Posted: Sat Apr 18, 2020 10:19 amFahran wrote:Which is why we need both patriotism and nationalism in the absence of a monarch.
Nakena wrote:As what would you define a country then? Like a place where you are by tradition, culture and other ways being connected to your kith and kin, your folk?
Novus America wrote:[un]Truth pilled.
Cambrian Albany wrote:In what? I thought my nationalist credentials were clear?
The state is the people exercising (or declining to exercise) their power to govern the country. Nothing more than that. The state is no more to do with nationalism than business, church, court or army.
Nations are fake. Nations are formed from symbol. Symbol is of course important to man. See: Jung's Man and his Symbols. But Symbols do not a country make, symbols do not a people make. Symbols do not cohere men, only other men cohere men. Symbols can be interpreted many different ways. That's why you have some people around the world who burn American flag, and some people who wave it. Same way Communist flag for many means freedom, and it is on their national flag, and for others tyranny and it is illegal to burn it. Swastika we think is symbol of Nazis, but many other people do not think so.
Without symbol, no nation. But symbol doesn't mean anything, only what you tell people it does, and only what they will believe after you have lied to them enough. So symbol can mean anything. Symbol does mean anything. National flag and eagle is American symbol, but what did it mean to Armistead, Kemper and Garnett? Or what it means today, in complete opposite way, to Kaepernick? No, nations are fake. They are lies that people believe in to reach different truths.
The country is real. The country is the land, the fields, the rivers and the becks, the hills and the woods, the streets, the railway cuts, the beaches. The country is the stench of fertiliser, the salt that blows through into your nose and the boats lined up by the pier, the whipping wind on the moor, the lone lights of the car streaming down the roman road at night, the piss dripping in the back alley.
The country is the mud in which you first kicked a football, the stone bunker in the long gone bomber field, the streets, gardens, and parks where you first fell in love. The country is the war memorial and the plinth, the Norman church, the old homes. The country is the land which your ancestors forty generations removed put their sweat and blood into, the yards in which the women were buried after they had given birth, the fields in which men slaughtered one another. You are one tiny atom of the life of your country, and if you weren't, you would not be of that country, you would be an alien, or a guest. You are a fleeting part of the heritage of your country, which connects you to all the other fleeting parts to make an emergent mass, greater, stronger, more meaningful than the sum of your parts.
That is the only thing that is real. We can touch it. It made us. It shaped and formed our demands, desires, dreams. The country is the individuals greater connection to their community, to their history, to their future. It is not symbol, because it is real, because it can be touched, felt, smelt. It can be fought for, died for, worked for. The country is real.
Nations are fake. Death to nations. Long live the country.
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