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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35578 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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Standing up for the national anthem is culturally universal phenomenon

Nationalism isn't universal, let alone being for the national anthem of your (again, not a universal sentiment) country.

I'm sure there's some Irishmen who don't feel too kindly about the national anthem of the United Kingdom, for example. To this day iirc there are elected Sinn Fein members that'll never sit in government cause they can't accept the trappings of the UK government.

Sinn Fein politicians are perfectly happy to stand respectfully for God Save the King in accordance with international protocol when it is played at an international sports game, or on other appropriate civic occasions like the arrival or departure of a senior official visitor from the United Kingdom.

Part of the confusion is the weirdness of Americans putting on a patriotic display at bog-standard pro sports games. In the culture that is non-American pro sports (most obviously including European league football) it would be a presumptively inappropriate political statement to play the national anthem before a game. Similarly, it would be obviously inappropriate to protest a national anthem before a game between national teams, because it is being used to designate a country and not to make a political point.

Similarly, it would be obviously inappropriate to protest a national anthem before a game between national teams,

Yet this is what the American Womens Soccer Team did. So I don't think your reasoning explains what motivates those who disrespect the Star Spangled Banner.

That doesn’t make them not nationalists. Quite the opposite. They just aren’t nationalistic about the flag of the State they are living in, and would prefer another State to run that area

That doesn’t make them not nationalists.

It's not really the problem here. The problem is that they are anti-nationalist of the universally recognized flag of the nation that holds the country - just as the US flag is universally recognized as the flag of the current government holding sway over those territories.

They are showing the same "disrespect" that Kaep showed. Point is that that "respect" is not universal at all.

Basically you can't lean on some descriptive fact about flag popularity here; you just have to make a normative case that it's wrong to dismiss the national flag relative to other (less practically relevant in some cases) alternatives.

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