To all nationalist fags

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Even if true, the exercise of power produces commonalities between the thus-governed (language, customs, national heroes, etc) which are NOT spooks.
And then there are commonalities existing prior to the national state, which have often produced the national state.

Mycenian civilization wasn't stable at all, they shared lots of cultural features, sure, but this doesn't make up for everything I said before. You may be thinking they were all very much like in Homer, but Homer didn't live at the Mycenian period, Greek culture will "take form" in the Archaic and Classical periods.

i dont see the connection there, how are they not spooks? and thats not even the issue at hand, many things are spooks but not all of them are inherently bad. However, i belive national identity to be a specially bad spook.

youtube.com/watch?v=iCgDcbSWTtU

How are language, customs, and national heroes spooks?
The abstract nation, existing apart from the individual people who make it up, as a kind of demi-God I sacrifice my life to- is a spook.
The commonalities among people, which produce a natural solidarity / affinity, is a different thing.

"Languages, customs, and national heroes" are artificial impositions of meaning onto objective phenomena, rather than descriptions of the phenomena themselves. They're your own selective interpretation over your own limited exposure to external stimuli. Insofar as they can be said to exist at all, at best they're the dimmest shadow of whatever it is you think you know.

Were one a common Belgian, one might believe that Leopold II was a "national hero." He enriched "their country," industrialized it, modernized it, and even had a tremendous statue built in his honor for his trouble. Conversely, the average Congolese probably has a much different interpretation.

Neither the one nor the other knew Leopold or likely would have even were he still alive. Even if they had actually met, they both know nothing more as a matter of fact concerning Leopold beyond their immediate experience in the short time they spend together. Whether he's a hero or a villain is up entirely to whatever is imagined of him and nothing more. It's a delusion, like your pitiful nation.

when those things form a national identity which the self identifies himself with, then they become spooky, in themselves they are just tales and cultural artifacts, but the spokiness comes when one belives they define their own self.

everything which makes oneself identify with anything other than his own unique self is a spook, but i digress, thats not the problem, working class identity is a spook if we want to be strict, but i advocate for it because it is arosen from economic conditions which are real and it is useful for political struggle.
What i have repeatedly argued here is that nationality is a PARTICULARY bad spook, and that is not arosen from "commonalities between people" but from the particular set of commonalities held by the most powerfull set of institutions in the area.

t. post-modern pseud

The argument that tradition, culture, customs, and 'shared history' are artificial impositions of meaning doesn't come from postmodernism at all. Isn't that what Marx is presupposing when critiquing religion?

if you are referring to socialist states: Even if many of those countries objectively improved the conditions of its citizens, its national identity makes them identify with institutions of power which take away power and commodities from them, even if they are called the peoples institutions. National identity leads to the revolutionary stall at the "dictatorship of the proletariat," (centralized democracy vanguard party bureaucracy) because it almost metaphysically legitimizes institutions which should be aimed at their self-destruction over time to archieve communism (never once a state archived it, never once a state had the intetion to, reaching at best a social democracy with centralized economic planning characteristics) inhibiting the advancment of class conciousness and class struggle in favor or struggle for the nation, relating said institutions deeply to the sense of self of the proletariat, or whats worse, relating the working class identity to a state which operates with the same institutions and mechanisms of power that a capitalist state does, only slightly changed and centralized.>>2903872