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Libertarian Labor Review #14
Winter 1992-93, page 1
Editorial:
The Scourge of Nationalism
Patriotism assumes that our globe is divided into little
spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate. Those who
have had the fortune of being born on some particular
spot consider themselves better, nobler, grander, more
intelligent than the living beings inhabiting any other
spot. It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on
that chosen spot to fight, kill and die in the attempt to
impose his superiority upon all others. The inhabitants
of the other spots reason in like manner...
Emma Goldman, Patriotism
As we go to press, Croatians, Serbians and Bosnians are
engaged in full-scale war. Russia is threatening action against
Estonia unless it stops discriminating against ethnic Russians.
Border disputes are flaring throughout the former Soviet empire as
nationalists try to carve out their own, ethnically-pure nation
states.
Thus, we see the "national independence" movements move from
the Third World to eastern Europe. Nationalism is not, of course,
a new phenomena. But today "civilized" warfare has advanced to the
point where entire cities can be levelled in a matter of hours, and
tens of thousands slaughtered in mere minutes.
War is tragic enough even when necessitated (as, for example,
during the Spanish Revolution) by workers' self-defense. But its
devastation is all the more tragic resulting from the empty chimera
of nationalism. There is, at root, no such thing as a nation--
nationalism is an empty construct that serves both to conceal
internal oppression and to define the vast majority of the world's
population as outside the realm of human solidarity.
As Jose Marti noted, "To change the master is not to be free."
Throughout the Third World, nationalism has served as the vehicle
for a new set of masters to take control--but there is no evidence
that the majority of the population has benefitted thereby. Nor
have the nationalist revolutions in the Soviet Bloc benefitted most
workers (as evidenced most recently in Lithuania where voters have
ousted the nationalists and returned the former communists to
power--not that there is any reason to believe their oppressive
yoke will be any lighter).
The nation-state is not a natural community. Rather,
nationalism is the political theology of the state--a doctrine
evolved to justify all manner of outrages against external and
internal threats to the state's (or the aspiring state's)
interests. Self-determination has nothing to do with it.
Thus, Serbian nationalists relocate Croatian and Moslem
populations to concentration camps (when they don't execute them
outright) in order to create ethnically homogenous territories in
which to construct their new nation-state.
Indonesian generals massacre residents of East Timor who wish
to set up their own nation-state, in the name of preserving the
unity of the Indonesian nation (itself a colonial construct devised
to simplify administration of far-flung islands).
In the name of nationalism, the U.S. and its allies felt no
compunction about massacring Iraqis. In turn, Iraq's leaders appeal
to nationalism to mobilize support for their attacks against the
Kurds (whose nationalist "leaders" in turn use their armed forces
to suppress efforts by workers to take control of their
workplaces).
The anarchist alternative to nationalism, as Sam Dolgoff notes
in "Third World Nationalism and the State" (available from LLR), is
a libertarian, stateless federation of various peoples with all
other peoples of the world. We reject the artificial national
boundaries imposed by capitalism and the state to segregate and
divide the workers into hostile camps.
Our freedom, our ability to realize our capacities and pursue
our desires, can only be realized when we reject nationalist
efforts to paint our fellow workers in different parts of the world
as "other"--as people whose aspirations and needs are less
important or less legitimate than our own. It is time to more
beyond international solidarity, with its implicit notion that
national boundaries retain some meaning or legitimacy, towards a
global solidarity of people struggling to realize our common
humanity, and the freedom that we can truly enjoy only when it is
extended to all.