JakartaPost-Aug 16, 2022
As Indonesia gears up for its celebration of 77 years of independence on Wednesday, the air has become thick with patriotism, and there is a seemingly unending display of red-and-white flags adorning every nook and cranny, accompanied by the chorusing of national songs in public spaces. The uniform fanfare, as it were, stands almost in stark contrast to this diverse nation that is home to more than 800 different languages, 300 ethnicities and six recognized faiths. After all, Indonesia is the eighth most patriotic nation in the world, according to a 2022 poll from global survey company YouGov, with 14 percent of respondents answering positively to the statement that Indonesia was “the best country in the world”. However, local professionals and researchers alike are growing increasingly worried that Indonesia’s nationalism has turned toxic, citing glaring instances of growing intolerance at a recent focused group discussion The Jakarta Post hosted in Central Jakarta. The work of defining a national identity and the boundaries of loving one’s country is thus unfinished, the panel said. Melbourne University history PhD candidate Ravando Lie, defined toxic nationalism as a sentiment that, rather than uniting, divided people into categories. While the manifestation of this toxicity has been seen time and time again in the numerous tragedies that have befallen the country’s minority groups, the “destructive” sentiment has also more recently bled into Indonesia’s vast online spaces. Philips J. Vermonte, dean of the School of Political Sciences at the Indonesian International Islamic University (UIII), said that while the nation’s founding fathers were unmistakably “rationalists” in their nationalism, the modern characteristics of loyalty to the country had lost touch with sensibility, reasoning and definition. Usman Hamid, director of Amnesty International Indonesia maintained that nationalism had served nothing but to perpetuate human rights abuses via a “melancholic” glorification of the collective good. Read more at: https://www.thejakartapost.com/paper/2022/08/16/toxic-nationalism-under-scrutiny.html.
