Wojtek:
> before 1939 few believed that the nation of Bach and Goethe will be
> overrun by barbaric mass murderers.
Angelus replied:
There was never a "nation of Bach and Goethe."
Bach was born in the Duchy of Sachsen-Eisenach in the Holy Roman Empire, Goethe was from Frankfurt am Main, in modern day Hessen.
Projecting backwards in time some common German national identity is as stupid as when the present day EU lays claim to the ancient Athenian polis as a cradle of "European culture".
It's irritating whenever purported "leftists" regard the nation as some sort of eternal form of human social life.
It's funny how people are only critical about stuff like this when it comes to deconstructing Israeli national mythology ? la Schlomo Sand, but every other nation on earth gets a pass.
In fact, 1871 is only 77 years before 1948 in historical time, a mere blip, but somehow some nations are more "natural" than others.
&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& Point of information:
As Sand informs us in his INVENTION OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE, all nationalisms were political expressions of the rapidly changing social relations of the producers of wealth. From peasant subjects, to wage-labouring citizens, the producing classes were united, after nationalist revolt, as citizens with the ruling capitalist and landlord classes in one big political State. These conditions were accompanied by new political notions, primary amongst them, the rule of law and the classless identity politics which proclaimed that sovereignty was no longer the king’s; but for the ‘people’ of the nation. From these material circumstances sprang a need by the ruling class for the legitimation of their system of political dominance thus, the impetus for public intellectuals to invent and spread the gospel of the various and sundry nationalist brands. One of the first tasks these amplified intellectual voices had to confront was to define who ‘the people’
were.
Sand contends that modern public intellectuals invented all nationalist ideologies thus, all ‘peoples’. Most of these intellectuals mixed history with cultural myths in order to fashion their nationalist ideologies. Sand calls these nationalist ideologies passing for history, ‘mythistory’. More than a few of these nationalist mythistories were combined with the pseudo-scientific invention of ‘race’, an ideology originating in the 18th century. “In the nineteenth century, national cultures often tied the soft term, ‘people’, to the rigid and problematic ‘race,’ and many regarded the two words as intersecting, supporting, or complimentary. The homogeneous collective origin of ‘the people’—always, of course, superior and unique, if not actually pure—became a kind of insurance against the risks represented by fragmentary, though persistent, sub identities that continued to swarm beneath the unifying modernity. The imagined
origin also served as an efficient filter against undesirable mixing with hostile neighbouring nations.” (p.27)
FYI, Mike B)
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