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!".