Was that the one that had cholera in itme and the secret garden
book thread
- Thread starter minty
- Start date
i have no idea because i didn't read it
i had a hardcover n it just sat there
all my fav fiction books as a kid had talking animals in 'em (watership down, secret of nimh, methuselah's gift)
actually bought the secret garden the other day to listen to next week-ish
Tech Noir
Ediot
Years ago someone asked me to define what a nation is and the best I could come up with was that it's a group of people that have agreed that they belong to the same nation, and it was the only explanation that actually made sense. While arguing with bunch of people on the internet ("can't use a thing to define itself"), someone actually agreed with me and recommended this book.
Like the title says, the author considers nations imagined communities. He tries to explain how nationalism came to existence, It's a snowball that rolled for a long time, I chose some of important milestones:
"print capitalism" got the ball rolling (you can see that he is a Marxist, and that it influenced his theories), the printing press gave the people a new way to turn profit, and seeking to sell books to as big of a consumer base as possible, they started printing in vernacular instead of Latin, the lingua franca of the educated aristocratic class, vernacular soon also becomes the language of religious service and people start forming kinship on linguistic instead of religious basis, and national consciousness starts to form. But the Chinese invented the printing press hundreds of years before Euros, how come they didn't also come up with nationalism? They lacked capitalism as the second important ingredient. This sounds kinda flimsy to me, but fine. Next significant step was colonialism, and the resentment of Creols in Americas (Creols is the term he uses for whites born in colonies, and he includes the founding fathers there too) over the unequal treatment and lack of political agency, causing them to rebel and form separate identities. According to him, nationalism wasn't created in Europe, it originated in the Americas, and was then pirated across the world.
The final step was making nationalism official & state approved, since it came from the people (educated middle class), not from the top. With the loss of divine right, the royal houses (in most cases of German origin and not even speaking the languages of the people they ruled), had to adapt to the masses and adopt new national identities (Hanovers became Windsors).
He goes on to provide examples how nationalism developed in different countries, why some sooner, others later . Also at the end of the book, comments how he regrets the book not being published earlier in Yugoslavia, it may have defused the jingoistic tensions and stopped the war
oh the cute naivety of the academics
here's some stuff to amuse you
@fleacollerindustry
@minty
Marx didn't have the balls to define nationalism
on the phenomenon of glorifying the unknown soldier and nationalism being closer to a religion than to an ideology:
Nothing justifies glorious Japanese imperialism as much as Marxism:
"print capitalism" got the ball rolling (you can see that he is a Marxist, and that it influenced his theories), the printing press gave the people a new way to turn profit, and seeking to sell books to as big of a consumer base as possible, they started printing in vernacular instead of Latin, the lingua franca of the educated aristocratic class, vernacular soon also becomes the language of religious service and people start forming kinship on linguistic instead of religious basis, and national consciousness starts to form. But the Chinese invented the printing press hundreds of years before Euros, how come they didn't also come up with nationalism? They lacked capitalism as the second important ingredient. This sounds kinda flimsy to me, but fine. Next significant step was colonialism, and the resentment of Creols in Americas (Creols is the term he uses for whites born in colonies, and he includes the founding fathers there too) over the unequal treatment and lack of political agency, causing them to rebel and form separate identities. According to him, nationalism wasn't created in Europe, it originated in the Americas, and was then pirated across the world.
The final step was making nationalism official & state approved, since it came from the people (educated middle class), not from the top. With the loss of divine right, the royal houses (in most cases of German origin and not even speaking the languages of the people they ruled), had to adapt to the masses and adopt new national identities (Hanovers became Windsors).
He goes on to provide examples how nationalism developed in different countries, why some sooner, others later . Also at the end of the book, comments how he regrets the book not being published earlier in Yugoslavia, it may have defused the jingoistic tensions and stopped the war
oh the cute naivety of the academics
here's some stuff to amuse you
@fleacollerindustry
@minty
Marx didn't have the balls to define nationalism
on the phenomenon of glorifying the unknown soldier and nationalism being closer to a religion than to an ideology:
Nothing justifies glorious Japanese imperialism as much as Marxism:
that's basically what every history n government n culture class define it as too... i genuinely don't understand how it could be thought of as any different. why would they argue it?
-2025
-still arguing with mentally deficient on the internet
yeah, marx wasn't nationalist n beefed with bakunin a lot about it
bakunin saw some use for it as nationalist groups CAN be pretty based (insert 50 irish republican "up the ra" memes here)
his case for the printing press being the cause of nationalism MAY loosely be applicable to finland, as iirc finns started becoming more nationalist after the kalevala was rediscovered n dropped (been ages since i wrote a paper on that, don't take my word for it out the gate)
the rest of this shit is sponsored by big brain worm
i have bought this book purely so i can die laughing while i slam into a tree
thank you
aside: i have officially completed my 100 books this yr self challenge today with richard feynman's "what do you care what other people think?" and then relistening to david lynch's catching the big fish
double aside: last week i listened to rick rubin's the creative act and i found it neat that he also likens the act of idea catching to fishing.
I mean, we're ALL made up, it's ALL imaginary, none of it really matters. But I never cared to take a nihilist POV on this fact... nihilism is teenage edginess to the X-TREME, ie "it doesn't matter so let's BURN IT DOWN". To me it doesn't matter, so people can just do whatever they want that's important to them. This includes anything that makes someone shout:
We are insanely complex creatures, and we have this strange superpower to somehow turn imaginary concepts into real world objects. All the grand statues of the world: the Statue of Liberty, Motherland Calls, Mt. Rushmore, etc... those will survive for some time, maybe some evidence of it will outlive us. We imagined them, but they're still real. God is real, Communism is real, Nationhood is real, because enough people gathered together and willed it to have a practical effect on the shape of the world.
We're all part of a made up community, only because we all collectively agreed "fuck Kiwi Farms" (among other things).
...
As for your book passage: lol yeah, I think I've heard it suggested that Emperor Jimmu himself was Korean (Baekje?) but of course no one in Japan would dare consider the entire Emperor line coming from mongrels like that. Yet even the Emperor of Japan himself admitted as such: https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2001/dec/28/japan.worlddispatch
Tech Noir
Ediot
No, you don't get it. Yes, it is imagined. But imagined things need to be DEFINED. It isn't if Marx liked nationalism or not, it is if he could give his definition of it or no, and he couldn't. And the reason you've dismissed it is because you haven't faced the problem like he did, I gave you the answer on a plate.
Define a nation. A group of people? Fine. A group of people talking the same language? Not necessarily (Switzerland). A group of people of the same race? Not necessarily (Americas).
My nation could be defined as a group of Slavs living on the Balkans, speaking SerboCroatian, and practicing Serbian orthodox Christianity.
Croatians could be defined as a group of Slavs living on the Balkans, speaking SerboCroatian, and practicing Catholic Christianity.
Bosnians could be defined as a group of Slavs living on the Balkans, speaking SerboCroatian, and practicing Islam.
Nation resisted definition for the longest time, and in the end the answer is: consensus. We are of the same nation because we agree we are of the same nation.