Political Crossfire Forums

I think the primary reason to reject patriotism and nationalism is because they are inherently dishonest propositions. The proposed motivation for these feelings is to express love of own country and people but the true motivation is clearly not a love for one's country or people at all but rather the desire to impose a particular type of harsh and violent authoritarian government on the very people and nation that the so-called nationalist purports to love. The true nature of nationalist/patriotic feeling is a will to power.

Because this motivation must be hidden from the masses the belief in patriotism and nationalism is therefore a modern form of superstition, a modern religious myth, if you will. Wherein the state takes the position of an omniscient and omnipotent god in place of a supernatural being.

The idea of a national identity is just as false as belief in supernatural beings, however. Humans quite simply cannot feel kinship with millions of anonymous individuals, therefore quasi-religious belief in an abstract concept that can be adapted to nearly any bourgeois viewpoint is necessary to make the state function. Somehow people must be convinced to believe the illogical premises of statism and this requires the development of a state mythology. Stories such as the one that George Washington chopped down a tree and refused to lie about it serve the same function as any other religious mythology. It's a belief in a implausible, xenophobic worldview that units people under one perspective. If outsiders reject the belief it only proves to the insiders that they were right to distrust outsiders and this strengthens the group kinship..

This inherent false-hood at the heart of nationalism/statism is what makes the pattern of social organization of Fascism so unstable and necessitates the violence and intimidation that are the hallmarks of the authoritarian state.

I think your making a massive mistaken running nationalism and patriotism together. People often do, but Patriotism is better and often still is expressed as an idea of civic virtue, quite different from nationalist chest beating.

There are also plenty of historical events described as patriotic which were not nationalistic, stuff that had it been on the wrong side of history would have been treason. The actions of Marlborough during 1688 for example.

A system based on nationalistic fervor is inherently unstable because there is a built in discontinuity between the cultural goals of society and the acceptable methods for reaching them.

This could lead to effects such as having an inordinate number of citizens imprisoned. Does that sound familiar?

I find it quite disheartening that leftists at the center of capitalism, the beneficiaries of imperialism, have such a strong tendency to adopt a view of nationalism which automatically disparages the revolutionary nationalist movements which have been fighting and dying in their struggle against imperialism for decades.

In any case, I don’t think we can simply nail down the idea of nationalism as prima facie good or bad because nationalism is always imbedded in a particular historical context. We must ask: "Whose nationalism, and for whom?"

At one pole of the capitalist world-system, the struggle for national self-determination, against imperialism, is central to the struggle for human liberation and socialism. On the opposite poll, the bald-eagle-chauvinism that dominates here in the states (assuming your American) is the ideology most closely linked with that imperialism.

Capitalism is not fascism. Even fascists hate capitalists.

Furthermore, capitalism engages in creative destruction. If anything, people hate capitalists not for replacing culture, but for misplacing culture. It's the same reason people claim progressives aren't socialists - they take pride in the "melting pot".

Have you ever heard of "kitsch"?