What Do You Want?
HAVE always regarded nationalism as the silliest of modern idolatries, irrational, hysterical, unscrupulously fanned into flame at periods of crisis by irresponsible demagogues of one kind or another; an emotional refuge for persons of shaky stability, designed to give them an ersatz identity, and a manufactured meaning to their lives. But, listening the other night to the United Nations Radio programme on the Hungarian refugees, I was made vividly aware that there are some situations
where this feeling is spontaneous, real, and tied inextricably to the soil, The questions given by the American interviewer were a little glassy and rigid, expressed in this formula: "Question: What do you want? Answer, recorded on the Austrian border in such and such a camp. . ." and there would follow, haltingly, the simple, but overpowering testimony: "I want to live ... free from fear .. . where the nights are quiet. . ." At one point in the programme, a large band of refugees broke into the Hungarian National Anthem, and this was intensely moving. No manufactured idealism here: this was the beating heart of a people united by the image of their
land oppressed.
B.E.G.
M.
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 914, 15 February 1957, Page 16
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191What Do You Want? New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 914, 15 February 1957, Page 16
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