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Bangkok Pundit reports on how, in the context of worsening relations between Thailand and Cambodia, Abhisist Vejjajiva (the current Prime Minister) is condemning former PM (and current fugitive) Thaksin Shinawatra a "traitor" for accepting a job with the Cambodian government:
As calls to patriotism usually are, it is fairly juvenile name-calling.
Yo' mother works for Cambodia! Irrespective of well-known git (he disowned his own daughter for being gay) and Premier of Cambodia, Hun Sen, being deliberately provocative (Ha! I've got your fugitive right here - and I'm appointing him a special economic adviser! How'd you like THEM apples!), you'd hope that Vejjajiva could do better than that. Maybe take the high ground? Here in Australia, we're traditionally fairly cynical of authority and US-style flag-waving patriotism. (We laughed derisively at the idiotic "Barack Obama hates America if he doesn't wear a flag pin" confected controversy in 2008.) Still, overt displays of flag-waving "patriotism" became much more prominent under our former conservative Prime Minister, John Howard. It was very quickly linked in with racism, from Pauline "Australia is being swamped with Asians" Hanson...
...through to the Cronulla riots:
Apart from the racism on display, the showy patriotism and aggressive flag-waving saddened me because our lack of silly, self-absorbed nationalism was, ironically, one of the things about this country I most admired. People try to draw a fine distinction between nationalism and patriotism ("your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it", according to Bernard Shaw), but ultimately they boil down to the same thing for their practitioners - my country, right or wrong. Fundamentally I see them as innately negative. How does patriotism make anything better? How does it do anything other than drive wedges between nations, deepen conflicts, give racists and demagogues an excuse to exclude people and demean opponents (hence Samuel Johnson's famous "patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel"), and overall make the world more dangerous and unfriendly? How "patriotic" do you really want your country to be? How "patriotic" are you comfortable with your neighbours being?
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Hey, commenting here is really easy after all! You know which nation is the best at commenting here? Yours.
There are some interesting distinctions to consider about this issue. Patriotism and Nationalism are not the same thing. Love for one's country does not mean a blind jingoistic bias, indeed true love for one's country means the ability to be critical in order identify ways to make the country better. Nationalism however is fraught with in-grained bias and political expediency and requires uncritical acceptance of dubious ideas. The overt display of jingoistic nationalism is seldom in isolation from political economic agendas. Cui Bono? History informs us that the populus rarely benefit from nationalism though elite vested interests often do. The more blindly nationalistic a country is the more likely it is to be a belligerent neighbour. The difficulty is the crossover between patriotism and nationalism as the vocabulary and rhetoric can be ‘fellow travellers’. If my country or neighbouring countries are patriotic that’s fine; the world needs as much love as it can get, if they are nationalistic I worry that cryptic tyrants are grooming us for war.
I agree with all your criticisms of nationalism. How far do you say "patriotism" extends? To me there's no real meaningful distinction between them, it's just a question of degrees. But maybe my definition of "patriotism" is different from yours.
Well some first thoughts are that patriotism can exist separately from the nation state but nationalism requires it. Patriotism is about love for the geography, customs, idiom et al of a more or less ‘organic’ group which is distinguishable from other groups with differing geographies, customs, culture etc. Nations are identifiable by their requirement to impose themselves and non-loving ideologies upon the populus. Nations, especially after the rampant colonialism of the last few hundred years, are frequently marriages of convenience and the simplest way to forge national unity is through a response to, or creation of an external threat. Scapegoats and propaganda and jingoistic symbolism are a matter of course with Nationalism, it is difficult for ‘assembled’ nations to perpetuate without them. The strong flag-waving nationalism exhibited in some countries is a product of an underlying lack of unity within the nation and a requirement for overt symbolism. Nations derived from a more ‘organic’ state, based on cultural and geographic convergence, have less need for jingoistic symbols as the essence of being that nation is lived everyday and needs no critique subsuming symbol worship. |
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