Is being proud of your country unfashionable in Europe?

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Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

Most of us like at least some of the stuff about where we live, and have probably invested time and energy learning our histories. That doesn't mean we have to trip over ourselves to find new ways to self-congratulate at every opportunity. In England it was always regarded, as part of the national manners, as quite crass to be too over the top nationalistic; that's only recently started to change.

Showy and often voiced nationalism is, I think for a lot of Europeans, a sign that something is a bit wrong. A little bit of quiet pride is fine. Loud maybe for sports if you like that kind of thing. The idea of flying a flag outside your house and swearing allegiance in the morning - what the gently caress?

# ¿ Jan 17, 2015 13:04

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 14:17

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

Also, I don't think that many Europeans would loudly assert that theirs is the best country in the world, as Americans seem so prone to do (although I've almost never met an eastern European person who didn't insist the women from his country were the most attractive at least once).

I think the principal reason to be nationalistic for a lot of Europeans is so that you can poo poo on your neighbours if you meet one in a bar for pure banter purposes.

loving Germans :smugdog:

# ¿ Jan 17, 2015 13:15

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

RonMexicosPitbull posted:

Also 3 5 times a day every single American has to face Washington DC and praise Franklin.

Hth.

# ¿ Jan 17, 2015 13:23

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

Effectronica posted:

McCarthy was one guy who a lot of the conservative establishment hated, although he's been rehabilitated by many on the modern right. The overall Red Scares, though, haven't been admitted to be a bad thing by most of America yet, nor as something we did as a whole nation.

So you're saying nothing has slipped into the American consciousness yet as a trauma? I kind of get the vibe that slavery and civil rights is at least a bit that way. Of course, there are all sorts of trapdoors that allow you not to blame yourself for this.

# ¿ Jan 17, 2015 14:47

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

Effectronica posted:

Those aren't things we understand as a consequence of American nationalism, and they're also associated with specific regions in the country.

That your country has done lovely things can be sufficient to dampen nationalism, whether the lovely things were related to your nationalism or not.

# ¿ Jan 17, 2015 14:59

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

Effectronica posted:

However, it's mostly western Europe that has had that dampening. Nationalism is still strong in eastern and southern Europe. All of those countries are also ones which either went through decolonization or fascist governments, both of which are fairly intrinsically tied to nationalism as a principle. Italian fascism being recognized as a bad thing drags down nationalism with it.

That's how it plays out in practice, I'm just saying that the 'my country did bad stuff in the past' narrative is another way you could get to a reduction of nationalism even if what happened wasn't a strict correlate of nationalism.

Of course, the other thing is that nationalism was partly a liberation movement in eastern and central Europe (also places like Finland).

# ¿ Jan 17, 2015 15:10

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

Rent-A-Cop posted:

Things we didn't miss: Dresden, Hiroshima.

Woah woah woah. Dresden is more our atrocity than yours, motherfucker. Get your own.

# ¿ Jan 17, 2015 17:15

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

davidb posted:

Well besides america being #1 by most measurements. Or if not #1 then very high up there. So not only are they the most successful democracy their also most successful of any type of government/economy

It was predictable that the 'is it ok to be proud of your country' thread would turn in to a dick length competition, I'm just surprised it didn't happen sooner.

# ¿ Jan 17, 2015 18:52

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

karthun posted:

While the EU may not be a country (though it does have lines on a map), it certainly is a State.

Wrong answer. It really isn't. At all. Nope. It's a forum in which individual states agitate for their interests, it is not a state by any definition.

# ¿ Jan 18, 2015 01:41

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

davidb posted:

And of the group of them, any of the European nations has the most to gain, the highest responsibility to defend against Russian aggressian. The fact that America had to step in to do anything is embarrassing.

It's decidedly against the immediate fiscal interests of France and Germany to oppose Russian aggression, likewise for the UK. We're all tied heavily to Russian economic interests. Really, clamping down on Russia is a net loss for us, and other Europeans too. It's still worth it, but talking about it from the point of view of 'gain' is ridiculous.

DarkCrawler posted:

And if you think that Europe doesn't spend money on its military, you need to take a closer look at military spending. Token military? Well yeah, compared to the US armed forces literally every single army in the existence of human history has been a token army.

You need a certain amount of money down to get the gear to fight a war on another continent semi-independently, something only France and the UK have shown capability to do in recent times. But yes, the idea that Europe is a continent of military minnows is misleading. It's just not mobilised towards potential multi-continental major conflict at all times.

Disinterested fucked around with this message at 02:00 on Jan 18, 2015

# ¿ Jan 18, 2015 01:50

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

computer parts posted:

Eh, the US hates Mexicans more than (e.g.) Somalians* precisely because we shared a border with them. Europe has the same problem with Arabs in general, even/especially because they take the same low paying jobs that Mexicans do in the US.

