Nationalism

[keeblercrumb]

Stockholm is a very ethnically versatile city, moreso than most European cities, that often have a few dominant immigration ethnicities. We have a considerable population from many of the competing countries in the Euro08. Russia, Turkey, Greece, Croatia, Romania, Germany, Italy, Spain, Poland.... And a whole lot of Dutch and Portuguese exchange students, apparently. Didn't know that.. And for every game, a downtown park with a big screen TV have been host to hoards of fans and flags of every which nation.

Mood has been great so far. No indication of anything turning ugly.

Good..... It will be interesting.

I will be hopeful for Germany.... Throughout the World Cup, it was a great atmosphere.... but this Turkish thing worries me some....

-KC

 

[freshface]

Stockholm is a very ethnically versatile city, moreso than most European cities, that often have a few dominant immigration ethnicities. We have a considerable population from many of the competing countries in the Euro08. Russia, Turkey, Greece, Croatia, Romania, Germany, Italy, Spain, Poland.... And a whole lot of Dutch and Portuguese exchange students, apparently. Didn't know that.. And for every game, a downtown park with a big screen TV have been host to hoards of fans and flags of every which nation.

Mood has been great so far. No indication of anything turning ugly.

It's been great fun here in Germany too. They have a crowd at the stadium watching the game on the giant screens and the whole city erupts in cheers when Germany scores a goal. I am a little worried about the Germany-Turkey game tomorrow night, though.

 

[shereads]

"Nobody can lick our Cocks!"

//Threadjack//
To my bud Joe and a diehard Gamecock .. Recovering from spinal surgery today, I hope...back in the southern Carolina..

"I love you, Man! Hurry back, the girls at the Starlight Dinner keep asking about you!"

//End Threadjack//

The 'Cocks! Long may they wave. And good luck to your friend Joe.

[/threadjack threadjack]

 

[xssve]

But the hard, cold truth as evidenced by those crazed Ruskies on Saturday night is that 99% of us have national pride because we were simply born there.

I would like to think it is all innocent fun and sports and all that… But there is something that strikes me as sinister in this nationalism… something that makes nations militaristic and aggressive….

And now we have the Olympics again….. and despite the stated ideals, there is an enormous amount of flag waving, etc.. National Pride, in other words.

Think it is about “sportsmanship”? Check out the breathless medal count in YOUR country each day…. And talk to me about sportsmanship.

Is it something in our nature we should struggle against? Or should we embrace it as a kind of “war by proxy” thing?

I honestly don’t know….. But it depresses me. Thank God for the girls walking by… and even more for the ones who stop….

-KC

People inherently need self respect, and depending on the individual, will often choose anger over depression and/or marginalization.

Populations often display an aggregate of individual behavior that reflects that populations most pathological elements, probably a function of primacy effect, and this in turn creates a certain "permission" for less pathological individuals to act out on their more sublimated, but still extant, aggressions and grievances.

Nationalism is only one facet of it, society is, in at least one sense, simply a system of social divisions, whether racial, sexual, economic, territorial, etc.

Sorta stupid and mindless but all too common unfortunately, and again "society" in a sense creates this condition to begin with, as in another sense, society is system of values; i.e., we attach values to things that facilitate social order, and we support these value assignments to the degree we depend on them to satisfy our ambitions - religion is a social institution, and people will defend, die and even kill for it regardless of whatever values it ostensibly purported to represent, it takes on and strictly represents the values of the status quo, whatever it happens to be.

i.e., people will kill over it, regardless of how many wise men or women repeat the formula of the greatest good.

Ultimately, these institutions, which are abstractions and the creations of our own minds and ambitions seem to take on a life of their own, to be things outside of ourselves, and we are expected to serve them and their needs, rather than shaping them to serve us.

So it goes.

 

[xssve]

Oh, and sports is probably a healthier outlet than anything else, at least it typically doesn't explicitly require mortal combat to reach a (mostly) satisfactory conclusion - you can't say the same about other sports analogs: religion and politics notably, which increasingly follow a very similar team based formula.

