No such thing as a good national identity, no such thing as good ethnocentrism

[yvannairie]

Ended up down a rabit hole of trying to see if a callout post I saw had any merit and it ended up with me reading a bunch of extremely informative articles about Karelian rights and how "suomalaistaminen" was also enacted against them as a way to pave over the fact that we just decided to Do Some Colonialism in Karelia, same as in Lapland.

Like, I never felt much of a connection to a Finnish identity, y'know? Growing up with most of my positive relationships being in English (with my mom's encouragement) and generally just being really ill-suited to society until I was about twenty honestly did more to hasten my general alienation from society than work ever did, and has so far, and a lot of the bonding with strangers I've done has been with other people alienated from Finnish society, which turns out to be a lot of immigrants and minorities. Honestly, to this day I had a harder time settling in with my work b/c of the anti-Romani and anti-Somali racism.

But that doesn't really change the fact that my disconnect to my culture as a white Finn is just not the same. Finnish nationalism being a comforting blanket that I could wrap myself in, a sense of Finnish cultural heritage in the absence of meaningful community, is honestly just as much of a fabrication as other nationalist identities, and is just as virulent about self-maintaining as other nationalist identities. I still find the "sob-story" (I'm allowed to say that, just like I'm allowed to say I bullied people into accommodating me) about reclaiming Finnish identity in the face of Russification, after pushing for Finnish language and culture to be treated at least as equal to Swedish language that had been imported here over the puddle relatable in the way you do when you've been excluded and your contributions devalued and you just wanna see yourself accepted as you are.

But, yeah, I guess this just means that Finnish nationalism is an edifice I'm just gonna have to let go of if I want to address the mental dissonance. I've been drifting away from it anyway, but mostly out of distaste of how "Finnishness" just gets weaponised over and over against Finns that aren't sufficiently white, and how non-Finns get treated in this country despite the fact that out society purports to hold egalitarian values in high regard. I've never known how to address the losing sense of someone trying to pit me against someone.

I guess I just had to be disillusioned properly, like, I've always thought a lot of anarcho-syndicalists and anti-statists have good and practical ideas, I've just been at a loss on how you could ever coordinate anything without creating an elective identity to create a sense of working together, just for the sake of coordination. And frankly, I don't think I can do things out of a global sense of interconnectivity, because in the global sense everything is predicated on someone's arm getting twisted. I am actively educating myself to go work a job that wouldn't exist if it wasn't for the pillaging of Africa and the continued need for conflict minerals. But a national identity isn't going to give me the sense of "belonging" and "being useful" that I want -- it's only gonna be used to pit me against someone else saying "I don't want that".

Comments

[cimorene]

Maybe local and regional communities, not necessarily political ones, but they could be? At least at the local and grass-roots level, individual people have the power to contribute. Having strong local trade and local economy is always good.

[yvannairie]

Yeah, it's just really hard for me as someone who has been excluded from literally all communities and has always had a maximum of three people besides my parents consistently interested in including me and building any sort of mutuality with me, to believe in any sort of local community. It's one of the big things that puts me off when most people start talking about alternative forms of society -- they always rely on everyone involved liking and respecting each other and I've never been able to be respectable enough that people wouldn't eventually start being mean towards me for reasons that are beyond my understanding.

Like, I understand it -- I don't think that sense of alienation is just the result of some people really hating my guts, but I also don't think we're ever gonna have a society where, unless compelled by some kind of community standard, people are gonna get along and respect each other without any caveats. I don't want my ability to participate in society to be dependent on how likeable people find me.

[cimorene]

No, I'm confident that it isn't possible for humans to build a society, even a micro society like the size of a scout troup, that would have people getting along and respecting each other without caveats and without any compulsion - and I don't think there are any social animals that do, either. Strife is obligatory, probably the result of the fact that some individual animals, whether human or otherwise, just always come out as jerks, and a much bigger proportion come out willing and ready to be jerks a good portion of the time, depending on which way the wind blows. And an organized society probably can't, in reality, get rid of ALL of that or smooth out all the issues either. But some do better than others at least, so it's worth trying to improve in the abstract... though it's totally understandable that less participation in local society is healthier or more enjoyable for some people, for reasons like yours or others.

It's worth pointing out in defense of Finnish culture and identity that, while racism is a big ingredient in Finnish nationalism and hence inherent in Finnish culture, I don't think it's necessarily especially racist, like compared to other nordic/Western cultures; the racism is perhaps caused at a level below culture, and shouldn't necessarily count against it since you can't get an improvement in any other culture. The same nativist and xenophobic impulses behind racism are present in all cultures, as far as I know; they just haven't had the opportunity to calcify into an edifice of structural racism in some of them.

I understand this is like saying a cake might be moldy but the other cakes are moldy too if you were looking at it specifically with a view to participate in or identify with the nationalist movement, and you still probably won't want to eat it (or any other nationalism). I don't think that has to spoil Finnishness completely for any relation to identity, though, if you can value the culture without succumbing to nationalism. I guess, though, that from the perspective of constructing your own personal identity, local and regional stuff like I mentioned isn't useful, even if it is on the societal scale.