Nationalism at core of China's reaction to Tibet unrest - International Herald Tribune

Nationalism at core of China's reaction to Tibet unrest - International Herald Tribune

I've understood already some interesting things about Socialism and Communism. As much as the official propaganda machines might deny it and even launch attacks against it, it has just about always been understood that these ideologies are nationalist at the core. Marxist-Leninist followers will always say something to the effect of "nationalism is dangerous and must be stopped"; Yet, they tend to use nationalism quite often.

I can think of all the present communist countries and their ideologies and all of them are nationalist to some degree or another. North Korea has essentially dumped any notion of Marxism from its official ideology in favor of what they call "Juche", an extreme nationalist ideology. Former and present communist parties in Eastern Europe have teamed up with neo-nazi parties in some countries, like Belarus and Slovakia. The Serbian Socialist Party, formerly known as the League of Communists of Serbia, has taken to ultra-nationalism, especially when Croatia and Bosnia attempted to flee former Yugoslavia. The old East German Socialist Unity Party had a bit of a nationalist streak, which Stalin had worried about and even had in its communist-dominated National Front a neo-nazi party called the National Democratic Party - not at all dissimilar to the modern NPD of Germany.

I could go on for hours about the love affair communism has with nationalism, but the point here being that the two don't really oppose each other as official propagandists would have us believe. It's the same deal in the People's Republic of China, that has its own version of a "National Front" with leftist members of the Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party) as part of it. OK, so they still display gigantic portraits of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao all over the place, but this is something the Fascists and National-Socialists did also. In fact, they had good teachers: The Soviets.

Modern mainland China is about nationalism. There is nothing in that society that even resembles communism or socialism other than official propaganda.

What's really sad though, is the number of lives that were lost in these "communist" nations to get this far.