Games people play.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

I feel that nationalism is demonized a lot moreso than it deserves to be. For some reason Nationalism is the new N word.

Nationalism takes an ugly turn when it drives a people to invade and crush another nation out of sheer hatred or convenience.

But when you compare a nation like America, where a woman just ran for office, and China, where baby girls are killed en masse because of their perceived lack of worth, the most useful and correct application of nationalism comes into play:

America's culture is superior to theirs. We don't murder baby girls en masse just because they're girls. We don't kill political prisoners for organ donations. We don't shoot pro-democracy demonstrators. We don't need pro-democracy demonstrators - we are a representative democracy. We don't have China's industrial pollution, the demon seed child of their laissez-faire-leaning "enterprise zone" policies that we abandoned with the onset of the EPA, Superfund laws, etc. We don't have a One-Child forced abortion policy. We are better than China.

That is a definition of nationalism and I do not at all believe that kind of nationalism is wrong.

How China treats their women or children is not a function of their being Chinese. It's a function of Chinese law. The proper response is not to say that the USA is better than China, but that US Law is more enlightened than Chinese Law in your view. This is not a trivial difference.

By your logic, you're saying Americans are superior to Chinese. Is that what you want to say? You're saying American Culture is superior to Chinese culture when the fact is, the Chinese went from a feudal, colonially exploited, agrarian culture to a 21st century industrial economy in 50 years, something American culture never could have done, and now they're paying the price.

 

[keeblercrumb]

Soviet Era Condom

Oh, and sports is probably a healthier outlet than anything else, at least it typically doesn't explicitly require mortal combat to reach a (mostly) satisfactory conclusion - you can't say the same about other sports analogs: religion and politics notably, which increasingly follow a very similar team based formula.

Games people play.

I have always thought that.... that this was all symbolic warfare and obviously a much healthier enterprise than war itself...

But what struck me about last weekend was perhaps I have this exactly backwards.... that it increases the likelihood of war by fanning the fires of nationalism......

Never mind the mindless violence that used to mar European football and still is an issue in South America.... The EU is so intertwined as to make war ludicrous....

But I am no longer so sanguine about Russian and Chinese sports.... or, for that matter, our own.

-KC

 

[xssve]

True, sports can be used to advance jingoistic nationalism, can even be a prelude to war - sports on one level functions like what primatologists refer to as a "display", i.e., there is a lot of beating of shields and making scary faces in an attempt to intimidate the opposition - the 1936 Olympics spring to mind, or the 1980 Winter Olympics, where larger geopolitical conflicts were played out symbolically in sporting events. In the later case, it may have helped prevent conflict from escalating, in the former, the conflict was probably inevitable.

In any case, I don't think there is any instance of anybody actually going to war over a sporting event, I still think sports help people blow off steam more often than they exacerbate tensions, statistically speaking.

In any case, all social institutions, from neighborhood associations to states function as vehicles of group fitness, and again, the propensity of these institutions to be "hijacked" to serve the interests of a relatively narrow consensus is a psychological phenomena that should never be far from the public consciousness.

By it's nature of course, it tends to precipitated by those with power, and who tend to prefer to discourage such debate - suppression or takeover of the media is of course the traditional first stage of an usurpation of any given democratic system, followed quickly by takeover of the legal and educational systems - the tripod upon which any functional democracy rests.

 

[keeblercrumb]

...
In any case, I don't think there is any instance of anybody actually going to war over a sporting event, I still think sports help people blow off steam more often than they exacerbate tensions, statistically speaking.

---QUOTE]

(Great post, by the way) Well, there was the infamous "Soccer War" between Honduras and El Salavador in the late 60's, I think.

But yeah...... It is usually the other way around.

There is no doubt that it takes a fired up poplulace to support a war.... and Nationalistic sporting events can only contribute to that...

A "chicken and egg" thing, I suppose..

Still worries me...

=KC