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When the Nation-state Rebels

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Clarissa

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The nation-state state rebelled against its creator, the Enlightenment,  and waged a massive war – in the most literal sense possible – against the Enlightened values of individualism, reason, women’s rights, rationality, etc. Hitler ‘ s hatred for the Jews is very emblematic of this antagonism. Hitler ‘s philosophy rests on the deification of the nation-state. The historically stateless Jews subvert the legitimacy of the order that rests on the belief that everybody should be packed neatly into the box of “their own country.”

The very existence of the Jews, let alone their tendency to prosper, the ease with which they move around,  their multilingualism, and their culturally conditioned love of reason and learning is a threat to the myth of the nation-state. Of course, the Jews’ rejection of the nation-state was only one among many reasons for the pathological anti-Semitism of Germans in the 1930s – 1940s. But it was an important one. Germans had come by their nation-state late and with great difficulty. It had been quite a struggle for them to force themselves to believe in their imagined community and then to keep dying by the million for this bizarre fiction. And that entire time, there were the pesky Jews hanging around,  reminding the Germans how ridiculously useless that sacrifice had been.

Ultimately, the Enlightened values won and humanity put reason,  individualism, and hedonism above sacrificing oneself for an imaginary construct.

Curiously, that was precisely when many Jews decided to put aside the Enlightenment and choose the nation-state instead.

25 responses to “When the Nation-state Rebels”

  1. musteryou Avatar
    musteryou

    ISIS supporters has some people hostage in a Sydney cafe right now. All air traffic and public transport systems have been stopped and people are being evacuated from the CBD. I hope this wakes some people up about the different values some people espouse.

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      Oh God. Seriously? What a horror! I am very very sorry to hear this!

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      1. musteryou Avatar
        musteryou

        Not a lot of news coming in except this and on the radio this morning — apparently they can see hostages pressed against the glass and a sign on the window saying there is no god but allah.

        At 0945 this morning a gunman believed to have jihadist connections and flying a jihadist flag has taken siege in the Lindt Cafe in Martin Place.

        The location is central to the railway, shops, government and media.

        Up to 20 hostages have been taken and people are pressed against the glass.

        All train services have stopped and comms shut down. Anti terrorism units have been deployed and the city is being evacuated.

        Any members in the CBD are advised to leave immediately.

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      2. musteryou Avatar
        musteryou

        http://www.perthnow.com.au/news/martin-place-siege-hostages-taken-in-lindt-chocolate-shop-by-armed-robber/story-fnii5s3z-1227156245751?utm_content=SocialFlow&utm_campaign=EditorialSF&utm_source=PerthNow&utm_medium=Facebook

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    2. musteryou Avatar
      musteryou

      Ok, it’s not an IS flag in the window, just an arabic flag often used by jihadists.

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      1. cliff arroyo Avatar
        cliff arroyo

        Oh, Okay! Then cool!

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        1. musteryou Avatar
          musteryou

          Nobody knows what it is all about in fact, but five hostages have been released.

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      2. cliff arroyo Avatar
        cliff arroyo

        I jihadi flag in the window and they don’t know what it’s about?
        There are exactly two choices

        1. It’s about some muslim grievance (legitimate or not).

        2. It’s some non-muslim trying to make people hate muslims.

        Which is more likely?

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        1. musteryou Avatar
          musteryou

          Well it is certainly number one, but they will not tell anyone the specifics of anything because the police are still trying to negotiate with the gunman. It might turn out he is mentally unstable.

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      3. cliff arroyo Avatar
        cliff arroyo

        I sense that this is a job for Joe Biden.

        Liked by 1 person

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        1. musteryou Avatar
          musteryou

          One hostage runs out of the building and you can see she is going, “WTF, there are so many guys in black pointing their automatic weapons at me!”

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  2. musteryou Avatar
    musteryou

    Ok, addressing the actual post…

    Scapegoating seems to occur when people have an identity that is unknown and hard to pin down. This produces paranoia. Add to this the factor of people suffering within themselves. If they are not intellectuals, they will be suffering for unknown and unfathomable reasons. They’re not economists, they’re not psychologists and they are not historians. Therefore they resort to the common human default when education is not present, which is to come up with a crude moral explanation for their suffering. That is why it is so easy to pin something onto the Jews.

    As intellectuals, on the other hand, our overly refined default is to attribute rationality or the capacity to think about abstract ideas to others who are not intellectuals. We can come up with explanations that the Jews seemed to threaten the nation state. I very much doubt that that is particularly true. It may become more true to the extent that people are intellectuals, but the majority of people are not.

    As for imagined communities and pointless sacrifices, isn’t that the human lot in general? Or, are we going to suddenly come up with a line delineating true communities from imagined ones, so that we never again make any mistakes and cast people as our friends when they are enemies, or overestimate alliances, or that we never continue to project parts of ourselves out there into the world (bearing in mind that empathy is also a common form of projection). And we all die, after working as well as we can and leaving what we do behind as our legacy, so we all make sacrifices– all of us with our lives.

    In any case, all of these realities are very complex and it seems a bit farfetched to suggest that we will one day suddenly separate truth from fiction (or that we would be better off in all ways if we did).

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    1. cliff arroyo Avatar
      cliff arroyo

      “As for imagined communities and pointless sacrifices, isn’t that the human lot in general?”

      This! (I’d like to upvote the post 178 times, but since I’m limited to one I’ll downvote instead in protest of only having one vote).

