Nationalism: The Great Lie or the Greatest Lie?

I've never considered myself a nationalist. I don't believe that I inherently belong to any particular nation. I guess the reason is that I find myself almost indistinguishable from a large number of English-speaking white people from countries around the world.

I do, however, consider myself a humble person, or in other words, a cultural relativist. I'm probably using the term wrong, but I'm trying to say that I don't want to be quick to jump to conclusions about what the right way of living is for other people. In other other [sic] words, if someone in a faraway land wants to be a nationalist, that's fine with me. In fact, if the people of my own countries were to divide themselves into nations, that's okay with me too. Indians and Quebecois come immediately to mind. Weird how that works: Indians and Quebecois have nationss, but I have none. Or if I do, it's the nation of Canada, whose self definition implies the non-existence or compositional existence of the Indian and Quebecois nations. Ie. the nation of Canada is made up of many smaller, weaker nations, plus miscellaneous English-speaking white people who happen to live in the territory and be the majority.

Well now, what's the problem with this kind of nationalism? Isn't it kind of organic? If you're living in the Stone Age, then yes. But anything beyond the age of empires has to have a different mode of organization. I have no tribal council to bring my grievances to my government. I have no heroes, no young men to fight in the name of my tribe. I have personal access to government services acting in the name of the monarch. If I have a complaint, I can take it to the court. This has been the case for just about as long as we have had civilization. And yet, somehow tribes and nations have continued to exist. The reason for this has something to do with the inefficiency of central authority. When the central authority is designed to deal with all people, inevitably some of the people fall through the cracks. And when these people are similar enough to each other, as happens when they share a common origin, territory, culture, and language; they can assign a council and a band of heroes to advance their cause within the empire.

But what is it that seems strange? Well, I was actually surprised at something that was said about the war in Georgia, or rather, I was surprised at my own reaction to what was said. Mr. Gorbachev was giving his opinion on the situation, and he said that the people of Georgia and the people of Russia and South Ossetia have nothing against each other. They like each other. This makes sense to me. I have relatives in Alberta, Washington, and Idaho. I wouldn't want Canada and the United States to go to war, because that puts all of my friends in danger. Civilians don't like war. Huh.

No duh. But what surprised me was that I hadn't even thought of this when the first news of the war came in on my Google feeds. When news services tell us about wars, they tell us: "South Ossetia tried to break away from Georgia, so Georgia attacked them. Russia likes South Ossetia, so Russia attacked Georgia." The problem is in the proper names. And when I read this, I read it in a nationalistic sense, for some reason. Am I just used to nationalist conflicts? I read it and thought to myself "ah, yes, two nations who hate each other." Why else would anyone go to war?

Well, apparently (and I knew this already) war is not fought between people who dislike each other. We don't kill because we want to kill. We kill because our friends, brothers, and neighbours are in our way. And when we outsource our warrior class to a professional military and centralized state government, they kill our friends, brothers, and neighbours in our name, whether we like it or not.

It's kind of interesting how soldiers think and operate. A normal person works his whole life for a house and a family, and a car or two. A soldier is given millions of dollars worth of equipment and the capability to destroy thousands of normal people's lives. The difference in scale is almost unbelievable. A man could work his entire life to build a life, only to have it all destroyed by a "wayward" missile. A soldier doesn't make as much money as a businessman, but a soldier has the power to bring a thousand businessmen to ruin. Or, more like a few dozen if the soldier has the authority to destroy a small town.

Anyways, I just found it strange to find nationalistic assumptions collecting cobwebs in the back of my mind. I know that nationalism is not true or correct, but I seem to have believed that some people in the world are still nationalists. Or that there is some connection between nationalism and interstate conflict.