Nationalism in a new format
March 15, 2010 2 Comments
Random expressions of nationalist statements can be seen almost anywhere and everywhere these days. The web and especially social networking sites have become the newest tools for carrying out the promotion of nationalist ideals.
The examples are numerous: Last year, a Kosovar hackers group attacked a Serbian government website. What did they do, you wonder? They placed the Albanian national flag on the website – Big deal, right? It just meant the Serbian government had to fix their servers and make them more secure. Besides, I have no doubt the Serbian counterparts to Kosovar cyber-pirates hacked some Albanian or Kosovar site in revenge.
What happened to the Estonian internetage in 2007 was far worse: The whole government website system was under attack and more. Banks, cultural institutions, community centres – it didn’t matter whose website it was, if it was Estonian, it was targetted by Russian hackers for a simple reason – The Estonian government had removed a 1947-Soviet-Union imposed statue on the main square in Tallinn, the capital, in remembrance of the fallen Soviet soldiers in Estonia. For Estonia, the hack was disastrous. The country is, after all, the most wired country in Europe, with the highest percentage of internet users per capita.
Most recently, some months ago, a friend sent me an invite to a group calling for the closing of a Facebook page created by Serbian nationalists who claimed that one of the examples of genocidal mass murder in Srebrenica, Bosnia, was a hoax. The group was indeed shut after hundreds of thousands of concerned Facebookers joined within a matter of days.
Stickers stating Kosova is the heart of Serbia are nothing new. I used to see them when I was in Montreal, and I would routinely remove them. If Kosova was the heart of Serbia, Serbia would have had a heart attack and probably triple bypass by now – You don’t treat your heart the way Serbia treated Kosova and the great majority of its citizens.
A couple of weeks ago, a friend mentioned in a conversation that there is someone in Oxford who keeps placing the stickers all over town, and he apparently removes them every time he sees one. The name of the printing house is on the stickers. So is the name of the group posting the stickers [apparently they call themselves "Delije" - Serbian for "hero", Turkish for "fool"]. His comments during the chat reminded me of not only the new age of nationalism, but the continued facilitation of nationalist propaganda distribution in the age of technology.
It was expected, with the spread of the internet, that people around the world would find commonalities between them and people they consider “others.” Instead, it appears that the opposite has happened: People around the world are re-asserting themselves, their values, their beliefs, on the new platform for nationalist propaganda. The act of placing stickers all over a town is not necessarily physically endangering anyone’s safety, but the taking of the issues outside of their original geopolitical sources naturally carries some danger. Namely, it creates a new battlefield – convincing the persons of the new region that the nationalist cause is genuine and that the foreigner to the cause should not be an outsider, but an adopted nationalist.
..more to come.
In the past several months I’ve heard of several cases where hackers put Albanian flags on websites of Kosovo Serb organizations. I’m sure the other way around happens as well. During NATO’s Lybia war, I remember some news reports that indicated that hackers were destroying all internet-based communications of Gaddafi’s opposition. They must have gotten that under control.
Yes, the back-and-forthing of website wars has created a new fighting front on the web, and yes, I’ve noticed the increasingly active Albanian hacker community. I’m actually surprised the Kosovar government isn’t launching a web campaign for legitimacy and recognition – the Serbian government has done much to undermine it on the web, including hosting a website, for two years, decorated in all kinds of glossy and shiny designs, trying to disprove Kosova’s independence. Somehow, the website disappeared after the ICJ ruling, although that’s not to say that the Serbian government has given up on the efforts.
The Chinese hacker community are said to have recently been collaborating with their government to do data mining on American state secrets, presumably in defence of Chinese national interests.