En relación a [PEN-L:2978] RE: Re: Memory & History: Herman Mel,
el 10 Oct 00, a las 20:05, Lisa & Ian Murray dijo:
> Nestor,
>
> Do you mean this to say that nationalism is still desirable as a form
> of cultural defense against the Americanization of everything?
>
> Ian
>
I am a socialist, I don't think "nationalism" desirable. My business
is a different business. I don't care _that_ much for "cultural
defense" in itself, for that matter (please note the _in itself_, it
is very important).
In a sense, I speak in strictly economic terms. I won't deny that an
all-Americanized world would be quite as boring as an all-
Argentinized world, but this of boredom is not my essential problem.
On the other hand, I am particularly convinced that what is imposed
on the world as "American" is basically the junk material that is
imposed on the Americans themselves as "American", while the powerful
ones reserve for themselves the truly meaningful aspects of life. But
this is still another issue.
Back to "nationalism". What I mean is, simply put, that from the
point of view of universal history, of the history of humankind,
nations have not purchased a ticket to eternity. There is a social
question, and there is a national question. The national question is
related with the solution of a definite set of social troubles (this
is why, by the way, national struggles are class struggles: because
they are social struggles). These troubles have been solved in a
handful of -now- powerful countries, namely the core countries. By
their action, they do not allow the remaining countries to solve
their similar troubles. So that while, for example, national struggle
in the United States has been closed with the American Civil War, and
thus belong to the past -they have been, somehow, _captured_ by the
bourgeoisie and solved in a bourgeois sense- in the oppressed nations
they are _still to be solved_. Thusly, there is a living and painful
"national question" that has to be solved.
It is in this sense that nationalism in the Third World is
progressive, while nationalism in the First World is reactionary.
Néstor Miguel Gorojovsky
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
