"Nationalists, to take one example of the imagined communities, like to claim that their nation has always existed back into that conveniently vague area, “the mists of time.” The Anglican Church claims that, in spite of the break with Rome during the Reformation, it is part of an unbroken progression from the early church. In reality, an examination of any group shows that its identity is a process, not a fixed thing. Groups define and redefine themselves over time and in response to internal developments, a religious awakening perhaps, or outside pressures. If you are oppressed and victimized, as gays have been and still are in many societies, that becomes part of how you see yourself. Sometimes that leads to an unseemly competition for victimhood. American blacks have watched resentfully as the commemoration of the Holocaust has taken an ever greater place in American consciousness. Was not slavery just as great a crime, some have asked?"
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Original Language: English
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Sources
Margaret MacMillan, The Uses and Abuses of History (2008)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Nationalism
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Nationalism
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