OUR NATIONAL SEWAGE

From the time when the idea of the nation was conceived, humanity – particularly in the West- beganto move within a new field in its perception regarding the state, with vague terms and new ideas suchas the grouping of people and societies based on language or religion.

In the effort or process of creating nations out of the masses, cultural characteristics were turned into ethnic ones in order to create the feeling and consciousness of belonging and co-belonging. The wayof life, religion, education, monuments, territory and so on passed into the service of the public-political discourse and condemned societies to lifelong ‘superiority’, particularly western societies towards others.  Thus, national cohesion and the idea of the nation needed something in order to take root: this something was a sense of superiority, which would be achieved through aggression towards other nations, other groups.   Because the concept of our own nation presupposes the existence of others, in order to have that enemy, that barbarian as mentioned by Cavafy.

The stable and real characteristics (those that we can see, in other words) of the cultural heritage(monuments etc.) became fluid and were used for the purposes of differentiation and a sense of superiority towards others. Consequently, from a historic monument of cultural identity, the Parthenon was turned into something that we ‘gave to the others, the inferiors’, or into that national monument in which we take refuge in our desire to escape the current misery of fraud and corruption. Invoking ancient Greece and the culture we have ‘given’ creates a delusion of unity and of union with the past, with what was once great and which no one had ‘except us’.

The idea of the nation and, by extension, of nationalism, leads massively to self-deception and it is not by accident that it grows enormously in times of crisis, especially economic.

The far right and nationalist parties replace actual problems with the abstract, albeit well thought-outnotions of national cohesion and superiority, while at the same time bringing the much-needed enemy to the surface. Because no one can be superior if they are not compared to someone else –such as, for example, black people, Muslims, and even sexual ‘deviants’.

Fantasy attracts and currently the imagination is going wild. Trump, Musk, Lepen and a few others are banking on this, and to some extent they have perfected it, particularly in the case of the USA. Now, Mount Rushmore can be dug up and altered, in the same way as the Acropolis was cemented, because what is important is the myth and not the monument itself.

This article was originally published on 05.02.2025

Kaynak: OUR NATIONAL SEWAGE