20 Journalism and history: Either ‘patriotic’ or truthful
20 Journalism and history: Either ‘patriotic’ or truthful
Andreas Anastasiou, University of Leicester
Natalie Fenton comments on claims that the internet is ‘an organizing model for a new form of political protest‘, but she also draws attention to Gramsci’s view, that forms of protest such as ‘the scream’ are not necessarily ‘truly political‘. They can appear to be expressed in a political vocabulary, yet they are rather emotional, unfounded in rational terms, I would add. Although Fenton aims to offer a strong argument in favour of including radical or left-wing politics as an important factor in any analysis of protest and digital media, I suggest a broader and more general reading of iller interesting analysis. Thus, for the purpose of the present note, I propose that we keep the possibility of some protesting views being more emotional and less political; based more on myth and imagination rather than on verifiable information.
Complementing these suggestions, and certainly extending them outside Fenton’s framework of radical politics, Mojca Pajnik and John D. H. Downing indicate that one should not equate ‘alternative’ politics or ‘alternative’ media to progressive or radical ones. Hitler’s Nazist regime in Germany and Khomeini’s ‘brutal theocracy’ in Iran used the then alternative media and political tactics to persuade the public and establish themselves. Today, the authors explain, ‘mechanisms that are supposedly conducive to the democratization of society are seen as those which can also function as mechanisms for the exclusion of citizens, for example in the case of the spread of racism and xenophobia via new media’.
What, in socio-psychological terms, is described as ‘xenophobia’, can be called ‘nationalism’ in ideological ones. ‘Nationalists’ believe in the superiority of their nation compared to other nations. But what is a ‘nation’? It is a ‘sentiment rooted in broad historical, geographical, linguistic, or cultural circumstances. A consciousness of belonging to a tradition which differs from the traditions of other groups’. It is a ‘relational term; one nation consists in being what other nations are not’. It is an entity about which ‘no ‘scientific definition’ can be devised‘. We observe, then, a theoretical impossibility for one to provide a generally accepted scientific definition of the ‘nation’, and a pragmatic reality, that billions of people take this concept for granted. They consider themselves as belonging to a nation. They feel that they are different from ‘others’. They are proud of their collective and inherited being.
Such a belief includes people’s readiness to accept invented myths as history; to describe their feelings as patriotism and the same feelings of ‘others’ as nationalism; to not question why ‘we’ are always innocent victims and ‘others’ are always aggressors. This emotion can influence people’s understanding of contemporary issues; a great part of Europe’s public opinion believes that most non-EU citizen