FIFTH COLUMN
Of Marcello Veneziani
Even the physicist Carlo Rovelli wanted to align himself with the Permanent Theme: attack patriotism because it turns into nationalist poison, Nazi and racist, and sing praises to humanity without borders. He wrote a long article yesterday in Corriere della Sera entitled "The only nation is humanity".
But why do we have to translate love of country with its violent and racist degeneration, it is not possible to love and protect your own nation, their civilization without degrading into xenophobia and racism? When we talk about religion, perhaps we reduce it to fanaticism and religious persecution? When we talk about family, of paternal love, maternal branch, we must necessarily reduce it to the abuses and abuses sometimes committed in its name? And changing sides, because when we talk about equality we don't immediately associate it with the memory of the Jacobin Terror or the horrors of communism in all its regimes? Or when we talk about freedom we perhaps reduce it to the abuses of freedom that lead to violence, to drugs, to oppression and arbitrariness?
The patriotic love, the natural and cultural bond with one's nation and its traditions, it is a fundamental need of the human soul and belongs to every era and every civilization. There are various ways of understanding that bond. Today, the most coherent way is not to close oneself in armed tribes against each other, but integrate nations into broader contexts, like Europe, and recognize mutual legitimacy and value of nations, yours like mine. But you can love humanity starting from your own city, from their own land, from your country. Feel solidarity starting from those who are closest to those who are further away.
Love of country as a community bond, passion for civilization and tradition, it must not be erased or criminalized or reduced to its ape, racism, but it must be rethought in our global era and indeed seen as a profitable compensation compared to globalization, to disorientation and loss of territory, of identity. Which produces evils at least similar to those of those who aggressively or overbearingly reaffirm those betrayed needs.
When Rovelli says that “nationalist or sovereignist policies are spreading across the world, increasing tensions” there is no doubt in his mind that those policies were created precisely to react to those he trampled on, humiliated and injured national and popular sovereignties, perhaps accompanying their "mission" with humanitarian wars, smart bombs, colonialism under a false name, coup to impose its democracy and its model on the reluctant?
Rovelli then makes a somersault on the subject of the nation: national identity is “a good thing if it helps to overcome local interests”, but it becomes false and unfair if it "promotes the interest of an artificial group, our nation, rather than a broader common good". But what a way of thinking that is? It’s true or false, good or bad only if it is useful or not to the global ideology? And then, because the nation would be an artificial group and a global society would not? Because the national state would be artificial and the UN instead would be authentic?
Between man and the world, between the individual and humanity, there are scopes, spheres and worlds that cannot be erased with a wipe of the sponge. Man lives in those concentric circles, it is its habitat, his life. The utopia of those who dream of a mass molecular society is dangerous, where nothing exists in between the individual and the world, except the powers of technique, of finance, the military and police apparatus. It is a global system, that violates the human soul, nature and history: if the roots can sometimes generate conflicts, uprooting is already in itself a violent act, which generates further violence, pros and cons.
Continue to think about eradicating the link with your homeland, confusing a natural need with his illness, and you will double the evils of the world: creating global monsters and local monsters. And losing all consonance with common feeling. Continue not to recognize citizenship and legitimacy to love of country, thus you will force those who want to cultivate those bonds to think of them only through conflict, hatred, the wars of independence. You are not doing your global cause a good service either, let alone that of man and civilization.
Source: http://www.marcelloveneziani.com/articoli/il-fisico-contro-le-patrie/