Friday, August 25, 2017

Nationalism 1&2

25th August 2017

An old American woman once berated me for being a Scottish nationalist, because, she said, all nationalism is evil. I want to address this because not all nationalisms are equal, and because recently British unionists have taken on this argument whenever Scottish independence is mentioned.
The Collins dictionary defines nationalism thus: Nationalism is the desire for political independence of people who feel they are historically or culturally a separate group within a country. The urge towards revolution in America came from this feeling that the American people were not anymore a part of the British Empire, but were in fact their own entity with a separate political and cultural identity.


This is the nationalism that rises up against empires. Mahatma Gandhi said, "Personally I crave not for "independence," which I do not understand, but I long for freedom from the English yoke."


Mahatma Gandhi has become the universal icon of peace, so when we look at his nationalism, we have to see something very different from the racist violence we saw on display in Charlottesville Virginia a week ago, the parading of the alt right nationalists and the neo-nazis. Gandhi's nationalism was one thing, and Steve Bannon's quite another.


So, too, Scottish nationalism. On the day in 1707 that Scotland was subsumed into the United Kingdom, there were riots throughout Scottish cities against the nobles that had agreed to such a thing. And then the British Empire ruling out of Westminster did what it did to every other conquered territory: it banned the language, the customs, the right of representation. If this were not so, then why did it execute independence fighters on a count of treason all the way up to 20th Century.
Scotland is still a country in its own right with its own educational and judicial systems, its own mentality, its own ethical stance. Were it not for the fact that it is an inherently wealthy little country, Westminster would not put up a fight.
So there's an inherent feeling of injustice in the kind of nationalism to which I subscribe. Just as there was in Gandhi's. The paranoid psychopathology of white supremacy and white nationalism or even nationalist isolationism is quite something else, and has nothing to do with a country like Scotland or Catalonia or Basque Country striving to get out from under the yoke of its oppressors.



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