Nation-building and Nationalism
“As a woman, I have no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.” Virginia Woolf 1938.
Nationalism is a dangerous hoax. Canada Day reminds us to step away from the yoke of nationalism and to question the colonial state that allows us the “freedom” to own land, fly around the globe, finance our childrens’ university tuition fees, invest in the stock market, go with the flow and watch the world on Netflix go by.
I appreciated reading Alex Allen’s insightful “Their Home and Native Land” last week. He attests to the “freedoms” that settlers have to live high off the hog, on stolen land. Our contrived reconciliation attempts have a very long way to meeting the needs of the Indigenous Peoples who were disenfranchised.
Greenwashing techniques have fallen out of favour with politicians. Blatant disregard for international climate and human rights agreements, e.g. UNDRIP, are now all the rage. Bills 14 and 15 that Eby rammed through recently seem to be mirrors of Carney’s Bill C-5. Why bother with these bills when multinational corporations already have the power to bulldoze their development agendas by any means possible? For over 500 years, they have used bribes, lies and extortion to force “consent” from FN Band Councils and politicians.
Canada was built by means of deceit/genocide/greed and is now decaying even farther into neo-colonialism. The public are fed a steady diet of lies about the need for national economic sovereignty. Beneath these resource extraction ambitions lie irreversible impacts of climate/biodiversity disasters, labour camps, displaced populations, human rights violations, missing and murdered wimmin, and water/land/air pollution. We, settlers, justify these short-term,”nation-building” “solutions to now-defunct US tariffs in many ways. Short-sighted nationalism/rationalization sounds like this: “things are less bad here compared to other countries, therefore, things are basically all right, therefore we can carry on with corporate business as usual.”
Hannah Arendt, born into a Jewish family, when asked to take a prominent leadership role in Israel’s Zionist state in 1957, replied: “I will have none of your tribal nationalism.” She could have been rich and powerful, but instead chose the high road. Hers is the long-term, ethical, valiant freedom.
