AW Blog Chain January 2009: Nationalism is racism
This post is meant to carry on from Razib Ahmed’s post in South Asia Blog as part of the Absolute Write Blog Chain for January 2009.
In his post he talks about the economic recession. And I suppose I’m meant to follow on and relate to something he said. Yesterday, I spent Australia Day (or what I prefer to call Invasion Day!) at the Big Day Out, Australia’s biggest music festival.
The day was meant to be for enjoying music. My highlights were Bullet for my Valentine, Mammal and The Butterfly Effect. But the thing that pissed me off about the day was all of the fucking Australian flags!
Australia Day marks the Invasion of Australia and the beginning of the genocide on the Aboriginal people who lived here before white people. It’s a racist holiday. And the rise of the popularity of flags at the Big Day Out (at all BDOs, not just the Melbourne one on Australia Day) came after the Cronulla Riot in 2005. Shirts such as one with an Australian Flag saying “Support It or Fuck Off,” were common.
What does this have to do with economic recession? Well in times of crisis, this kind of racist thuggery is often used to recruit to fascist organisations. They use the politics of division to blame ethnic groups on economic troubles. We can only expect these ideas to, sadly, become more popular.
Yesterday, conveniently barely heard about in Melbourne, there was a riot in Manly with such chants as “if you’re white and you know it, clap your hands!” and “fuck off we’re full!” With such chants, it was pretty stupid for the cops to even try to say it wasn’t racist.
And then the Premier of NSW tried to claim the youths didn’t understand the symbolism of the flag. But they did. As I said above, the flag and the nationalism is racist to the core because of Australia’s history of dispossession.
Racism has been used from the White Australia policy up until today with the War on Terror, where governments and the media continue to demonize Arab and Muslims to justify the wars in the Middle East.
Nationalism is about saying that people are divided by nation states and not by our social class. But I’d say I have more in common with an office worker in the Middle East than I do with a Billionaire Businessman in Toorak or Mosman.
And during economic crisis this ideology can gain popularity as people look for answers to why their lives are being ruined. Fascists totally capitalize on this and this is part of my reason for writing what is known as the “zombie/fascist” story.
But more importantly, it means that those on the other side, committed anti-racists need to be able to stand up to these racist ideas, even those ideas that pose as “good natured patriotism.”
I’ll pass it over to FreshHell at Life in Scribbletown. Please check out her post in the next 24 hours.
Technorati Tags: economy, recession, capitalism, nationalism, racism, Australia Day, fascism
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Thanks! I’ll take it from here. I think I know what I’ll about – we have something similar here in state of Virginia – the Civil War and Confederate flags that fly alongside US flags. I say: you can’t have it both ways! Either you’re in the union or you’re not.
Thanks Ben. I’ve been reading a lot of Japanese and world history recently. Nationalism scares the hell out of me.
My country Bangladesh was a British colony for nearly two centuries (1757-1947). Fortunately, the British people could never become the majority here. Well, they came here mainly for trade but went to Australia for settling there. Thanks God that they could not settle here. Otherwise, our condition could have become much similar to that of the Australian indigenous people.
It is unfortunate that so many countries are founded by the wiping out of the indigenous people. The US certainly did no favors to the Native Americans. We can only hope that people and nations “grow” over time and learn to accept and embrace other cultures. “Why can’t we all just get along?”