When are
we most nationalistic? Maybe when we are living abroad.
When you
meet with your fellow contrymen, you will soon start reminiscing about your
home country. How everything worked more smoothly there. How the food was
better. How the weather was better. How your own Church or religion is superior to
that of your host country. How people at home were so much more open-minded and
tolerant.
You are
happy to have an occasion to speak your own language, and you take much more
care to do it correctly and without the use of foreign loan-words you would use
at home. You even dig up the word for “fuck” that once existed in your own
language before the globalisation of the English word.
Maybe it is
like that for everyone. A sort of protection against the foreign and unknown.
I heard a
talk with an Arab girl on the radio. Her parents had emigrated to Northern Europe . She was born there. She grew up in what
can probably best be described as a “ghetto”. She had a strict upbringing.
Muslim customs and morality were scrupulously adhered to. Muslim food was prepared in accordance with all the
old rituals. The children were protected from the loose morality of the youths
of the new country.
As a teenager
she had the opportunity to stay with relatives in her parents’ village for at
period of time. To her surprise she found that life was much more relaxed
there. Things were not so strict. The old way of life, which her parents had
cultivated and cherished in their new country, no longer existed in the same
form in the old country.
Maybe our
“colonies” abroad turn into museums of national virtues as surviving only in
the memory of those of us, who did not witness the change.
On the
other hand, maybe this is not so bad as it sounds. When we go to our home
country on holidays, we are no longer nationalistic. We then, fortunately,
become international citizens with an understanding of the people of the world
in their multitude. The nationalists are now those who stayed at home. Within
their borders.
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