The State creates nationalism through a reaction induced by stigmatization. The strategy of the dominant is always stigmatization, exclusion, criminalization of the other, of the black, of the Moor, of the xarnego, of the poor, the need for an external enemy.
Not to mention Pope Bergoglio and his Christian words addressed to his Christians and parishioners who are perhaps less fervent on the subject of immigration; I leave that to the Catholics. In order not to continue the protests of the Christians, but rather for the opening, at the initiative of the archbishopric and the brotherhoods of Seville, of a night center for the homeless, many of them immigrants. In order not to dwell on the miserable way of confronting each other that the most ultra-mountain right and the left most fearful of the polls have found to win followers and not to educate the children of nationalist chauvinism and other forms of ignorance and intolerance regarding immigration. For these reasons and some others, I will start with Marcus Tullius Cicero.
Since history always repeats itself, especially when it features the most miserable, let’s look at it. Cicero, the great Roman thinker, orator and jurist, whose family of origin, at the time, was also naturalized Roman, got involved in the defense in the Senate of the citizen rights of a native of Cadiz; Julius Caesar’s enemies, today we would say the opposition, could not think of a better political strategy to attack him than to strike him in the back of one of his close friends, a foreigner he had met in Baetica and whom Pompey had a few years earlier obtained Roman citizenship. His name was Lucius Cornelius Balbo. This citizen would later become the first consul – the co-president of the Republic – of non-Roman origin. From Gades. “Welcoming people from outside and treating them as equals is much more a strengthening than a weakening for Rome,” Cicero declared triumphantly in his speech.
In one of his interventions in another of the many trials, Cicero, referring to the poets born in Cordoba, said ironically that their accent seemed greasy and foreign. Alas, the Senecas, the Lucans… Even the emperors were not exempt from xenophobia; The refusals were however more acidic before reaching these high magistracies, then they would end up being enchanted by their accent. In Life HadrianiHadrian, who at the time was only a quaestor, official or minister of finance, is reported to have had to endure senatorial jokes about his way of pronouncing Latin during a sort of parliamentary appearance, agrestius pronuntians risus esset.
Pierre Bourdieu insistently evokes the scourge of glottophobia as a weapon of xenophobia, the contempt for the accents of the hard-working and weak immigrant, or not, let us take as examples the Sicilians Andrea Camilleri or Leonardo Sciascia.
Hadrian, like his predecessor Trajan, was from Baetica, from Italica; from a Cadizian mother, Adriano. Both of them, together with Marcus Aurelius, also from a Baetic family, formed three of the five good emperors, the most important of the best era. If we continue in time, with the trace of identities, there is something little known and curious in the discontinuous historiography that Jorge Luis Borges said: documents written in Andalusian Romance attributed to Maimonides of Cordoba have been found. As more and more evidence demonstrates every day, people understood each other in this romance of the South or latiniyaand it sounded different, even if the enlightened wrote in the prestigious languages of travel, Arabic, Hebrew, Latin or Greek. There is no evidence of joking with the wise Andalusian.
Pierre Bourdieu insistently evokes the scourge of glottophobia as a weapon of xenophobia, the contempt for the accents of the hard-working and weak immigrant, or not, let’s take as examples the Sicilians Andrea Camilleri or Leonardo Sciascia; For the French sociologist, it was one of the most subtle forms of racism, perhaps because he himself suffered from it due to his condition as a mother who spoke Occitan in Béarn, where he was from, just like – he remembers – the Basque. – French waiters also suffer from it in Paris. Bourdieu said that the State produces a dominant nationalism and expels those who are not part of its paradigm, whether for ethnic, economic, cultural, historical, religious, linguistic reasons… The other side is that it creates one or other nationalisms due to a reaction induced by the stigmatization of the State. The strategy of the dominant is always stigmatization, exclusion, criminalization of the other, of the black, of the Moor, of the xarnego, of the poor, the need for an external enemy.
Balbus, from Cadiz, Trajan and Hadrian, from Seville, Marcus Aurelius, also from a Baetic family, Seneca and Lucan, from Cordoba, Columella, from Cadiz, all from Baetica and many others, as well as from the entire periphery of the Republic and the Empire; Without these emigrants, without their culture of origin, their beliefs, their accent, the color of their skin, their imagination and their political, scientific, artistic, literary lucidity, their migratory adventure, the great Rome would have been something else and if it allowed the Andalusian dialect détente, with the permission of the Senate, and with an expansive spirit, a point of reference to stingon a stick
