Imagined Communities Benedict Anderson

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for and no religion too -- John Lennon

When reading Imagined Communities, it's hard not to become reflective of John Lennon's words in his famed hit "Imagine", which calls for our imagination to do away with barriers that have created such a divide in humanity. It's interesting to note that in Benedict Anderson's analysis of the formation of nations; he accredits this process to our imagination of communities that include our peripheral acknowledgement of our fellow countrymen, and is made distinct by excluding the rest of the world from "our" collective identity as a nation. It's fair to conclude that both Lennon and Anderson believe in the power of a collective imagination when it can either unite or divide humanity. The difference in the perspectives between Lennon and Anderson however, are in their stance towards nationalism. While Lennon invites his listeners to join him in imagining the peace that can exist without the barriers of nations, Anderson believes nationalism is necessary and prevalent for a society to be kept in order. Lennon rejects the notion of sacrificing human life for the sake of a nation, yet Anderson affirms it as an act of love, in his chapter Patriotism and Racism. Within the same chapter, Anderson also counters the argument that racism is not borne out of nationalism, but rather class relations. It's hard not to agree with Anderson's proposal that nations are the product of a collective imagination; it is imagined because while not every individual in a community is well-acquainted with one another, there exists a sense of camaraderie between them in their minds. By nature of default, each individual's expectations of what and how a patriotic member of their nation would look like, differs. Most of the time, this expectations are subjugated by ethnocentric views that the majority race may have, and that translates into the treatment of minority groups, that