• redtea@lemmygrad.ml
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    1 year ago

    PatSoc seems to be an Anglo-European, mainly US phenomenon; it shouldn’t be imposed on other societies as if it’s a universal category.

    Patriotism to a coloniser state means loyalty to it’s colonising history and character. It’s a call for redistributing the spoils of imperialism rather than ending imperialism, with some noises about ending imperialism at some unknown date in the future.

    Kim Jong Un did speak about the need for patriotism. But the patriotism of a socialist state that has recently cut off colonial overlords has a different character to that of the patriotism of those ex-overlords. The one means patriotism for oppression , the other, as in the DPRK, is a call to be loyal to anti-imperialism.

    This is a big can of worms. I’d caution against listening to anyone who calls the DPRK patsoc.

    Current events provide another example: it would be bizarre to claim that a Palestinian Marxist is a PatSoc. Palestinian ‘patriotism’ (if that’s the right word for it – I’m not entirely convinced) would look very different to Israeli patriotism.

    Edit: this isn’t a view steeped in literature; it’s hard to divine what self-proclaimed patsocs themselves think because they’re too tedious and wrong to engage with for prolonged periods. So treat this more as ‘preliminary comments’.