*Not to be confused with African Americans, who Americans hate quite a bit.

In rich European countries, as many low paying jobs are being done by eastern Europeans as by Arabs et al. Also, France and the UK in particular have ex-colonial populations (e.g. the 1,000,000 Indians in the UK, similar number of black people from former African colonies and the West Indies) in addition to a later generation of immigrants and asylum seekers. It's a more complex phenomenon than that.

# ¿ Jan 18, 2015 02:10

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

Torka posted:

In a nuclear war (which a serious world war would be) surely the best place to go would be a country nobody gives enough of a poo poo about to nuke

I believe that the place predicted to to be best off in the event of full-blown nuclear confrontation was Tazmania.

# ¿ Jan 18, 2015 12:42

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

computer parts posted:

It's less of a thing with Russia but when Libya was going down the Europeans wanted the US to take charge, which is a far cry from their criticisms of us as world police only a few years prior.

The US has the best capabilities, but France inparticular showed a willingness to press on.

# ¿ Jan 18, 2015 14:53

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

davidb posted:

if its misleading then I guess If russia rolls through europe with Tanks theyll be able to defend themselves from their next door neighbor.....their prepared for that threat right? Or is the expectation that America will come to the rescue? loving american scum

You seem to think that Russians could just invade Europe easily like it's 1945. They really couldn't. (Putting aside the fact that two of the major European nations have nukes).

quote:

that right there is whats wrong with stupid europeans. blah blah blah well lose money..... even though we know we really should stop russia because its worth it.

if its worth it then America shouldnt have to drag europe kicking and screaming to do the right thing for their own benefit.

I don't see America rushing to commit its troops to Ukraine.

Disinterested fucked around with this message at 16:13 on Jan 18, 2015

# ¿ Jan 18, 2015 16:11

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

nopantsjack posted:

Hitler was a maniac but its a bit rich crowing about his lust for Greater Germany which would have been significantly smaller than the British Empire was at the time whose goals were literally conquer or exterminate all the non-white races in the whole world.

Ahahahaha.

quote:

Hitler was a maniac but

# ¿ Jan 18, 2015 17:30

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

the boston bomber posted:

Colonial British rule in most of the world was just as brutal and deadly as the Holocaust, Stalin, and Mao. This is a historical fact.

I think you'd have quite a lot of work ahead of you demonstrating this on more or less any basis of analysis.

nopantsjack posted:

I'm just saying the British Empire was already a world-spanning white supremacist empire seeking to wipe out or conquer the other races.

The notion that Britain was actively engaged in race war along Hitlerian lines is just...bizarre. There's also an agency problem, since the Empire did a lot of different things in different places, under different leadership etc. It's not as monolithic an entity as Nazi Germany. It certainly did not have one central or consistent ideology (or approach to questions of race or conquest).

A lot of the architects and theorists of empire weren't racist. You only need read people like Pelly, Mill and Layard arguing about India to see that something more complex was going on.

Disinterested fucked around with this message at 17:56 on Jan 18, 2015

# ¿ Jan 18, 2015 17:52

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

computer parts posted:

The standard that says that Mao caused millions of people to die would equally apply to the British.

You still have a picoHitlers problem. 45 million in 4 years is probably better than the British Empire managed in over 200 years.

# ¿ Jan 18, 2015 17:57

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

You're still a long way from demonstrating comparability with the holocaust, particularly considering that famines are not wholly preventable. Most of them were made worse by British rule (though after the worst of them British relief efforts picked up in some cases). It's a long road from killing people with neglect and indifference to hoarding them according to ethnic group into trains to gas them (particularly in light of how much more developed a society we're talking about in 1945 Germany vs Britain in the early 1800's).

Although you always get a Malthusian somewhere in these famines who think a big die off is a jolly good show.

zeal posted:

Are you seriously going to waste time and keystrokes defending an institution as hilariously, abjectly vile as the British Empire? I mean, really? Is this Niall Ferguson's account?

I think the British Empire was dreadful. I just think it's slightly unreasonable to compare it to the holocaust.

Disinterested fucked around with this message at 18:12 on Jan 18, 2015

# ¿ Jan 18, 2015 18:09

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

nopantsjack posted:

Well I mean its center was Westminster and Racial darwinism was the order of the day as to how we looked at the empire. A tiered genetic system where white men are born to rule and administer and other races are born to serve, fight or be quitely wiped out with inattention after their resources were seized.

Undoubtably the core of the Empire was motivated on mercenary profit, but the ideology that backed this up was white supremacism. Even the history books that like the Empire have to make mention of it once or twice. I mean gently caress the entirety of our history in India was us complaining that the Indians were an unsuitable, effeminate race that were racially incapable of ruling themselves.

