After my latest experience with antisemitism on the New York City Indymedia website — in which the first reply to an article I posted about the firebombing of the home of a member of the Jewish Agency on Brown University, was something like “so what?”, and the ones that followed were explicitly justifying the attack — I’ve decided to finally pen my very first blog entry here.
Workshop: Nationalism and Communism
Eastern European History and Eastern European Studies,
University of Amsterdam, 25 April 2008
After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 nationalism suddenly resurfaced in Eastern Europe, or so the common wisdom goes. This implies communism and nationalism have little to do with each other. In reality, the communist regimes of Europe all flew the national flag in order to gain popular legitimacy. After 1948, the People’s Republics of Central and Eastern Europe constructed the state ideology of ‘Socialist Patriotism’, a conscious blend of national and socialist imagery. Parties presented themselves as heirs to national traditions, and as guardians of national interests. They appropriated national symbols and heroes, and pursued ‘national’ policies whenever possible.
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