Nationalism Is Poison
People are real, flags are made up.
People everywhere are more or less the same. They want to earn a living and take care of their families and play with their kids and have fun on the weekends. They go to work and they play sports and they make jokes and they look at the stars. Some of them eat baguettes and some of them eat tortillas and some of them eat injera and some of them eat chapati but they all eat and sleep and dream. For all of the kaleidoscopic cultural differences around the world, most people are not that different from the person that you would have been had you grown up in their shoes.
So why are we all so pissed at each other? What is it that makes an American who has never left the Midwest feel so deeply that a Russian or a Chinese or an Iranian person is their enemy? It’s useful every so often to stop and take in the fact that all of the geopolitical tension that inflames political sentiment is really about governments, and not people. Governments are often power-hungry and immoral and violent and they start wars and they exploit far-flung people for imperial gain and they lie brashly about all of the above. Governments are adept at bringing the people along with them—it’s hard to wage a good war, after all, unless you can convince everyone that it’s worth risking their lives to go shoot at the evil bastards on the other side. But to hold a true picture of how the world operates in our minds, it’s important to always remember the distinction between governments and people. Most of history’s greatest atrocities originated with the will of a tiny number of people who ran their governments, and who then set spinning a great machine that brought their population in line. Not vice versa. Set aside society’s upper crust, and wipe away their power to compel millions of people to follow their will, and what would remain is a huge majority of the world’s population who mostly want to have something tasty for dinner and live their lives in peace.
A few days ago, The Guardian wrote about Palestinian bird watchers, who continue to sit and watch the migrating birds as war rages on around them. Yesterday there was a story about young men from Africa who went to Russia to go to school being strong armed into the Russian military, and sent to go fight and die in Ukraine. Both of these stories captured preposterous disconnect between the desires of humanity—to learn, to celebrate beauty—with the desires of their surrounding governments, thinking about death and power and eradication. Surely all of these people joined the grand list of those throughout history who have wanted to just stand up and wave their arms and tell everyone to stop; to live. These bloody absurdities can feel so deeply baked into the nature of our time that we imagine that complaining about them is like complaining about the laws of nature. But there is, I think, at least a small thing that we all can do to resist the tendency of things to slip down into this nightmare over and over again.
Our planet is four and a half billion years old. Humans have been around for perhaps three hundred thousand years. We’ve been making art and writing and planting crops for thousands of years. Yet our world of sovereign nation-states is a very recent creation. When you factor in all of the modern nations that gained their independence from the brutal empires of Europe, the national borders on today’s map of the world are largely a 20th-century creation. Nations are new, and their borders are made up, and determined mostly by violence. I’m not trying to give some Wikipedia version of world history here; I’m just trying to emphasize the fact that nations, the dominant organizing principle of our world, the force that spawned two world wars in the past century, are a recent, novel, and man-made phenomenon. We need government, and at this stage of our world’s development, government means nations with borders, and in any case I don’t want to spiral out too far afield here. We aren’t going to replace nation states with a utopian global government any time soon. Nations are here to stay. Nationalism, however, is a choice that is firmly in our control.
What nation you live in has a great deal of influence on the material conditions of your life. But it is not something that carries any moral weight. Drawing an imaginary line on the ground and waving colors on a flag and declaring that this side of the street is called so and so is exactly what street gangs do. Nations do it on a much larger scale. In the case of street gangs, it is easy to see the pathologies underlying their behavior—the desperate need for an other to fight against in order to define an in-group that can lend meaning to one’s life and offer protection in a world that is hostile precisely because everyone else is doing the same thing. We scoff at the gangs, but we take the project of nations very seriously. In reality, they are both predictable tendencies that we should think more about eliminating than supporting.
