nationalism – just moving along like everyone else

cephiedvariable:

roachpatrol:

piccolina-mina:

rememberwhenyoutried:

I get making fun of America for its flag worship and stuff but Brexit should be all the reminder you need that you don’t need flags in every classroom and a pledge of allegiance every morning for the people of a country to turn out absurdly xenophobic.

LOUDER FOR THE PEOPLE IN THE BACK

i used to feel like america’s flag worship thing was really creepy and fucked up, but now i think that america is so big, it’s actually a necessary. america has a ton of different states, environments, and cultures, plus the stated values of independence and individuality. state governments clash with the federal government and different chunks of the country absolutely don’t understand—or like—each other. so maybe the constant reminder that we all wave the same flag around and are part of the same nation is important to keep everyone from just breaking apart. we’re signaling to each other that we’re all, ultimately, on the same side.

These are two of the most misguided comments I have seen on tumblr in a long time.

1) The UK most certainly does have a flag-waving, poem reciting masturbatory sense of xenophobic nationalistic pride that is more than just comparable to the US’s. “The Sun Never Sets on the British Empire”, “God Save the Queen/King”, the whole myth about how the Brits ~held the line in Europe all alone against the Nazis and saved the world~. This is the nation that literally created the idea of ‘White Man’s Burden’. They slap the fucking Union Jack on everything.

2) The US was founded during the rise of Nation-State Identity and thus was allowed to nurture its propagandist idea of what made it “unique” within its borders from the early days of its inception. The whole “oh, American states are all just sooOOoooOOoooo different from each other” is part of the myth of American Exceptionalism. US culture is not actually that diverse when compared to, like… almost anywhere else in the world (just think for a second about places like: India, China, Indonesia, Spain, Nigeria, etc.) Most of the US’s diversity comes from immigration and subsets of oppressed minorities that the US government has traditionally tried to silence, sideline or snuff out (the same as in my country or any other predominantly-white ex-colony). These are the kind of people who feel disunity with the flag, for good reason.

3) Nationalist ideology in general seeks to erase diversity. The American flag, for many, is a symbol of oppression and cultural (or literal) genocide. I understand that you, nowhere in your post, said that this is how people should feel, but it’s an incredibly naive call for unity with a cultural idea that is especially hostile to those who don’t fit its parametres; an unconscious reinforcement of Nationalist Exceptionalism in a time when such ideologies should be dismantled. The people who feel disunity with the flag are not the people breaking the USA apart, and the people who worship it absolutely will not respond to any call to unity with those who don’t fit what they feel the flag represents. It is not a necessity – its a symbol of the ideology that caused those divides in the first place.

I get that these posts came from a good place, however when I saw this cross my dash I actually had to double-take because what this one-two-punch says – entirely due to thoughtlessness and not malice – is: “Hey, the UK doesn’t have exactly the same kind of xenophobic nationalism and the US does, so I guess that maybe aspects of the US’s xenophobic nationalism aren’t that bad and flag worship can be a good thing!”

Flag worship is still creepy and bad. More nationalism is not the solution to nationalism.