The
Intra-National Colonization Of Patriotisms
By Jorge Majfud
31 July, 2007
Countercurrents.org
Once,
in a high school class, we asked the teacher why she never talked about
Juan Carlos Onetti. The answer was blunt: that gentleman had received
everything from Uruguay (education, fame) and "he had left"
for Spain to speak ill of his own country. That is, an entire country
was identified with a government and an ideology, excluding and demoralizing
everything else.
Implicitly, it is assumed
that there exists a unique – true, honorable – form for
the nation and of being Uruguayan (Chinese, Argentine, North American,
French). If one is against that particular idea of country, of fatherland
(patria), then one is anti-patriotic, one is a traitor.
A fundamental requirement
for the construction of a tradition is memory. But never all memory,
because there is no tradition without forgetting. Forgetting –
always more vast – is indispensable for the adequation of a determined
memory to the present-day powers that need to legitimate themselves
through a tradition. If we assume that national symbols and myths are
not imposed by God, we are left with no other remedy than to suspect
earthly powers. Which is to say, a tradition is not simple and innocent
memory but convenient memory. The latter tends to be crystalized in
symbols and sacred cows, and there is nothing less objective than symbols
and cows.
In the Spain of Isabel and
Fernando, exclusion was the basis for a previously non-existent fatherland.
The Iberian peninsula was, at the time, the most culturally diverse
corner of Europe and comprised of as many countries as the rest of Europe.
Being Spanish became for many, after the Reconquest, an exercise in
purification: one sole language, one sole religion, one sole race. Almost
five hundred years later, Francisco Franco imposed the same idea of
nation based at least on the first two categories of purity. Camilo
José Cela recognized it thusly: "Not one single Spaniard
is free to see Jewish or Moorish blood run through his veins "
(A vueltas con España, 1973); like they say, "nobody is
perfect." For centuries the intellectuals sought out, obsessively,
the "Spanish character," as if the absence of a concrete character
ran the risk of losing the country. Américo Castro in Los españoles…(1959)
observed: "one will not find anything similar to the Spanish fantasy
of imagining Spaniards before they existed." He then criticized
the patriotic writings that praised what was Spanish about Luis Vives,
who, even abroad "never forgot Valencia": he could not forget
Valencia because his family, of Jewish origin, had been persecuted and
both his parents burned by the Inquisition. The celebrated priest Manuel
García Morente believed that "for the Spanish there is no
difference, there is no duality between fatherland and religion"
( Idea de la hispanidad, 1947); "there exists no dualism between
Caesar and God." "Spain is made of Christian faith and Iberian
blood." "In Spain, Catholic religion constitutes the purpose
of a nationality…" The ultraconservative taste for essences
led him to repeated tautologies of this kind: "the patriotic duty"
is to be "faithful to the essence of the fatherland." Another
Spaniard, Julio Caro Baroja (El mito del carácter nacional, 1970),
questioned these functional ideas of power: "I consider that everything
that speaks of "national character" is a mystical activity."
"National characters are meant to be established as collective
and hereditary. Thus, at times, one recurs to expressions like 'bad
Spaniard,' 'renegade son,' traitor to the 'legacy of the fathers' in
order to attack an enemy."
This strategy of forgetting
and exclusion is universal. We Chileans, Argentines and Uruguayans constructed
a tradition to the measure of our own euro-centric and not infrequently
racist and genocidal prejudices. The authors of various ethnic cleansings
( Roca, Rivera) are honored even today in the schools and in the names
of streets and cities. Indigenous people were not only expoliated and
exterminated; we also ended up whitewashing the memory of the indomitable
savages. Another Spaniard, Américo Castro, reminds us: "When
the people are more believers than thinkers […] it becomes unpleasant
to doubt."
Thus, The fatherland is turned
into an idea of nation that tends to exclude all other ideas of nation.
For this reason it usually becomes a weapon of negative domination based
on the positive sentiments of belonging and familiarity. In order to
consolidate that arbitrariness of traditional power, other semantic
instruments are made use of. Like honor, for example.
Honor is the symbolic tribute
that a society imposes, by way of ideological and moral violence, on
those individuals who must exercise physical violence in order to defend
the sectarian interests of those others who will never risk their own
life to do so. For this reason, a composite and contradictory ideolexicon
like "the honor of weapons" has survived for centuries. There
exists no other way to predispose an individual to death for reasons
he is in no position to understand or, if he understands them, he is
in no position to accept them as his own reasons. If it is a matter
of a soldier (the most common case) the salary will never be sufficient
reason to die. It is necessary to cultivate a motivation beyond death.
In the case of the religious martyr, this function is fulfilled by Paradise;
in the case of a secular society that organizes an army through a secular
State, there is no alternative but the retribution of an exemplary death:
honor, fulfillment of one's duty, love of country, etc. All ideolexicons
based on positive, unquestionable meanings.
One honors individuals (paradoxically
anonymously) because one cannot honor the war that produces seas of
nameless dead, nor can one honor the financial and political reasons,
the sectarian interests in power. This is demonstrated when, each day
that fallen soldiers are remembered, the motives that led the now heroes
to die are never remembered. One abstracts and decontexualizes in order
to consolidate the symbol and confer upon it an absolutely natural character.
It may be that just wars exist (like an action of defense or of liberation),
but even so it remains impossible to think that all wars are just or
holy. Then, why is this perturbing element abstracted from the collective
conscience? Any questioning is (must be) interpreted as an affront to
the "fallen heroes." In this way, the benefit is quadruple:
1) society washes its sins and its bad conscience; 2) the victims of
the absurd receive a moral gratification and meaning for their own disgrace;
3) any radical questioning of the sense of past wars is prevented; and
4) a loan is secured against stock for wars yet to come – for
a few but in the name of all.
Translated by Bruce Campbell
Leave
A Comment
&
Share Your Insights
Comment
Policy
Digg
it! And spread the word!
Here is a unique chance to help this article to be read by thousands
of people more. You just Digg it, and it will appear in the home page
of Digg.com and thousands more will read it. Digg is nothing but an
vote, the article with most votes will go to the top of the page. So,
as you read just give a digg and help thousands more to read this article.