Nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our insanity.
`Patriotism' is its cult. - Erich Fromm
"Nationalism is an evil. It causes wars, its roots lie in xenophobia
and racism, it is a recent phenomenon - an invention of the last few
centuries - which has been of immense service to demagogues and
tyrants but to no one else. Disguised as patriotism and love of one's
country, it trades on the unreason of mass psychology to make a
variety of horrors seem acceptable, even honourable. For example: if
someone said to you, 'I am going to send your son to kill the boy next
door' you would hotly protest. But only let him seduce you with 'Queen
and Country!' 'The Fatherland!' 'My country right or wrong!' and you
would find yourself permitting him to send all our sons to kill not
just the sons of other people, but other people indiscriminately -
which is what bombs and bullets do.
Demagogues know what they are about when they preach nationalism.
Hitler said, 'The effectiveness of the truly national leader consists
in preventing his people from dividing their attention, and keeping it
fixed on a common enemy.' And he knew who to appeal to: Goethe had
long since remarked that nationalistic feelings 'are at their
strongest and most violent where there is the lowest degree of
culture'.
Nationalists take certain unexceptionable desires and muddle them with
unacceptable ones. We individually wish to run our own affairs; that
is unexceptionable. Most of us value the culture which shaped our
development and gave us our sense of personal and group identity; that
too is unexceptionable. But the nationalist persuades us that the
existence of other groups and cultures somehow puts these things at
risk, and that the only way to protect them is to see ourselves as
members of a distinct col¬lective, defined by ethnicity, geography, or
sameness of language or religion, and to build a wall around ourselves
to keep out 'foreigners'. It is not enough that the others are other;
we have to see them as a threat - at the very least to 'our way of
life', perhaps to our jobs, even to our daughters.
When Europe's overseas colonies sought independence, the only rhetoric
to hand was that of nationalism. It had well served the unifiers of
Italy and Germany in the nineteenth century (which in turn prepared
the way for some of their activities in the twentieth century), and we
see a number of the ex-colonial nations going the same way today.
The idea of nationalism turns on that of a 'nation'. The word is
meaningless: all 'nations' are mongrel, a mixture of so many
immigrations and mixings of peoples over time that the idea of
ethnicity is largely comical, except in places where the boast has to
be either that the community there remained so remote and disengaged,
or so conquered, for the greater part of history, that it succeeded in
keeping its gene pool 'pure' (a cynic might say 'inbred' ).
Much nonsense is talked about nations as entities: Emerson spoke of
the 'genius' of a nation as something separate from its numerical
citizens; Giraudoux described the 'spirit of a nation' as 'the look in
its eyes'; other such meaningless assertions abound. Nations are
artificial constructs, their boundaries drawn in the blood of past
wars. And one should not confuse culture and nationality: there is no
country on earth which is not home to more than one different but
usually coexisting culture. Cultural heritage is not the same thing as
national identity.
The blindness of people who fall for nationalistic demagoguery is
surprising. Those who oppose closer relations in Europe, or who seek
to detach themselves from the larger comities, to which they belong,
do well to examine the lessons of such tragedies as the Balkans
conflicts, or - the same thing writ larger - Europe's bloody history
in the twentieth century."
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