#nationalism

Should I, too, prefer the title of 'non-Jewish Jew'? For some time, I would have identified myself strongly with the attitude expressed by Rosa Luxemburg, writing from prison in 1917 to her anguished friend Mathilde Wurm: What do you want with these special Jewish pains? I feel as close to the wretched victims of the rubber plantations in Putamayo and the blacks of Africa with whose bodies the Europeans play ball… I have no special corner in my heart for the ghetto: I am at home in the entire world, where there are clouds and birds and human tears. An inordinate proportion of the Marxists I have known would probably have formulated their own views in much the same way. It was almost a point of honor not to engage in 'thinking with the blood,' to borrow a notable phrase from D.H. Lawrence, and to immerse Jewishness in other and wider struggles. Indeed, the old canard about 'rootless cosmopolitanism' finds a perverse sort of endorsement in Jewish internationalism: the more emphatically somebody stresses that sort of rhetoric about the suffering of others, the more likely I would be to assume that the speaker was a Jew. Does this mean that I think there are Jewish 'characteristics'? Yes, I think it must mean that. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#africans #compassion #dh-lawrence #empathy #europeans

Independence did not mean chauvinism and narrow nationalism. ↗

— Said Musa

#did #independence #mean #narrow #nationalism

To realize that new world we must prefer the values of freedom and equality above all other values - above personal wealth, technical power and nationalism. ↗

— Herbert Read

#equality #freedom #must #nationalism #new

The things that will destroy America are prosperity at any price, peace at any price, safety first instead of duty first and love of soft living and the get-rich-quick theory of life. ↗

— Theodore Roosevelt

#duty #nationalism #life

Somebody must trespass on the taboos of modern nationalism, in the interests of human reason. Business can't. Diplomacy won't. It has to be people like us. ↗

— Robert Byron

#nationalism #reason #taboos #business

George Orwell famously described international sport as 'war minus the shooting'. But for all Orwell's greatness as a thinker, this was one of his least felicitous lines, analogous to 'murder minus the death' or 'life minus the breathing'. ↗

— Gideon Haigh

#orwell #sport #war #death

At times there's something so precise and mathematically chilling about nationalism. Build a dam to take away water AWAY from 40 million people. Build a dam to pretend to BRING water to 40 million people. Who are these gods that govern us? Is there no limit to their powers? ↗

— Arundhati Roy

#capitalism #corporations #dam #economics #environmental-degradation

Every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud, adopts as a last resource pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and happy to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority. ↗

— Arthur Schopenhauer

#racism #pride

The sublimated idealism of the Enlightenment, the spirit of the League of Nations and of the United Nations Charter have not proved strong enough to control the aggressive dynamism of nationalism. ↗

— Christopher Dawson

#charter #control #dynamism #enlightenment #enough

Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind. ↗

— Albert Einstein

#disease #infantile #mankind #measles #nationalism