It's a more mixed bag than that. To pick the most easy example by far: quite a lot of people thought it was nothing to do with race, just that they'd become savage because they didn't love Jesus. A bit of Jesus and they'd be back on the road to progress in no time. A lot of people went down this road to prejudice, (e.g. they have an inferior religion but they're not inherently inferior biologically).

Funnily enough, it was usually this school that caused bigger problems in terms of local outrage than hidebound racists and indifferent mercenary plunderers.

# ¿ Jan 18, 2015 18:16

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

That's without getting started on South America.

# ¿ Jan 18, 2015 18:49

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

There was a time that people thought North Korea was the miracle state and that South Korea was a backwater.

# ¿ Jan 18, 2015 21:03

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

ThirdPartyView posted:

Somalia: highly successful democracy. Got it.

There's no functioning government aka libertarian dreamland.

# ¿ Jan 19, 2015 02:21

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

You have to talk to the Hun in terms he can understand. Bad jokes and violence.

# ¿ Jan 19, 2015 11:42

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

VitalSigns posted:

Nah I think Britain's starvation campaigns are borne of jealousy and a deep-seated insecurity about English cooking.

Some things are worth being insecure about.

# ¿ Jan 19, 2015 12:03

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

BlitzkriegOfColour posted:

I think in terms of cooking, the English sense of superiority is safe against the swarthy German Menace. Only the Germans could gently caress up food enough to make a salad out of meats.

Ham, cheese, and indestructible brown bread that you could use to build houses are not breakfast foods.

# ¿ Jan 19, 2015 12:05

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

Panzeh posted:

Poland deserved all the partitions it got and the fact that it couldn't naturally assert its own independence is very telling about its national character.

A nation of people that drinks pickle juice to cure its hangovers must be destroyed.

# ¿ Jan 19, 2015 12:38

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

We are willing to consider the possibility that they are allowed a token free city.

# ¿ Jan 19, 2015 12:41

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

Cingulate posted:

I'm proud national pride is disapproved of in my country.

Who'd have bet this would turn out to be a typical German attitude 100 years ago?

# ¿ Jan 19, 2015 15:47

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

Ytlaya posted:

Nothing would ever change for the better if the world was full of people like you who justified the evils of the status quo. "Well, nobody is perfect" has never been a sentiment that leads to positive change.

Nobody is perfect can be a valid way of looking at history. Further back in our history people were so pig-ignorant that it's hard to say of them that they should have made choices that we regard as morally appropriate in the modern world, particularly with regards to thinks of which those people were simply unaware. The problem is trying to translate that logic in to the present to totally relativise everything - or even to totally relativise the past. By the mid-late nineteenth century all of the arguments for slavery had been debunked thoroughly. It was obviously a morally bankrupt idea, not even consistent with itself.

Nationalism had a very appropriate role to play in the time it was a developing phenomenon, as a way of stopping ancien-regime horse-trading of social and political communities. It is a totally legitimate social feeling to say 'look, we're Saxons. I don't want to be told I am a lower Saxon or an upper Saxon, or that I live in a different country to half of my family because of some curiousity of dynastic law. We should be allowed to have our fates conjoined'. On occasion feelings like this developed quite a long time ago in parts of Europe that were a jigsaw of states. It's very easy to see how you can get to an irredentist position from here, but a large number of early German romantics did think of nationalism more in these terms than in the crowing militaristic terms with which we are more familiar.

Disinterested fucked around with this message at 19:37 on Jan 19, 2015

# ¿ Jan 19, 2015 19:35

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

Cingulate posted:

Who, except for those terribly weakened by suffering genocide and enslavement, hasn't?

I guess if you were a landlocked minor European country you just sat around making your serfs toil until the 20th century.

# ¿ Jan 19, 2015 22:31

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

I can't really think of anything in the US's behaviour that has ever made me think that it wouldn't have gone utterly hamfistedly in to intercontinental imperialism from day 1 if it had been strong enough.

Trying to aggregate the sins of an enormous and complex country, with different leaders and a mishmash of changing governing ideologies is difficult. That is without getting into the question that governments don't represent people well. I personally think that claiming the USSR was better is...strange.

Either way, I'm pretty sure the only way to move past this stuff is to become more internationalist and get out of the national dickwaving business altogether, including the liberal 'no my country is worse than your's' contests.

Disinterested fucked around with this message at 01:01 on Jan 20, 2015

# ¿ Jan 20, 2015 00:56

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

It's also worth working out that Europe had social democratic traditions before Soviet Communism emerged, and was already well on the path to welfare reforms without it. If anything, the USSR became a stick to beat socialists with both then and now. Stalin was the gravedigger of communism, nobody did more damage to the left in the 20th century than him (this is a view common amongst 20th and 21st century communists).

