Is there such a thing as a national identity? Is nationalism any decent or just a cancer that leads to world wars? Is there such a thing as identity or free will at all?
Yes
Yes
Impossible to know
>>7229256
Is there such a thing as a national identity?
>Yes
s nationalism any decent or just a cancer that leads to world wars?
>Yes
What?
Is there such a thing as identity or free will at all?
>Impossible to know
Come on guys, we can do better, fucking discuss.
A cleverer dick than today's reactionary nationalists once said: "The working men have no country. We cannot take from that what they have not got."
>>7229284
Yeah, a worker in the UK and a worker in Myanmar are exactly the same, amirite
>>7229284
>"The working men have no country. We cannot take from that what they have not got."
>>7229288
>>7229269
Nationalism can lead to happy, productive countries or ethnic cleansing, so I's say it goes both ways. And there is not a sufficient amount of information to determine if the will exists.
>>7229284
The problem with a popular orthodox marxist interpretation is places material wealth as the be all end all of human desire. Even though Marx himself was not as reductive in his work, he never said Nationalism and its ability to liberate should be replaced, but should be complimented by a dialectical material foundation
Of course there is such a thing as identity, it is precisely what makes nationalism exist. And in fact it is this identification itself that brings war (but also love, don't forget), because it is more than saying what you are, but what you are not. In other words, it is what makes "me and others", this side of the frontier, this project, this religion, this perception... You don't even have to go far into macropolitics, identification is what make us clash ideas as if these ideas were ourselves, it's what makes us dive into our current emotions as if it was all there is, it's the skin that protects us from the outside but also makes us experience it.
Nationalism is just one side of it. You may also want to pay attention to whether there are things underneath the discourse of nationalism (or any other discourse). What makes a specific country a country to be fought, or in another way to say it, what your identity is really about. Say that in a huge turn of events the US were to engage in a socialist project, would the same nationalists of today defend it because it is still the US? No, they would say it's not their country anymore, that it was corrupted and so on. So you'll see that it's not that they are defending the US for whatever it is, but only insofar as it is capitalist, that's where their true loyalty is. Or you can look at people who say they are buddhists but "without the mysticism", which really puts their secular position above Buddha, they are not really buddhists. Our ideology is the ruler with which we measure everything, so look beyond what people say about themselves to what really is about. People will read the same books and fight for the same country or cause, but be acting in behalf of very different things.
Read the sticky.
Fun fact: The very notion of identifying with a prescribed "nation" makes oneself a Nationalist, as it confirms the belief in the concept of "Nationhood"
Yes nationalism is cancer Derp are you kidding?
