authoritarian identification

* "Australian schools must have a functioning flagpole if they are to qualify for extra educational funding, Prime Minister John Howard has said.

[...]

Mr Howard also said he "wouldn't mind" the national anthem being sung in schools, although that was not a requirement."


* lacanian analysis of nationalism

"Jacques Lacan's 'mirror stage,' wherein the construction of the ego is seen in terms of reflection in a mirror, would seem to be a valid theoretical model of the nationalist epistemology. Lacan posits an identification between the child and the reflection; the ego is seen as created out of the desire to completely identify with the reflection. To the inchoate child, the reflection is fixed, stable and coherent. Lacan sees the genesis of the ego as fictive, constantly attempting to identify with this image.
Lacan calls this process the mirror stage, and sees it as part of the Imaginary order of identification the image of a subject being captated by a reflection, which is both idealized and at the same time frozen is a paradigm for the identificatory processes of nationalism. The captation of the child by his reflection is an analogue of the captation of a people by their nationalist mirror-image. The dual nature of the scopic field between an ethnie and the projection of their identity is central to nationalism; that there is no third party in this scopic bijection is another cogent factor as the identification is mutually fulfilling, there is no room for anything or anyone else."