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I. CITIZENSHIP IS NEVER AND HAS NEVER BEEN NEUTRAL

When Herr Händel became Mr. Handel in 1727, naturalization was so unusual that it required an Act of Parliament.

Such rules and restrictions didn't apply to the regents, of course, since prior to the upsurge of revolutionary, liberal and socialist republicanisms starting in the 18th century, the royals more or less "owned" the various countries. For example, just a few years before the great composer's transition to being English occurred, the fellow known as King George I had been referred to as the Kurfürst von Hannover.

Indeed, the British royal house still requires its chief poobah to be descended from George's mom: the Electress Sophia. She was born in 's‑Gravenhage and was raised in the Netherlands, but wasn't Dutch. She was the grand-daughter of James VI, who was also James I, who was king of Scotland, Ireland and England. And she was the daughter of Elizabeth Stuart. But she was neither Scottish, nor Irish, nor English. She stood in line to be the Queen of England, though she never was, missing out on owning the British Isles by dying just a bit too soon, though she she did live to a ripe old age (84) for her times.

Both she and her husband were great-grandchildren of Christian III of Denmark. But neither of them were Danish.


To her credit -- and germane to my topic in an obscure way -- Sophia, Princess Palatine, was enormously intelligent. She counted Gottfried Leibniz as a personal friend. And she was well-read in Spinoza and Descartes, the foremost philsophers of her day.

If oddball sci-fi is more your bag than Euro-snobbish history, don't despair. Sophia also plays an important role in Neal Stephenson's page-turning trilogy, The Baroque Cycle, which, among other things, deals with the feud between Liebniz and Newton over who invented calculus. Good stuff.





For most people citizenship is not chosen and remains unchanged for life. One of the little pleasures of eRepublik is that it is quite a bit easier to change e-citizenship here than in real life.

In RL, citizenship is assigned at birth. In eR, it is almost the same. One chooses a citizenship based on a whim. In RL, for your average natural-born USAnian or Dutchie, one can live their whole life without thinking much about it. Everything changes, tho, in societies, like say Qatar for example, where tyrant citizens are vastly outnumbered by the rightless deportables. The rightless in such a society see things rather differently too.

Or. Consider the two-and-a-half million or so young people under the age of 24 in the USA who were brought there illegally at a young age, often just a few months old. They grew up speaking English in say, Minnesota. learned to play lacrosse and baseball. Liked Pink or Green Day or Lady Gaga or Beyoncé or Nelly Furtado. And they discover one day they have no rights, and cannot stay, even if all their younger siblings can.

Or. Slovenians born in Slovenia but living in say, Bosnia, who, in the wake of the Yugoslav wars, failed to notify "authorities" that they wanted citizenship in Slovenia and were therefore "erased", left stateless.





Having citizenship can carry severe penalties as well. In Egypt, where 87 percent of women and girls are subject to genital mutilation. Ritual beheadings and mutilations occur in various "Islamic" countries for reasons it is difficult for any "outsider" to comprehend. After international outcry, Turkmenistan finally started issuing exit visas for its own citizens, who previously had been banned from ever leaving the country. Now, instead, anyone wishing to leave is put on the secret police blacklist so you get pulled aside at the airport and your case is "reviewed"... indefinitely.


II. BY LOCALIZING A UNIVERSAL IDEAL, CITIZENSHIP IS BOUND TO UNDERMINE IT

It's a crap shoot. In RL, being born Swiss nearly guarantees a healthy life, a good education, the freedom to travel internationally, and the option to opt out and move instead, with few issues, to any of forty-some other highly-developed countries.

Other citizenships are an automatic glass ceiling. making living a decent life difficult at best. The system locks the world's poor into places where both their economic and political power is nil.

The hypocritical "she should go back where she came from", when directed at an escapee from one of the maximum-liability countries thoughtlessly accepts the notion of the equality of states, supposing randomness is justice and that dispossession is equality.

The rhetoric of duty is similarly inane and unkind. Its phony logic is infused in the deprivation of rights endured by women, minorities, conscientiuos objectors, and those who are simply indifferent to needs of their overlords and "authorities". The core functions of citizenship are revealed clearly to consist of two: exclusion and complaceny.




Until the socialist revolutions, and afterwards too in too many cases, citizenship has long been firmly cast as a "tough" masculine trait. And once the feminist tide rose high enough to topple the old discriminations, interestingly, then the old concepts of duty likewise began to crumble. Free people began to question more than ever the necessity and purpose of bizarre pomp, of militarized policing, of the "need" to police the world, and of course, of the need to police women's bodies.

The words of a popular slogan being used by the Women's Strike in Poland is reminiscent of an earlier revolutionary uprising. But it is directed, without apology, at the old men currently trying to drag Warsaw backwards: “Liberté, Égalité, Wypierdalajté” (Liberty, Equality, Get the Fuck Out!).

And the numerous signs and slogans raised during the Womens Strike in Mexico on International Womens Day, which was aimed at calling attention to and stopping alarming rates of violence and murder directed at women -- at citizens, mind you -- the one that struck me as... essential... read simply: "Hasta que la dignidad se haga costumbre" (Until dignity becomes custom)





III. CITIZENSHIP IS NOT AN IDENTITY

Identity is, in fact, doubly irrelevant when considering citizenship.

The main point to consider is that it is a status assigned by law. It is not a choice and less than 2 per cent of the world's population ever change it. The vast majority rely on whatever accident of birth assigned them a citizenship.






The converse doesn't help any arguments that citizenship contributes to identity. In other words, imagine you are genuinely ashamed of your citizenship. Say you are a South African citizen prior to, let's say, 1990 (when Nelson Mandela was released from prison) who hated and despised the apartheid system. No matter what you felt, it did not affect your citizenship. Your citizenship was utterly at odds with your identity.

