Industrial Workers of the World

Shock Horror!!

“Workers have no country”!!

Patriotism now identified as major brain disease in working class!!!

Flag waving major cause of preventable death during last 100 years!!!

OK the headings might be a bit overdone. But this really irritates me. When people flee to our geographic region to escape death and persecution it is hard to watch the authorities do all in their power to make life as difficult as possible for them and as comfortable as possible for the people doing the killing and persecuting.

Now it may well be that there are people in this country of ours that benefit strongly from the continued existence of authoritarian repressive governments in places as close as Indonesia and China. In fact I know that there are. For most of us though it is fairly clear that it is our interests that democracy and self-determination prevail in our neighbourhood and the world. If we are to have any chance of preserving and extending them here.

One of the pieces of baloney that gets peddled in the fatuous expulsion of wind passing for political debate in this country is the nationalistic one. This tries to convince us that our interests as a “nation” are totally bound up with, if not identical too, those of our exploiters. One would think that this would be rather like convincing a lion or other big cat that its interests were identical with the flees feeding upon its back. But not so. We are suckered every time.

Every time we turn on the idiot box for the news we get confronted by one or other of our so-called leaders, draped behind any number of Australian flags, feeding us the patriotism dope. This, in itself would not matter so much—it usually is the last refuge of the scoundrel as Oscar Wilde truthfully said.

What is more painful is the increasing prevalence of the same bits of cloth adorning poles littering up the suburbs, outside schools, commercial ventures and even, sad to say, private homes.

It used to be one of the main virtues of the Australian worker that s/he did not wear the patriotic heart on the sleeve in this way. Leaving that, pretty well, to our American brothers and sisters. We, generally, knew where we were without such reminders. I could get patriotic thinking about the wonderful lack of patriotism that once was ours. It was all show, of course. Give the call and we would be gone to die in our thousands. For us they said—in South Africa fighting the Boer, in the WW1 trenches, in Korea, in Malaya in Viet-Nam - but they didn’t explain how.

A strange contradiction clinging about the new patriotism is that it should come just at the moment that the Australian nation state is at its weakest. Free trade deals pretty much mean that the government has admitted that the economy is out of its control. Citizens like David Hicks are kidnapped by a foreign power and left to rot in Guantanamo Bay and his government dares not to say boo. We try to give asylum to some persecuted neighbours in West Papua but the Indonesian politicians (who have to generate an appearance of being super patriots too) frown sternly and we have to start backing away at high speed.

We are not being a country any more as the term was thought of in the past—its more like we are barracking for a team. “Come on lads—we’re all in the same boat” we can imagine the controller of a slave galleon saying as he gives his charges another flick with the whip just to ensure that they remain competitive.

Another strange contradiction is that internationalists tend to reflect the culture, land and people that they come from love (nothing is as American as the wobbly hailing from that part of the world; Nothing as Spanish as the CNT militant). On the other hand nothing is so blandly lacking in any real national flavour as a nationalist.

Whatever the part of the world they all seem to look the same with their particular little bit of cloth in the background. It is always the nationalists who are concerned with “developing the country” by which they mean making it identical to every other capitalist economy. For love of their nation they will tear down and chip every last old growth forest, mine every national park and have every coast developed. The ultra nationalists are even stranger in their international uniformity.

Unfortunately whenever people start waving flags with real enthusiasm you know that some other people are going to be dying fairly soon. Over a hundred thousand now in Iraq by the look of things. (They are over there for us again) Iran next? Why not use some bunker busting atomic bombs? That will stop them nuclear proliferating.

It is absolutely time to put a stop to this rubbish. Working people have only one country—the planet earth. There is only one foreigner—the boss.

miek Australasian Phoenix May 2006