      It’s not like no government form in existence before the nation state demanded people sacrifice their lives. They all did and whatever follows the nation state will as well. That is probably not a feature of human communities will change in the next few centuries.

      The nation state was just kind of meta about it, saying “die for your metaphoric blood kin” rather than “die for our clan!” or “die for our king or “die for our god!”. And meta-narratives are too easy to pick apart, if not one’s own then other people’s narratives about the special nature of their group are too transparent.

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      1. musteryou Avatar
        musteryou

        There doesn’t even have to be people wandering around thinking about the special nature of their group. The assumption that some (most?) people hold, which is that we start from the abstraction of the nation and work down to the particular is not necessarily accurate.

        For instance I am eternally grateful that soldiers bought me some time to live in Africa longer. That’s an organic fact. At the same time, I can be critical of the kind of society I would have grown up in. This isn’t about being special or having a narrative. It’s organic fact, plus some additional analysis.

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      2. Clarissa Avatar
        Clarissa

        Before the nation-state state was invented, there was no possibility of making millions go die so cheaply and enthusiastically as it happened during the two world wars. Julius Caesar had to decorate his soldiers ‘ weapons with jewelry to prevent them from dropping it every time they ran away from battle. Spain wasted everything it stole from the colonies on paying the indifferent soldiers who kept going on strike and had zero enthusiasm for any cause but enriching themselves.

        There is no possibility that anybody could have kept people dying in the trenches as massively, stupidly and protractedly as happened during WWI before the invention of the nation-state.

        It would be great if we could stop arguing whether the nation-state was an enormous transformation because that’s not in dispute any longer.

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      3. cliff arroyo Avatar
        cliff arroyo

        You’re still talking about difference of scale and effectiveness (quantitative) and not of kind (qualitative).

        At present the post-nation state that’s most effective at getting people to throw away their lives is the Janus-like international jihadi movement which is exploiting the demise of the nation state but buttressing it in fantasies based on the past.

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        1. Clarissa Avatar
          Clarissa

          “At present the post-nation state that’s most effective at getting people to throw away their lives is the Janus-like international jihadi movement which is exploiting the demise of the nation state but buttressing it in fantasies based on the past.”

          – These terrorist groups pay their combatants. It’s easy to do since they are not enormous. The era of the hyper-excitable believers dying for free is gone. Now there is a price list. They get paid in Chechnya, in Palestine, in Iraq – everywhere. The organizer of Al-Qaida was from an ultra-rich family and that’s not a coincidence. Dirt-poor ideologues can’t attract anybody these days because they can’t provide a good salary and a good package of benefits. 🙂 🙂

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  3. cliff arroyo Avatar
    cliff arroyo

    “the Jews, let alone their tendency to prosper, the ease with which they move around, their multilingualism, and their culturally conditioned love of reason and learning”

    I think you need to refine that more, as none of it seems to apply to groups like the satmar or hassidic jews decimating public education in East Ramapo (or hassidic jews in Israel).

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      I think the post makes it clear that the Israeli Jews chose to step back from this model after the trauma of the Holocaust.

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      1. cliff arroyo Avatar
        cliff arroyo

        I really doubt if orthodox (as a cover term for hassidic jews, many of which are very anti-zionist) ever bought into that model.

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        1. Clarissa Avatar
          Clarissa

          Hassidic Jews venerate learning for its own sake as a religious good. And like nobody else I know. They worship the written word (literally) and pray to it. In Israel, they are refusing to go into the army which is a direct defiance of the values of the nation-state.

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      2. cliff arroyo Avatar
        cliff arroyo

        “Hassidic Jews venerate learning for its own sake as a religious good. And like nobody else I know”

        But what do they learn? Religious texts, yeah, but what else? And were women given any chance to develop their academic skills?

        Of course the traditional Jewish culture of learning is amazingly helpful for Jews who turn their back on the closed hermetic dead end world of religious scholarship. But those who did mostly seemed to join nation state models to a greater or lesser extent (like the pro-Ukrainian Jewish side of your family).

        “they are refusing to go into the army which is a direct defiance of the values of the nation-state”

        I’d be more impressed if they refused nation state funded welfare… but if I’m not mistaken they’re always first in line for that.

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        1. Clarissa Avatar
          Clarissa

          “But those who did mostly seemed to join nation state models to a greater or lesser extent (like the pro-Ukrainian Jewish side of your family).”

          – Let’s make no mistake. Since the nation-state arose, nobody could check out of it and into any other model at will. Because there is no other model. Everybody adapted to the nation-state. But in terms of the USSR, the moment the borders opened, ever so slightly, the Soviet Jews began a massive exodus. This means they had adapted to the nation-state – what else could they have done? But on the emotional level, the level where it really matters, they never developed any allegiance to it. I personally believe that is great.

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  4. el Avatar
    el

    \\ Of course, the Jews’ rejection of the nation-state was only one among many reasons for the pathological anti-Semitism of Germans in the 1930s – 1940s.

    Never thought about this before. What were other reasons, except old traditional anti-semitism?

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      Germany had been created out of enormously disparate elements and very very recently. There was a desperate need to unite these very different people around something. That something can only be a hatred of a very present and visible Other. A close Other, not just a distant one.

      This is another reason.

      Anti-semitism always existed. But it always served many purposes, as well. Sometimes, several strong purposes united and there would be an enormous flare-up of hatred.

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A conservative literary critic and college professor

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