Home » For Memorial Day: on patriotism and nationalism

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For Memorial Day: on patriotism and nationalism — 8 Comments

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  3. Germany fell to nationalism because patriotism was extirpated from the ranks of Germany. The purges destroyed too many German patriots, including the war hero that tried to assassinate Hitler. Both his country and the world, suffered horribly because of his failure.

    People like him are not forgotten by true patriots, because we understand what it took for him to do as he did. Colonel Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg was the soul and heart of Germany, and with his death so died Germany. Germany is a shadow of their former selves.

    The name of Germany will be dishonoured forever, lest German youth finally rise to smash his tormentors and invoke a new, intellectual and spiritual Europe. Stalingrad’s dead implore us! Rise up, my people, the fiery beacons beckon!”

    “We took this challenge before our Lord and our conscience, and it must be done, because this man, Hitler, he is the ultimate evil,” von Stauffenberg states.

    Fate was not kind to the Germans. They did not have the grace of God. They were unlucky as much as the US was lucky.

    True patriots understand that others may love their countries just as much as we love ours. People who don’t love their countries, will never understand why others fight against them as they do.

    They will crush that dissent, as Janet Reno did, as Hitler did, and as Stalin did. None were patriots, and none understood the heart and soul of their nation.

  4. There is a significant difference between nationalism and patriotism.

    While patriotism is the love of one’s countrymen, nationalism is simply the love of the land, borders, ethnicity, race, language, and what makes us different.

    While patriotism does not exclude the other, nationalism is exclusivist and often at the cost of others.

  5. The irony lost on the progressive left is that while you can change the venue, or focus, you can not change people much.

    So the focus is no longer on nation states… Now it is on the EU.. or Leftist ideology… What’s the difference? There are rabid ideologues and people full of hate in the advocacy of their pan national EU identity and their international leftism…

    If anything they are more common and worse than their [current] counterparts stuck in old style nationalism. Because they have these lessons of history to bolster their self righteousness.

    Anyway, nationalism was a symptom that helped spur the world wars. The root cause was romanticism. Something alive and well among our current ideological extremists… Who still dream of the progressive utopias they would build if only not for the evil right wing conspiracies holding them back… Well, that and the limits imposed by human nature…

  6. While we’re waving the flag here on Memorial Day, any plans or gestures to commemorate the great American politician’s that helped bring Saddam and the Taliban to power, armed and funded them (financially and politically), then after so many years of repression sanctioned and bombed the poor people we’re pretending to help?
    Unless something is done to commemorate these individuals, our brave men and women in uniform will not have died for anything other than ..Macheavelli? ..Yuuuch!!

  7. What a great post. Quick comment: I read a cut-down version of “Man Without A Country” when I was in school (on my own; it wasn’t assigned). I felt pretty much the same as you did about it. Anyway, happy Memorial Day.

  8. I wasn’t assigned “The Man Without a Country,” but I remember buying it through one of those classroom book clubs run by Scholastic. I think that particular book was more popular among my classmates than it might otherwise have been because the Scholastic synopsis contained Nolan’s curse, appropriately expurgated: “D*mn the United States!” In a parochial school in the late 60s and early 70s, that mild, bleeped-out cuss word was enough to make a book seem pretty adult and exotic (I remember hearing my classmates giggling about it). Still, I’d bet a lot of kids who bought the book for that trivial reason wound up getting more good out of it than they’d bargained for.

    By the way, it might interest you to know that in my area of the country, American flags are still going strong — they’re all over the place, on vehicles, on businesses, and on people’s homes. The only time they’ve really gone away since 9/11 is during spells of bad weather. California may be a blue state, but I live in the rural central part, which is pretty red, culturally and, increasingly, electorally. It’s a poor county, but it voted for Bush. (I have a feeling your liberal friends would see this as evidence that we here in the central valley are too dumb to know how badly we’re being exploited by the Bushitler War Machine. Perhaps someone should write a sequal to “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” about our part of California.)

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