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Yitzhak Graff's avatar

Though nationalism is definitely a complicated topic, I think it is worth thinking about the French revolution form of nationalism as a model for most nationalist movements instead of British nationalism.

Arab nationalism, like French revolution nationalism, formed as a means to tople a government, the Ottoman empire. Prince Faisal and Lawrence of Arabia. The European Colonial powers definitely supported Christian and Alawite communities to govern the territories, but early Arab nationalism very much belongs to the Sunni Muslims. They are the people who actually toppled the Ottoman empire.

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Peter Defeel's avatar

> While they basically ruled over a united nation (don’t look at the Irish - they don’t count!),

Don’t look at the facts that totally demolish the ideology that is being promoted. If you are going to argue that we Anglos created and exported nationalism then you are going to have to actually have some understanding of what nationalism is and what states are. The British empire was multinational, as is the U.K. neither are nations.

The former disappeared and the latter is on its last legs - and that is something I applaud as an English (but not British) nationalist. If nationalism could be constructed by states then the Irish would be British still.

Spain is a multinational state but not because of the nonsense about visigoths etc but because the basques and Catalans are separate and not assimilated.

Different groups of people can merge into an ethic group over time, in a process this is exactly how we English came to exist from the Angles, Saxons and Jutes. The Scottish and Irish could not be so assimilated, so it goes.

The problem with Zionism is that Israel has no business existing, it’s a fake state with no continuous history pre 1945, which is why it needs to destroy the indigenous Palestinians because unlike the Angles, Saxons and Jutes who made ethnogensis with the celts and each other, Zionism has to expel.

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