Quick thought…this is extremely flexible. The House Committee on Unamerican Activities was formed to root out right-wing fascists. Blink your eyes twice and it was anti-communist. Also reminds me of Hannah Arendt talking about how it was not the Germans who didn’t believe in anything who became ardent Nazis. Germans who may well have strongly believed very different things were the ones because you either are or aren’t strongly believing in stuff and it’s easier to just flip and believe something else than it is to switch from skeptical to zealous about anything.
The clear-headed rationality of Centrism is the story that they tell themselves. It’s a fiction about how they don’t believe in make-believe.
Would be good for me if this were excised. @mods - does that work? It should. I don’t have time to really read the last couple posts and respond.
Arendt’s point could easily fit this into my idea by portraying American patriotism and national identity as a replacement for state-level patriotism and identity that were invalidated by the Civil War. There would also be a push to justify the war by embracing the rhetoric that it was about preserving the Union, which people would then want to portray as something worth saving by maximizing the perceived value of America as a whole.
Microbet talking to bobman is about the best anarchist discusses issues with centrist ever. You guys are doing well.
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It split off from a discussion about WW2, but something like “on patriotism” or “on patriotism and nationalism” or something started here:
https://unstuckpolitics.com/t/lc-thread-2020-sausage-vs-gyro/1332/3302
Thanks.
Hmmm…mebbe @zikzak or @anon46587892 mod me for half an hour so and I’ll do it and throw in some random bans.
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Thanks. I will excise it tomorrow if I still have the power and let you know when it’s done.
Actually, I did it tonight. Hopefully I didn’t mess anything up.
@zikzak or @anon46587892, I’m ready for my demodding. Thanks snoreo.
I’m ready to pull a Kevin Costner in Dances with Wolves and proclaim “My name is [unsure yet]. I am a Lakota Sioux [or whatever other nation will have me].”
This country is shit and I want out. We’ve always been shit. Everything we learned in history is a lie. I mean yeah ok we were the good guys in WWII. But that’s Sandusky saying he’s helped so many kids it makes up for the ones he molested.
We’re an evil country founded on lies, slavery and genocide. The truth did not win out. The moral arc of the universe is not bending toward justice for anyone but white men, as always. Half the country are entitled, spoiled, vehemently reprehensible racists.
I guess most other countries are pretty shitty as well. And children are born pure. It’s not their fault. That’s about the best thing we have going for us.
That’s my thoughts on patriotism
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I have some fairly undirected and pointless thoughts on this.
While the distinction between nationalism and patriotism is a real one, the latter can transform into the former quite readily, and since humans are tribal by nature, I think encouraging patriotism is dangerous. People naturally come to patriotism anyway and it’s good for any large group of people to be consciously self-critical.
I think bobman’s posting ITT has been generally good. Most people need a feeling of belonging which was once provided by local communities, then by religion, then by nationalism, now frequently by partisanship. You can’t educate people out of this tendency to tribalize, it needs to be channeled into productive ends, which are becoming less and less available. Trying to satisfy this desire with internet communities is a disaster.
If I could play God, I think the thing to do would be to separate the world into relatively small nations, with some sort of very loose federation to handle international issues. The danger of nationalism is a lot less when you don’t individually have very much power and you don’t have the tendency to think of yourself as a world-striding empire the way places like the US, Russia and China do. Larger nations also have an inherent danger of balkanization.
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Pretty sure all countries ever suck and it’s best that everyone is cynical about them and suspicious of them.
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There were 20 Congressional Medals of Honor handed out for the Wounded Knee Massacre. Funny how my high school history class skipped that part.
Whether America sucks or not is derailing the thread from discussion of patriotism more broadly.
This is also perhaps a derail but:
While this is sort of broadly true, “bad” and “good” are fairly meaningless categories here. I doubt that even you would deny that “humans are tribalistic” is close to a bedrock truth about mankind, which has orders of magnitude more explanatory power in human affairs than either “humans are good” or “humans are bad”. What I mean by this is that there are innumerable examples of people laying down their lives for their friends, family and community and also of people subjecting groups of outsiders to horrifically inhumane treatment, while examples of either in reverse are so rare as to make the news and/or get made into movies.
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It would be much more accurate, by the way, to say that the right view people as immutable while the left regard them as perfectly fluid, in other words it’s the nature v nurture debate. That’s the really fundamental divide. It’s not “people are bad” because the degree to which the right see “bad by nature” in the marginalized and “criminal” classes is matched only by the degree to which they see “good by nature” in the successful (I’m sure I don’t need to give examples here).
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Generally agree with this point, subject to two caveats:
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It’s important to distinguish between encouraging/discouraging particular “community ideologies” and encouraging/discouraging the psychological need for, or tendency to adhere to such ideologies. To the extent it’s possible to do so, it seems obviously good (to me) to encourage people not to think that way. But that’s not a full substitute for encouraging the most benign ideology you can sell. It’s a bit like sex ed. Even if what you really want is for teenagers to not have sex, you need to teach them how to have sex safely, even if teaching them safe sex makes them more likely to have sex. The downsides of unsafe nationalism are so large that teaching safe nationalism is a better strategy than abstinence-only.
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Small countries are a way of making identity-formation easier, but lots of practical questions around that solution (why don’t they fight wars all the time?). Your proposal is, at least in broad outline, the Versailles solution for Eastern Europe.
Also true and as I understand it explains things like the USSR and Nazi Germany finding different scientific facts to be basically heresy. Like, the fox breeding experiment in Russia was not ok because inheriting traits is not consistent with being able to mold people into good communists. Heisenberg was called a “white Jew” by Nazis because prefer determinism.
But “bad” and “good” are still important and that’s why the right wants law and order. People must be controlled. Maybe it is just the undesirables (and they are born that way) but it’s never entirely obvious who might need some sense beaten into them.
But the Olympics are boring.
Maybe the plan of having some smart, wise, educated West Wing elite who know so much better than the dirty masses direct them into safe nationalism isn’t actually viable. For one thing, they just aren’t that wise. Plenty of numbskulls get into your Platonic society for wise leaders. For another thing, the masses may not be that bright, but it’s just not that hard to tell when people are phonies.