Patriotism a mental disease ?

Do we need patriotism any more, are those who call themselves patriots just mind controlled slaves who do the bidding of their masters. Why do we have this connection to coloured piece of cloth that in reality is only fitt for wiping your nose on and certainly is not worth dying for.

Why is it that those who instill this brain addled ideology in us aren't the ones who do the fighting and the dying. The reality that the flag any flag does not represent freedom but quite the opposite, its a banner that is owned by the rich and powerful who use its colours to charm us and render ourselves to them, along with our freedom and rational thinking.

Its like when we drape the flag over the coffins off the fallen, well how about not getting them killed in the first place. To me the flag is the ultimate corporate symbol, wave the flag and watch normal inteligent people become drooling fools or rabid warmongers ready to sell their souls to the devil. I cannot think of any other device that triggers such effects as a flag does. In the US you can only fly the stars and stripes, in the UK you can fly what you like but who really cares.

When I see all those flags outside of American homes, a loved one off to fight war, the family showing its allegiance. Well what I see is someone going off to fight for the rich and power mad who dont give a toss about those who do the fighting and who must sit back and laugh their arses off at thinking the flag, the best and cheapest mind control device ever invented.

While everyone is thinking about advanced technology contolling us the reality is a cheap piece of cloth. How many of you have sat and watched the US/UK flag get burnt in some ME town and before you know it you want to kick the telly and grease all them rag heads, its a great trick is it not. There you were with your 6 pack nice and calm and now you want to kill someone all over a cloth.

Well I would like to see a world with no flags, no religion, no nationality, its the only way we are going to advance because if we dont sooner or later we'll end up dead for those crappy ideal's.

I think the problem is that you are associating patriotism with nationalism/statism.

The people of the United States are at times the victims of corruption and bad government as much as the people of any other nation.

To love one's nation is not to blindly support those problems however, but merely to acknowledge the good things we have in this nation. It is not to deny the dangers that may exist to those good things if we do not guard them jealously against corruption, but to honor the process that has given them to us and preserved them thus far.

I have a lot of bones to pick with a lot of powerful interests in this country. I think both political parties which have divied up our government between themselves have behaved with often disgusting disregard for reason, civility, law and morality. Our people have allowed themselves to be mislead into may things. Corporations act as if they own this country and I'm not so sure they're wrong (as a matter of fact that is, I know it's not the right thing).

All that being said though, having lived here and enjoyed the level of freedom that we Americans enjoy, it'd be a cold day in hell that I put up with Sharia law, Communist appropriation of private land, Mexican federales, even with the Japanese social sense of propriety and order. We aren't the only good country, and I wouldn't be so arrogant as to say that we are the all-around best; I know that there are a lot of successful societies that offer a great deal of freedom, some even a little more in line with my own social views, but this is the one that I have thrived in thus far and I'm grateful for it.

I, like many others, express that gratitude through symbols. The symbol isn't the point, but it is a visible component of the act of expression and a ritual through which we remind ourselves of our values.

I don't know if you've even heard of Joseph Campbell, but he wrote some books on the similiarities in and functioning principles of various mythologies. I read a transcript of a lengthy interview he did with Bill Moyers- it was in a book called The Power of Myth. His explanation therein of how symbols function is very good and very applicable to patriotism. It is a matter of orienting our minds in a certain direction in order to influence our own habits of action and the way we live our lives.

We hang up our flags not because the flag is an idol to us but because it reinforces to us our value for the founding principles of this country, however imperfect the practice of them has been, so that we will be conditioned to expect and demand them and willing to defend them.

I like the people I work with- they're educated people and they accept my sometimes odd way of doing and seeing things because they have a few of their own too. Those neighbors are in part products of the good things which still exist in this nation and bet your hat that I respect them, that I want what's good for them, and that I'd protect them. That's what patriotism is about if you ask me, not about blindly supporting this or that war, or dutifully being a working drone for the colony. It's a view which has been under attack; some people would like to distort it, tell us patriotism is something else and that it's a virtue that one absolutely must have, but I don't embrace that perverted definition of patriotism and I think there are a lot of people who agree with me.

The nice thing about the faux patriots is that 1. They are easy to spot. 2. They aren't very pro-active for their views. The people who fall in line and follow orders- slap a bumpersticker on their car to tell everybody that they've decided to suspend critical thinking and want others to do it too- to hell with them.
They aren't the ones with the strength of character to defend this country and they'll never define us. A nation that they defined would quickly bring about its own destruction. I point out Nazi Germany as an example.

The very idea of this is making a lot of assumptions; among them the idea that economic prosperity and peace are somehow the natural state of things, and patriots are in their screwing things up. In fact, the opposite state of affairs is the natural one: a life in the jungle; nasty, cruel, brutish and short.

People don't become prosperous without hard work and sacrifice. They don't obtain peace without convincing criminals that they will not be an easy target. Let's see, how can I put this. . .

that to secure these. . . .rights . . . governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. . .

yeah. I like the sound of that.


You ask if patriotism is a disease. I have to ask if the young person who asks such a question has every shouldered any real responsibility. Has he ever paid his own bills, saved up for his own education, had to pay for his own car, his own clothes, or his own food?

I met a lot of anarchists in college. Most of them, basically all of them except me, turned out to be living on their daddy's trust fund.

That's about the time I quit being an anarchist.

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