to either rein in or censure shoot-from-the-lip Cabinet Ministers who answer all critics with blanket charges of racism have brought the island to within a hair's-breadth of anarchy.

That might be overstating the case, but not by much.

Given that international business and its satellite industries now power the Rolls-Royce economic engine of Bermuda, this is hardly the kind of publicity that is conducive to the island's long-term well-being.

Yet nationalism and the peculiar habit of mind it engenders - predicated on the false premise that a particular party or bloc is the recipient of the Revealed Truth, so even the objective truth can be ruled inadmissable if it runs contrary to the official line - is clearly the wellspring from which Government's reactions to criticism flow.

Not to be confused with patriotism, the love of country, nationalism is an all-consuming obsession with an ideology, anthat cannot be moved or dislodged by reason. Orwell broadly - and correctly - defined nationalism as a mindset predicated on loyalty not just to a country or region but to some racial, political or even religious creed. Though covering as it does a multitude of ideological sins, nationalism's cardinal feature remains constant - a faith that does not yield to either rational arguments or inconvenient facts.

In fact, its more rabid followers could have served as the models for Oscar Wilde's acid pen sketch of a fanatic, a person who cannot change his mind and will not change the subject,

The flotsam and jetsam of nationalism first washed up on Bermuda's shores in the 1950s and if socialism was the foundation the Progressive Labour Party was built on, then racial nationalism provided the cornerstone.

At the time - with a limited electoral franchise, officially sanctioned segregation, a Front Street monopoly on the economy that amounted to a chokehold - the embracing of these already discredited philosophies may well have been the inevitable equal and opposite reactions to an intolerable series of actions, the Third Law of Physics as applied to politics.

Since both socialism and nationalism are predicated on creating the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, reforming society so that those who have traditionally been ruled become the rulers, the appeal of this curious fusion of beliefs was obvious.

Given Mammon is the only false god Bermudians of both races serve en masse, the watered-down socialism espoused by the PLP has always tended to be regarded as so much hokum even by the party's hardcore supporters - something that is usually the case when left-of-centre political movements try to make inroads in relatively wealthy communities.

a PLP Parliamentarian called for the public ownership of both the off-shore sector (which would be administered directly by a PLP Government) and the hotels (to be run by the Bermuda Industrial Union) in the run-up to the 1993 General Election, he lost both his own and his running-mate's seats - and the PLP the Government.

Its racial nationalism, though, has always played to a broader audience over the years, although it's worth noting that the PLP never won more than 50 per cent of the popular vote in a predominantly black island until Alaska Hall attracted not insignificant white support at the last General Election.

Indeed, some analysts argue the size of its margin of victory in 1998 was attributable to protest votes cast by a white electorate tired of being taken for granted by a scandal-plagued UBP and willing to give the PLP its long asked for "chance" to govern after the late Frederick Wade repositioned the party as a more palatable centrist movement devoid of excessive socialist and nationalist cant.

This image makeover proved as temporary and unconvincing as tourism's notorious marketing efforts to repackage Bermuda as the Plato's Retreat of the North Atlantic.

Mr. Wade's heirs have squandered his legacy of modernisation and moderation - which included opening Alaska Hall up to internal democracy as well introducing a degree of cross-over appeal hitherto unknown at the ballot box. Within weeks of taking office, the leadership of the first PLP Government issued its warning that those who crossed it did so "at their peril" - and it has remained largely true to this unpleasant declaration of principles ever since.

Taking the old nationalist mantras out of the mothballs where Mr. Wade had sensibly consigned them, the PLP leadership has returned to a position where the normal sense of right and wrong clearly have no meaning when it comes to furthering the party agenda.

In this type of scenario not only can any political, logical or moral lapse be condoned, the very fact they even happened can be denied. That was certainly the case when the Government's constitutional programme was advanced by way of deception, a backdoor process that the Attorney General now denies ever occurred. And even the most glaring examples of mismanagement, dishonesty and poor judgement - the BHC or Berkeley disasters, for example - must be mentally disinfected in the minds of loyalists because, it is argued, they were short-term expediencies intended to further the long-term common good.

An eminent psychiatrist once said that his only dogma was that dogma is suspect because to be absolutely right means that your critics are absolutely wrong. "It seems to me," he remarked, "that most of the harm in the world is done by those who are dogmatically certain they are right."

This scepticism of a creed that can confidently categorise all opponents as "bad", that can elevate itself beyond good or evil and recognise no other duty than advancing its agenda, was clearly shared by a majority of Bermudians. There are few who would argue that Bermuda, in its own fits and starts way, has not evolved in the half-century since the PLP's cast-iron dogma was first adopted. The island has metamorphosed from a large country club run for the benefit of its well-heeled visitors into a little country run for the benefit of its own people.

success of such a gradualist, evolutionary approach to remaking Bermudian society effectively robbed the PLP and its revolutionary programme of its , type-casting the party for three decades as the once-and-future Opposition. Directly the PLP embraced less dogmatic positions, it became more electable. In conjunction with the simultaneous internal strife that caused the United Bermuda Party to implode, its victory in 1998 was preordained.

That may not be the case at the next General Election.

With the Government continuing to haemorrhage credibility, it cannot hope to attract either swing- or white votes by clinging to the nationalist nostrum that places it beyond criticism, a position that even wavering loyalists are now beginning to question. The leadership's self-justifying - and self-deceiving - circular thinking amounts to a variation of the old clich? about not being able to make an omelette without breaking some eggs. But since nothing resembling an omelette is actually in evidence, this line of argument is beginning to wear exceedingly thin.