User:RD/9k/notes on "nationalism" (Q43,91)
Main entry
nationalism (George Orwell)
/ the individual behavior of identifying oneself with a specific national population, racial subpopulation, religion, political ideology, or abstract idea, such as to place the importance of that link between individual and "idea" (sic) beyond Good and Evil to the point an individual has no greater duty than to advance its interests, refuses to arbitrarily desert the faction or nation despite "good arguments" against it (sic), refuses to abandon their individual emotions about a situation and individual judgement for bare unbiased objective rationality (sic) to coldly evaluate whether what other people say is true to the exclusion of what they currently say and believe, despite being surrounded by more skeptical swaths of intellectuals and perhaps wider public opinion that each promote disconnecting from attachment to any particular group of people more than others, and leaves behind merely defending a group of people (sic) to more or less start desiring (sic) to accumulate power, rather than seeking to free themself from the biases away from material fact that come from having membership in or affinity to something seeking that freedom through taking up a moral effort to become a better person; this sentiment (sic) can be identified by individuals either not having heard of or not talking about civilizationally-associated atrocities such as in the Warsaw rising of 1944 [huh?] or lethal large-scale disasters such as the Ukraine famine of 1932, or by individuals discussing that atrocities or disasters happened but refusing to recognize them as essentially similar in their substance to other atrocities or disasters; this sentiment (sic) is often accompanied by being unable to tell which people were actually produced out of a national population, such as by mentally "naturalizing" Stalin into a Russian although he was born in Georgia [1] / living amid dreams of power and conquest somewhat uninterested in the real world (Orwell) ->
wow this is a piece of work. I have... thoughts about this.
1) why does Wikipedia think that anything but a nation-state is an abstract idea when everything here but "abstract idea" is in fact a physical thing called a group of people
2) this seems like a little bit of a category error in that it is implying that this form of nation-state-ism is an Ideal people suddenly choose rather than a state of things that materially exists at any given point in time.
3) to even float this concept at people is implicitly endorsing post-structuralism. it's actually a very specific mode of existence to think that you aren't inherently part of a greater whole and have the right to defect to another greater whole at any moment you like. somehow people like Bertrand Russell just think that's natural, but like, if he truly believed he was free to doubt anything and defect from anything at any moment then he'd be free to defect from science and support anti-science, free to defect from anti-racism and support racism, and free to defect from logic and support irrationality, as well as obligated to make some of those defections when the alternative makes him personally uncomfortable enough. it is materially impossible to be infinitely free and be allowed to doubt anything and change sides at any moment you want.
4) it breaks my brain that Orwell essentially dislikes Trotskyism because it isn't Trotskyist enough and he wants an infinitely orange philosophy where he can split from anything and complain about anything no matter how sensible it is. why are people like this? do we truly want to deny science and medicine and oh wait, yes we do.Freedom honestly.
Related
- the real Russian people / the real Georgian people / the real United States people / the real Israeli people / the real Palestinian people
- Stalin was not a real Russian -> people argue this from two angles: A) Stalin came from Georgia so he wasn't a good representative of Russia B) Stalin is properly described as a member of the Soviet population as distinct from the Russian population, making him not a real Russian. Orwell really argued the first one. which is a silly argument to make when Georgians will say he wasn't a real Georgian.
- Stalin was not a real Georgian -> this again has two angles: A) Stalin had more affinity to Moscow, Russia than Georgia B) Stalin was a member of the Soviet population so he wasn't a real Georgian. if you ask me? A is pretty fair because if the place he came from doesn't want him then logically he's part of the new place where, historically speaking, he had a pretty high approval for a while.
the real Georgian people + Stalin = Stalin was not a real Georgian. - Barack Obama is a Kenyan / Barack Obama is better characterized as a Kenyan than a United States person because his father was born in Kenya; this is to imply but not to state that Barack Obama II was born in Kenya although he was actually born in Hawaii [2] [3] -> after thinking about it a little I realized that "but Stalin was born in Georgia" is very similar to this.
the real United States + Barack Obama = Barack Obama is a Kenyan.