The need to belong to a group is biological, thus when nationalism fails people flounder for a new identity, and the colour of skin is an obvious feature, as are clothing styles and religion. So xenophobia rises; recall that groups are not defined by who is in them, but by who is not. So in these troubled times we can fall down into the sewage mire of primitive fears or be intelligent about it and offer a new group to belong to. We are all humans of Earth. We belong to a group called humanity. You are born into it and membership is lifelong. We can be one tribe or fracture into vile factions that believe their own lies and bring war.
Earth is my nation, creation is my cradle and all fauna are my relatives; this is my nationalism.
Family don't dine in style while children starve; we can kill nationalism or one another.
Nationalism is there the convince the poor that they are the "family" of the rich, and the lonely that they are family, without taking any real action to help either.
How better it is to see myself as an Earthling equal to all my brothers and sisters within creation than to let my ego take this Gollum ring of nationalism.
When capitalism had destroyed community and family at the birth of the industrial revolution, reducing the people to ragged beggars, nationalism was their palliative.
Nationalism was born when the capitalists needed the poor to see themselves in a heirachical "family" with the rich, to offer them this sense of belonging to a "tribe," when they were entirely fragmented in brutal competition was their shackles.
Our need to belong to a group binds us to nationalism and war, to these artificial boundaries on a map.
Nationalism is an invention, as is the nation. A nation is too large to be a community and so ways are found for masses of strangers to think of themselves as a group. For most of evolution were were simply humans on earth, one species in many communities, and in reality, we still are.
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