Vehicles for Oppression and Cruelty

“I’ll get personal here for a moment because having grown up in a police-state myself under apartheid South Africa, I was the kid [who] refused to sing the national anthem in music class. We were there to study music, I did not want to sing a political anthem that justified the apartheid regime. And I got in big trouble for this… My entire life I’ve been disgusted by nationalism and its mouth-breathing, masturbatory cousin patriotism. The abstract symbols: the flags, the self-aggrandizing identifications of national pride… all of that just seems totally empty to me. And the reason I’m deeply suspicious of it is I feel it’s always a vehicle for justifying superiority, and oppression, and cruelty, and sabre-rattling because now we’re going to go to war against the people who are not from our great nation. So to me, I don’t see a really big difference between the hammer and the sickle, the stars and stripes, the swastika, or indeed the crucifix, in the sense that these are all devices for instigating and intoxicating and transcendent loyalty that too easily ignores moral clarity and courage and concern about the facts. I see them really as being part of what Robert J. Lifton refers to as the ‘thought-terminating cliche’ that enables cult indoctrination.” - Julian Walker, “Brief: Is It Fascism?”, Conspirituality Podcast, March 29, 2025

Recommended listening.