This Saturday, a gaggle of demonstrators, a few hundred strong, gathered in the Swedish capital Stockholm. They scurried around from site to site as the municipal police tried to disperse the demonstrators in the least confrontational way possible, due to the fact that the protest violated Covid restrictions.
Which might have been the whole point, seeing as the disparate demonstrators where complaining about said restrictions. And to some extent, even protesting the very concept of Covid as a government hoax.
At the end of the gathering, as cops carried away people who refused to disperse, one could audibly hear “we are Sweden” from a handful of chanting voices in the pretty tame civil liberty exhibition.
Which lead me to the question as to why nationalism seems to be one of the strongest common denominators of the cognitively deficient?
Now, this Saturday’s demonstration wasn’t in itself anything comparable to the storming of the Capitol on January sixth. To equate the two would be a grossly fraudulent. This Saturday in Stockholm, no one died (except for in the coming weeks when some of these cretins will invariably be tested positive for Covid-19). No government offices were ransacked. No one showed up dressed like a nipple-exhibitionistic buffalo dude. There is no comparison of the two events…
Except for the intellectual capacity of the people that were involved in them. While Qanon isn’t a… mainstream movement in Sweden (like what it is in the US), these demonstrators sounded quite like what you might expect from some Qanon crackpots: Flailing to justify their convictions that the pandemic was a hoax. That vaccines are the same as mind control. That the Prime Minister is a traitor. And that the notion of the nation state is somehow a sacrosanct concept that binds a fictive ethnic group together in unholy matrimony.
Let’s talk about nationalism. No, not the socialist kind. I’m not getting into discussing the tenets, ramifications, and subsequent fallout from NSDAP. No, let’s roll it back further and discuss the imaginary notion of The Homeland as a unifying force. This notion of a nation that some of our least mindful citizens seem to hold so dear.
From a cursory glance at history, we can make out that nationalism grew out of the centralization of power from the old feudal states. The aristocracy waned and the Crown waxed during the 17-hundreds. And while previously, a human might identify more with the county it came from, as the dominion of the monarchy grew, a new identity of its subjects needed to be molded. Where once a subject may have thought of itself as from a town, a district, or a region, now it should consider itself a part of a nation. So that the King or Queen could better assume control and loyalty.
Nationalism is a tool to homogenize and control the population. It’s a shared identity meant to constrict deviation. And sadly, the idea took root. So much so that by now, the national identity has turned into the variable mortar of society.
It is a shame that it has also turned into a cornerstone of identity for the least imaginative and independent of us. That it has become a counter-weight to globalism and multiculturalism. Concepts that nationalism was engineered by the autocrats of old to counteract, but that have become the new norm in modern society.
Where nationalism was once a strong tool for a centralized power to mobilize a country, it has become instead a dead weight without a master. A function programmed into the population to make it perform for the glee of the high and mighty, has now become a thorn in the side of any serious democracy that value humanist privileges as rights.
Nationalism is a relic of control. A vestigial spark of loyalty, a reptilian remnant from a time when the general population was supposed to be uneducated, willing to die at a leader’s whim, docile until unleashed, and willing to believe any dumb notion that an authority pumped into them. In return, the population would receive an identity preset, a sense of community in an expanding world, and the false promise that they could accomplish great things if only they did what they were told.
In essence, nationalism isn’t that far flung from organized religion.
Which brings us back to the question at hand; how come nationalism has become the strongest common denominator among the least cognitively proficient people in our modern societies? Well now that question pretty much answers itself. Because nationalism was specifically designed for just such a group of people. People that are incapable of sufficiently navigating such a massive flow of conflicting information as we suffer today. People that feel unfit to survive in a world of diversity. People that behave as if incapable of constructing an individual sense of self and would prefer a neatly packaged preset to use as a crutch.
In short, nationalism was manufactured for stupid people. Little wonder that the idea is popular among them still.
/Sebastian Lindberg 9/3-2021
WastedWords 