Let's dig around a little further back into history. Hernando de Talavera, a Jewish convert, became such a devout Catholic that he became archbishop of Granada and confessor to Queen Isabel. The Inquisition put him to death anyway.



IV. PUNISHING TRAITORS ALWAYS TRANSLATES INTO SMASHING AND TRIVIALIZING DISSENT

The duties of citizenship, though divergent in scale, work exactly the same way in democratic and totalitarian or authoritarian societies. Their function is too important to vary with the flavor of political controls being exerted, too ancient to be disturbed much by the type of political regime currently in place.

The indifferent are the "worst" of all. They must be "educated" to love the Party, to salute the flag, to observe Christmas, to back the police, to support the troops, to keep state secrets about murder, corruption and the abrogation of civil liberties, to be nonchalant about bombing folks on the other side of the world, to accept utterly absurd elections as normal.

Indifference is equated with rebellion. A "good citizen" is actively complacent and it is the authorities who decide what is good and what is bad. Advocating free love, or the equality of love. Helping fugitive slaves or refugees. Attempting to vote. All of these can be as bad in the eyes of the authorities as writing Nobel-prize-winning poetry.

The following is Frida Vigdorova's translation of the trial of Joseph Brodsky, in Leningrad in 1964, for "social parasitism". He was condemned to internal exile and forbidden to leave the country. He eventually moved to the US, where he became the poet laureate.

Oddly enough, somehow it strongly reminds me of the time (in 1986) I watched Jello Biafra on Oprah debating Tipper Gore about "bad lyrics". Full disclosure: my friend Mikey, who long ago turned me on to both the Situiationist International and computer programming, was Eric's roommate at UC Santa Cruz (and he was the original bassist for the Dead Kennedys, but got thrown out because he sucked at playing bass... punk rock... LOL, anyway...), so, by the law of less-than-six-degrees-of-separation, I tend to get a bit of a vicarious thrill watching Jello eviscerate authority.

To make matters thoroughly ironic, the District Court was actually sitting on a stage during this performance...




Judge: What do you do for a living?

Brodsky: I write poetry. I translate. I suppose...

Judge: Never mind what you "suppose." Stand up properly. Don't lean against the wall. Look at the court. Answer the court properly. Do you have a regular job?

Brodsky: I thought this was a regular job.

Judge: Answer correctly!

Brodsky: I was writing poems. I thought they'd be published. I suppose...

Judge: We are not interested in "suppose". Tell us why you weren't working... And in general, what is your specific occupation?

Brodsky: Poet. Poet-translator.

Judge: And who said you are a poet? Who ranked you among poets?

Brodsky: No one. Who ranked me as a member of the human race?

Judge: Did you study for this?

Brodsky: Study for what?

Judge: To become a poet. Did you attend some university where people are trained... where they're taught...

Brodsky: I didn't think it was a matter of education.

Judge: How, then?

Brodsky: I think that... (perplexed) it comes from God...

Judge: Do you have any petitions to the court?

Brodsky: I'd like to know why I was arrested.

Judge: That's a question, not a petition... Citizen Brodsky... explain to the court why you didn't work... and why you led a parasitic way of life.

Brodsky: I did just what I am doing now: I wrote poems.

Judge: That is, you wrote your so-called poems? What was the purpose of your changing your place of work so often?... How were you useful to the motherland?

Brodsky: I wrote poems. That's my work. I'm convinced... I believe that what I've written will be of use to people not only now, but also to future generations.

Judge: That is you think that your so-called poems are of use to people?

Brodsky: Why do you say my poems are "so-called" poems?

Judge: we refer to your poems as "so-called" because we have no other impression of them...

Public Prosecutor Sorokin: Brodsky is defended by rogues, parasites, lice, and beetles. He's not a poet, but just a man trying to write verse. He's forgotten that in our society man must work, must create something of value: machine tools, bread, or poems. Brodsky must be compelled to work. He must be sent away from this Hero City. He's a parasite, a lout, a rogue, and an ideologically filthy man. His admirers merely spatter their saliva. but Nekrasov said, "You may choose not to be a poet / but you cannot choose to not be a citizen"...

Judge: Brodsky has systematically failed to fulfill the obligations of a Soviet citizen with regard to producing material value and personal well-being, which is apparent from his changing jobs frequently.... From the report of the commission of work with young writers it is clear that Brodsky is not a poet. Readers of the newspaper Evening Leningrad have condemned him. Therefore the court has decided to apply the decree dated 4 February 1961: Brodsky will be sent to remote locations for a period of five years of forced labor.




V. THE GLORIFIED CONCEPT OF CITIZENSHIP BOILS DOWN TO A SIMPLE PUNISHING COCKTAIL OF TWO INGREDIENTS: RANDOMNESS AND HYPOCRISY

I present all of this material for the purpose of urging Admin to make the following meaningful modifications to the game:

First, instead of "countries", refer to the various e-geographical entities as "Camps".

Second, abolish all game mechanics relating to "citizenship". Instead, allow players to reside anywhere, whenever they please, and to participate in the (so-called) political mechanisms of whatever area in which they reside, of their own free will.





I have some other cool ideas too, such as "General Strike", "Global Peoples' War", "Autonomous Zones", "Livingry, Not Weaponry Bonuses" and "World Peace". This article is pretty long, so I'll save those for another time!






Thanks for checking out this edition of "Radio Free Dixie"! Please share your own wildly impossibilist theories of life, e-life and everything.

In-game: Use the handy comment section below, or send a message RF Williams, or chat me up on the Socialist Freedom Party feed, which is where curmudgeons like me lurk, sneering at everything while never looking up from our screens.