Anderson on racism

I'd like to turn discussion for a minute away from the great stuff that's been going on in the posts prior to mine and make two quick comments about Anderson's analysis of the relationship between racism and nationalism, as the chapter devoted to it was the most problematic for me of the entire book.


First off, I wholly understand that equating nationalism with racism is a cop-out; the line of thought that he's writing this chapter in response to is, I agree, quite incomplete. But his attempt to invert this argument seems to ring a bit false to me, too. While it's true (as he points out in a footnote on pg. 142) that it's tough to find "hymns of hate," or any token of nationalist discourse that is explicitly hateful towards others, isn't the vilification of everyone outside of the nation in question still part of the propositional content of any nationalist text? By praising the glory of/praying for the victory of/basking in the beauty of our nation, aren't we simultaneously putting down or wishing for the defeat of or implying a lack of, I don't know, aesthetic grandeur in everyone else's?

Secondly, Anderson writes that "on the whole, racism and anti-semitism manifest themselves, not across national boundaries, but within them. In other words, they justify not so much foreign wars as domestic repression and domination" (150). But, would we expect it to be different? I mean, within the national boundaries is the realm of control. Sure, anti-semitism in the USSR didn't prevent "a respectful working relationship between Brezhnev and Kissinger" (150), but Brezhnev wasn't really in a position to strip Henry Kissinger of his rights. And also, racism at home is still a way of imagining the boundaries of the community, right? As in, "those people live here but they don't fit the prototype I imagine for the members of my community."

So I guess I'm making the same root point with both of these examples: I don't see a lot in this text analyzing what I take to be the necessarily exclusionary consequences of imagining communities--not that there aren't positive consequences as well, as Anderson points out (although I'm not sure that inspiring countless self-sacrifices is necessarily one of them).