There is plenty of talk these days, at least among liberals, about the resurgence of Christian nationalism. And Christian nationalism is certainly dangerous. There is a more general danger, though: Nationalism. The millions of boys who marched off willingly to the trenches of every awful and unjust war did not start with the gun; they started with the flag. Their appetite was created with patriotism and love of God and country and all of the most upright and respectable institutions that taught them that the highest good was to serve one’s country. It is a stupid ideal, if you think about it for a millisecond. The highest ideal is to shoot a machine gun at someone just like you who was born in another country and whose government’s will conflicts with your own government’s selfish will? This is the value of your life, and his life? There is something hallowed about this? This flag, your gang colors, are all that your life is worth? The persistence of this message in popular culture is its own crime against the young. It sets them on a path to reach a state of mental and emotional readiness to pick up a gun and kill and die in the event that the vampire atop their government requires their blood during any of the years that they are physically able. Every person whose life was wasted in Vietnam or Iraq or in any other unjust war was lured into that trap by a lifetime of nationalism, surrounding them like an inescapable cloud. Without that, a craven government’s demand that you sacrifice your life for some bullshit would be met by the common sense response: “No thanks.”
We on the left often mock right wingers for their rabid patriotism. But nationalism, patriotism’s more urbane cousin, is distributed equally across our political spectrum. Few of either political party seriously question the need to place America’s interests above the interests of every other nation, and to do our very best to extract wealth from the rest of the world to benefit ourselves. Imagine if the simple alternate vision of “All humans everywhere have equal rights and we all have an equal responsibility to help one another” were our baseline. (Or “we’re all god’s children,” if you like.) If we’re going to be indoctrinating children into philosophies, that one would be infinitely healthier than “God Bless America.” As nationalism increases, so does tribalism, xenophobia, and ultimately violence. We wail and moan about it once the war starts, but the stage was set back when they were making us stand up and say the Pledge of Allegiance in class every day.
I know that this whole thing sounds a little goofy and over-earnest and maybe like something a child would say. Well, this is a case where children see the world more clearly than we do. A child would instantly know that it is wrong to grab someone who is trying to go to school and make them go to war in a faraway land, and a child would know that it’s wrong to bomb the place where everyone is trying to watch the birds. A child is able to look across the street at someone and see that they are the same as them, even if there is an imaginary line separating them, and a different flag flying over their heads. We need to live to the standards of kids on the nationalism question. Nations are a temporary necessity, a passing phase of history that will one day be looked back on as janky and ineffective, a useful way to collect taxes and regulate food quality but hardly an ethical reason to shoot somebody. Nothing more nationalistic than The Olympics should ever be allowed to exist on earth. It’s all so ridiculous. Loving thy neighbor is just a pit stop on the path to loving everyone everywhere. Don’t get fooled into thinking it’s the end of the road.
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Yes I know I need to get back to writing about labor soon to balance out all this dreamy stuff. Want to do something for the labor movement today? Donate the Pittsburgh Striker Fund to support newspaper workers at the Pittsburgh PGH who have been on strike for an unbelievably long time. Read an interview with one of the strikers here.
By the way— I wrote a book about the labor movement and its potential to save America. It’s called “The Hammer,” it got nice reviews, and you can order it here or wherever books are sold. I have a couple of book events coming up in June:
Thursday, June 20th at 7 pm in Rochester, NY: I’ll be talking about the book and having a conversation with veteran union organizer Richard Bensinger at the Workers United union hall, 750 East Avenue.
Saturday, June 22nd at 6 pm in Louisville, KY: I’ll be speaking at a very worthy fundraising dinner for Louisville DSA. Get your tickets here.
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"Religion may be the opium of the masses, but patriotism is their rohypnol"
So right.
The problem is, nationalism/patriotism has sex appeal. Every guy whose hormones have him itching to do violence to someone or something, who chafes at the rules and tameness of a fair, humane, nonviolent society, lights up at the chance to be violent - and be admired for it, instead of shamed.
No, I'm not saying all guys are like that, nor that no women are, but testosterone IS the "aggression hormone," a challenge for anyone trying to build a constructive society without excluding young men.