Oompa Loompa
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- Jun 4, 2020
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The best way I can explain it is to compare burning the American flag to insulting the Brittish crown to a bunch of Royal Marines."Nationalist education" is alive and well in America's public schools, where national symbols like the flag, the Constitution, are imbued with mythical, symbolic weight. Whereas Britain has more historical memory of the results of nationalism rooted in myth: bombed cities, destroyed lives, and collective struggle of resistance.
English patriotism tends to be more rooted in a sense of place, relatively stable cultural institutions (especially before the Thatcher-Blair revolutions) and common life, and doesn't require the same amount of gloss. There are symbols of course, but there's also a sense of distance from them that you don't get in American culture. Perhaps due to the weight of a longer historical memory that's full of wrestling with ambiguity and complexity in a way that America's more ideological founding myths can't assimilate (and still hasn't).
In Australia, the differences are even more stark, I would imagine.
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