Nationalism may be an infantile disease

Nationalism may be an infantile disease

By David Jardine

JAKARTA (JP): "Nationalism," the great scientist Albert
Einstein once said, "is the measles of mankind, an infantile
disease." It is often rather easy to agree with him. Reading
Antony Beevor's Why can't the British get along with old enemy?
in Feb. 18 The Jakarta Post, it was certainly easy to squirm at
the infantile nationalism of some of his British compatriots he
described.

While not necessarily agreeing with Beevor as a film critic,
it is not difficult to sympathize with his major point. Yes, many
of the British are trapped in an atavistic anti-Germanism. This
is sometimes deeply embarrassing because it takes account neither
of the post-Nazi reality of modern Germany nor of the realities
of war itself (if there was anything to be said for Saving
Private Ryan, then it was surely the harrowing first 20 minutes
and the scenes on Omaha beach!)

West Germans after World War II underwent a painful and
imperfect transition from being one half of "the thousand-year
Nazi Reich", a transition that forced them to "look into the dark
circle of their crimes" as the Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman put
it.

That process was unfinished by the late 1960s, and the West
German student movement was one element of society determined to
complete it and denazify society completely. Part of the
movement became caught up with terrorism in the Baader-Meinhof
gang, but the majority were more cerebral in their approach,
listening to the voices of great writers like Heinrich Boll and
Gunther Grass.

If there were Nazi hangovers still in positions of importance,
then there were also anti-Nazi Germans, many of them, and one,
Willi Brandt, who had gone into exile and become a member of the
Norwegian resistance, became chancellor and arguably West
Germany's finest.

Since the late 1960s many of the students have taken up
positions of influence, and it is partly as a legacy of their
struggle that their country has the best record in all of Europe
of giving asylum to refugees, hundreds of thousands of them from
places as diverse as Bosnia and Iran. This has not been without
its cost, proven by the mounting attacks by neo-Nazi elements on
foreigners like the Turkish migrants immolated in Hoyveda, but it
is a record of which Germany can be rightly proud.

Why, I ask myself, are so many British people unaware that
Germany has changed, that the Germans have recreated a civil
society that is at least as strong as their own, if not more so?
Empire, as suggested, plays a role, and its echoes in the
strident anti-Europeanism -- not to be mistaken for anti-EU
sentiment, which is an altogether more complex matter -- of
leading politicians such as Margaret Thatcher and Norman Tebbit
are all too obvious (it was Tebbit, the "Chingford Skinhead", who
told Asian immigrants they failed "the cricket test" and were
thus not loyal citizens). All that "Rule Britannia, Britannia
rules the waves" baloney!

One of the answers to Antony Beevor's question is, sadly, that
many of the British are either tied to a fossilized version of
their history or do not really understand it at all. An
illustration can be found among English soccer supporters. Three
years ago among some backpackers on Jl. Jaksa to watch a Euro '96
game between Germany and Hungary, the following revealing
utterance was heard.

When the Hungarians came out, one young Englishman said
gleefully, "Oh, good. We liberated the Hungarians". Wrong, very
wrong. First, it was the Soviets who defeated the Nazis in
Hungary, and, as events in 1956 rather bloodily proved, occupied
it. Second, Hungary for most of World War II was a pro-Nazi Axis
power. Third, unlike Yugoslavia, where British support for Tito
was important, Allied aid to the small Hungarian anti-Nazi
resistance was totally insignificant.

If that young chump knew little of the recent history of
Europe, what then of those English soccer fans who chant "Two
World Wars and one World Cup", a sorry conflation of the military
and the sporting? Why is it that they know so little about World
War I, and the huge almost continent-wide suffering it
occasioned, that they can be so flippant with history?

The answers perhaps are not very palatable but include a
cautionary tale for just about everybody. When you allow your
free press to become dominated by sensationalist tabloids that
stir up antiforeigner sentiments at every turn -- one editorial
in The Daily Star last year was titled The Frogs (French) deserve
a good kicking and sadly typical -- when leading politicians like
Thatcher build their careers on xenophobia, when the
countervailing ideas of internationalists are squeezed out of the
media, then perhaps it is no wonder that unsuspecting young
German visitors to London are exposed to the "measles of
infantile nationalism".

This is a tragedy. And as an antidote, those who sit in
cinemas and cheer as movie Germans die should make the journey to
one particular gravestone, among the hundreds of thousands there
are, in a war cemetery near Laventie in Flanders.

There lies one British soldier, a Sgt. Owen of the Sixth Black
Watch, who was executed on Christmas Day 1915 for attempting to
fraternize with German soldiers in the true spirit of the season,
as soldiers had done the previous Christmas in the legendary
Anglo-German soccer match. Then, if they have absorbed the story
at all, they might just say "Two World Wars and one World Cup
indeed!".