>Put a cork in the insults.
I'm winding them down, cut me some slack eh?
>Look, while I can't follow Angelus into his stateless place of pure
>communism, he does have a point about nationalism.
There is a point there of course. For example I took a drive out to my old mums place today, on the way through a small country town called Exeter on the Tamar river I saw an odd sight, a dirty great flagpole of the front lawn of someone's house. With a a flag flying on the pole.
I remarked to my mother and her sister about it, asking who the hell the people were and why they hadn't been run out of town or something. Frankly, I find it quite un-Australian to be making ostentatious displays of nationalism. I'm not alone either. Which is a form of nationalism too I suppose. ;-)
> In fact, Israeli policy really crystallizes in pure form a lot of
>the trouble with that doctrine (and it's no accident, is it, that
>Zionism arose along with a lot of other reactionary nationalisms in
>the 19th century?): the denial of divisions within the national
>body, and the creation of external enemies against which the nation
>is defined. While Israel may be an extreme case, there are plenty of
>other instances.
Sure no argument there. Israel isn't the worst by many measures.
> I remember from my visit to Australia in 2001 the paranoia about
>Asians overrunning the old white country (even Greeks are racialized
>as dusky, no?)
Oh, we're fairly relaxed and comfortable with the dagoes these days. ;-) Sure, there used to be a bit of suspicion (not as much as with the Irish of course).
Incidentally, I found out today that one of my ancestors on my mothers side was Irish. (My eldest son is rifling through the family skeletons.) Was sentenced to transportation in 1840 for, wait for it, sheep stealing. ;-) A family tradition it seems, maybe even a dominant genetic trait.
Anyhow, Ireland at the time is another example of the problem we're talking about. I've never argued that Israel is unique in history, no-one has. That's just another of the Angel's many red herrings. Don't be taken in by what he claims anyone is arguing. But two wrongs don't make a right. Just because many immigrant Tasmanians in the nineteenth century were victims of English genocidal policy, doesn't legitimise them doing the same thing to the native Tasmanians.
And this isn't the nineteenth century anymore.
> - even an anxiety about foreign invaders overwhelming native marine
>life documented on a sign at the Hobart waterfront.
You don't really get it, the importation of northern hemisphere marine pests is a massive ecological menace. We've got starfish from arsehole to breakfast-time around the coast. What price a feed of scallops or crayfish if they upset the delicate balance of nature eh?
>And the USA, too - we're full of anxieties about external threats,
>and proclaiming the rightness of the Good American. I can't think of
>a practical way to get beyond the nation-state, but it is pleasing
>to dream about it.
Well the nation state serves a particular need within the class system. It is quite obvious to me what needs to be done to make it redundant. It is equally obvious that it is a utopian pipe-dream to imagine that the state is the problem (rather than a symptom of the problem) or that we can eliminate capitalism and class rule by eliminating the state.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas