THE NATIONALIST ILLUSION

We live in a class-divided society, wherein a small minority own the means of producing and distributing wealth while the vast majority have to work for wages and salaries and produce the surplus value that the owning class live on. How do the owning class manage this con trick? One of their ploys is religion. You may be poor in this world but when you die you will go to paradise. Another diversion is nationalism. In the recent Olympic games the media played on this prejudice all over the world. "From table tennis and shooting to diving and swimming, the gold medals have poured in, and hundreds of millions of Chinese have been glued to the wall-to-wall coverage of the Games on state TV. ...."With each gold medal that China wins, I feel my heart leap," said saleswoman Huang Weiwei as she ate lunch in a Beijing fast-food restaurant, her eyes fixed on a wall-mounted TV showing the Games." (Yahoo News, 4 August) Nationalism is a wonderful illusion that the owning class use to disguise their exploitation. It is an accident which country you were born in, in fact it is probably an accident that you were born at all, but it presents the illusion that you and your exploiters have something in common. RD