They can Die for Their Countries (By Blowing Themselves Up): Stuart Hall and Identities

Today we are living in a “global world”, which comments us to be similar with different communities. There, many societies are having the crisis of identification of their members. They try to construct and de-construct the ‘nation’ through ‘national culture’ which is producing its members to share same memories and stories about the past and connecting it with present, also, they fix many different groups and cultures into one by merging them into a hegemony. However, there are some uncontrollable facts such as, the migration of many different ethnic groups after the decolonization process, they generally have “dialectic identities” Hall argues that, because those communities have been oppressed by the majority and they have driven in to a dilemma of global, local and their heritage, they practice the two possible consequences of globalization; resistance of their local identity –by strengthening their local ids i.e. bounding– and creating new identities instead of their national identities –having the feeling of oppressed with other ethnical communities i.e. bridging–.

The Muslim minorities in the occident, has always came up with the idea of political radicalization towards the Western majority, which generally occurred in negative way i.e. terrorism. The bad conditions of housing, education, employment meets with the discrimination by the majority. This discrimination for them is generally occurs in “triple disadvantage form”, that is their skin color or nationality, their religion and their status (immigrant). Therefore, the people who share the same nationality and religion in the minorities bound together strictly in a community and bridge their community with other Muslim communities in one sense that leads them to share negative experiences and makes them ethnocentric. The possible outcome of this, non-surprisingly, a group of angry people who wants to live free, but acts in violent way.

In my opinion, the identity crisis in Western countries is caused by conservative and republican fundamentalist politicians, they always speak about preserving their national identity but on the other hand they are always trying to occupy a role on the global scope. Let’s think about Merkel’s Germany, she always supports the idea of united in diversity in EU, but inside of the borders, her cabinet tries to discriminate and assimilate “eastern minorities”. Of course the policies of Merkel’s Germany are constituted in subjective way. She just ignores “the non-fixable national cultures” in Germany, moreover tries to take many of immigrants out of the country by indirect supporting of “Neo-Nazi” groups (the punishment and investigations against them are not serious). Merkel’s Germany is not the only case in Europe, BNP and Nick Griffin, France, George Bush’s America and many more examples can be given. My argument is that, the hegemony that the many of western countries are trying to create is subjective and xenophobic, and that’s considered as an “attempt to go on another crusade” by Muslim communities and they mostly practice it in a different form, which is called as “Jihad”