Challenge: No Nationalism

[Leo Caesius]

Islamism, as a theocratic movement, is as bad.

It's the bane of progressive thinking and destroy any other identity outside of religious one.

Political Islam, which is the most malignant form of Islamism, mirrors these developments in the west. Just look at the constitution of any "Islamic Republic" and see how much it owes to socialism and western concepts of a modern nation state. Heck, the whole concept of the "constitution" is completely alien to Islam. Also note that Islamist movements claim to be univeralist, but that both Arab Islamists and Iranian Islamists are almost always cultural chauvinists.

 

[Max Sinister]

@Abdul: Look at what the Romans did. Caesar boasted that he killed one third of the Gauls and made another third slaves. Even if the numbers are 100% exaggerated, that's a higher body count than Poland and Russia suffered under the nazis. (OK, I admit that the body count would be higher actually if the nazis had won the war.)

 

[Berra]

Back to the question. A society with strong focus on the family might be a solution.

 

[Hendryk]

There are two books in particular that I consider absolutely essential reading for anyone interested in nationalism (which, as Abdul and fortyseven have said, is a recent development in the history of mankind), and, for that reason, I have already mentioned them on this forum:

Anderson, Benedict: Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

Hobsbawm, Eric: Nations and Nationalism since 1780

 

[MerryPrankster]

How many emperors were Roman? Not many.

It was a cultural thing--the Spanish were more Roman than the Romans, hence Hadrian (or was it Trajan)?

 

[MerryPrankster]

Islamism is a resistance movement born of Western imperialism. It is also a tiny fringe movement, not the involvement of entire nations in the extermination of races. It has never, and never will, result in even a tiny fraction of te suffering caused by nationalism.

Never say never. No one knows what the future holds.

 

[Dean_the_Young]

Back to the question. A society with strong focus on the family might be a solution.

Can you say family feuds? In the old south, such things would go on for generations, as each family remembered the smallest slight and vowed to avenge it, creating an endless circle of violence.



And I wouldn't say nationalism has caused more deaths than any other idea. Wars and fighting have been going on as long as we could pick up rocks and talk to eachother. How do you think they justified such large scale actions against eachother then? Religion comes to mind. And religion has been a justification for the greatest atrocities since its conception and has a much longer head start than nationalism.

Nationalism (often supported by religion) can, with more advanced technology and more targets, do more than primitive religion and tribalism ever could have immagined. But do you really think that old Tribal Tom, or Religious Roger, or any Primitive Paul, had they been able to get their hands on advanced weapons, wouldn't have used them to slaughter their enemies by the tens of millions?

Nationalism can get a larger number of people behind a single idea, but that just makes it's potential larger in scale, not of type, than smaller tribalism or ethnicism.

Heck, religion can dwarf nationalism in that regard, because religion isn't easily stopped at borders.