Cross posted from: https://feddit.de/post/11433331
A Chinese student in the US has been sentenced to nine months in prison for stalking and threatening a female Chinese student who put up pro-democracy fliers on campus.
The fliers, put up at the Berklee College of Music in Boston in late 2022, read: “We want freedom… We want democracy, we want to love, stand with Chinese people.”
In response, Xiaolei Wu said he would “chop [the woman’s] hands off”.
A federal judge has ordered that the 26-year-old be deported after serving his sentence.
“What Mr. Wu did in weaponising the authoritarian nature of the People’s Republic of China to threaten this woman is incredibly disturbing," said Jodi Cohen, who leads the FBI’s Boston Division that investigated the case.
The pro-democracy fliers were put up in late October 2022 during a wave of activism among Chinese people abroad.
If patriotism is the virtue of the vicious, nationalism is the virtue of the psychopathic.
Patriotism is loyalty to a country, which is simply an area of land over which a government presides.
Nationalism is loyalty to a nation, which is a group of people with a shared history and culture.
Patriotism can be good, because all forms of civic engagement meant to improve one’s country can be seen as patriotic; so both anti-Vietnam protesters and pro-military boneheads, who both believed themselves to be bettering the country, could be called patriots.
Nationalism really can’t be good unless you buy into heterogeneity of a peoples as being good. Moreover, it is not simply an implication of “my group good”, which can be true of multiple groups, it’s a directly adversarial stance that implies “my group better”.
The US isn’t and has never been a Nation-state, i.e. a country made up of one nationality, so any profession of Nationalism towards America intrinsically implies the belief that only one group of peoples within it is the ‘rightful’ nationality, (which is why the current Christian Nationalism movement is inherently racist and White Supremacist, as well as intrinsically historical-revisionist).
Here are some thoughts by a political scientist on the distinctions, if you’re interested.