# ¿ Jan 20, 2015 13:36

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

Cerebral Bore posted:

The existence of the USSR provided a really nice argument for various Social Democrats to get the bourgeoise to play ball in the first place. Basically if the capitalists didn't work with the Social Democrats the alternative was the communists mobilizing the working classes, and the USSR showed why avoiding this was in the best interest of the capitalist class.

No. The existence of the radical left did this, not the existence of the USSR. You are treating the two as interchangeable in a highly problematic way.

Bismarck didn't implement social programs in Germany in the 1870's (very generous policies, too) because of a country that didn't exist yet. He did it because he was bricking it because of the Paris Commune.

Britain's initial drive towards social welfare pre-USSR came in the early 1900's (again, pre-USSR) with the twin rise of the Labour Party, and with Britain's failures in the Boer War; Britain had tremendous problems finding large numbers of able-bodied recruits, which created a tremendous impetus towards improving living standards.

Likewise, the further development of the welfare state in the 1940's in Britain was not driven by fear of the USSR. Communism was not a political threat in Britain. It was mostly driven by political conviction and the widespread suffering of war.

Fear of the USSR actually drove a pushback against social democratic and socialist ideals in a lot of countries, and the jacobin nadir of Stalinism has also resulted in a wholesale discrediting of the far left in the eyes of many people, wrongly or rightly.

Disinterested fucked around with this message at 13:50 on Jan 20, 2015

# ¿ Jan 20, 2015 13:44

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

Cerebral Bore posted:

You might want to read what I wrote again, with a special eye towards the distinction I make between the example of what might happen (i.e. the USSR) and the people who might make that happen (i.e. the indigenous revolutionary labour movement).

That still doesn't explain a lot of European cases where communism was never really a viable domestic political threat. Some countries just had a successful, more moderate socialist movement, or were beneficiaries of conservative ideas of Christian paternalism to some degree. You don't need a revolutionary labour movement (just a normal labour movement can be sufficient).

# ¿ Jan 20, 2015 13:53

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

Yeah, the idea that Stalin was just doing an inevitably bloody process of industrialisation is one of the more poo poo-eating forms of revisionism going.

# ¿ Jan 20, 2015 14:24

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

Back To 99 posted:

Guess you prefer a Nazi Europe to a brutal industrialization process.

This can only be a troll.

But by all means, let's all thank comrade Lysenko for defeating Hitler for us. And Stalin, for far-sightedly predicting Nazism in Europe when he started the first five year plan in 1928. I'm sure gulags and intentional mass starvation for decades were the only way we could have got to V-day.

Go read a book.

# ¿ Jan 20, 2015 14:30

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

Back To 99 posted:

Read one yourself.

Or preferably the post you are replying to. I never supported gulags. And yes, it seems like prioritizing industry while allowing for the risk of a famine was the only way the USSR could keep up with the west. If you knew anything about the USSR you would know that an invasion from the west were their primary concern from its conception until the cold war.

This could have been achieved without killing so many millions of people. It flatly could have. Putting aside the fact some of the deaths by famine were intentional.

Industrialisation a la Stalin was a process of mass murder as well as a process of increasing productivity. I don't have to thank Stalin for killing a lot of people unnecessarily, both murderously and through negligence, when results could have been achieved in other ways.

Disinterested fucked around with this message at 14:40 on Jan 20, 2015

# ¿ Jan 20, 2015 14:37

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

Effectronica posted:

Stalin's explicit reasoning for abandoning the right wing of the Bolsheviks and embracing forced collectivization was in order to arm the country against a possible invasion. Not specifically against the Nazis, but it wasn't hard to see by 1928 that between the USA, Great Britain, France, Germany, and Japan, the USSR had a lot of enemies, all of whom were better-armed and more industrialized than they.

So it's not so much "could they have industrialized" as "could they have achieved the crash, militarizable industrialization necessary without the use of force", which is a much thornier and probably unanswerable question.

I didn't say re-armament wasn't a factor, but to say 'good on Stalin for doing it or we'd have to be speaking German' applies a totally ahistorical moral judgement to the decision to industrialise.

"could they have achieved the crash, militarizable industrialization necessary without the use of force" is the question I am asking. Some force inevitable. The desolation of Stalinism - not necessary.

# ¿ Jan 20, 2015 15:46

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

The fact that the CIA made a bunch of Italian Americans write home to Italy to tell people not to vote communist has never ceased to amuse me.

# ¿ Jan 20, 2015 18:41

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 14:17

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

computer parts posted:

Cuba's been good for Cubans but they don't really have much international reach.

And, you know, they got the world as close as it's been to thermonuclear destruction.

Castro was literally berating Khrushchev for not launching on the US all the way through, insisting the total obliteration of Cuba was a price he was willing to pay for the poo poo to go down.

# ¿ Jan 20, 2015 20:28

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Is being proud of your country unfashionable in Europe?

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