Tag: nationalism

Crossposted at Daily Kos

Writing in 1945 in his remarkable essay Notes on Nationalism, author George Orwell noted the following distinction between patriotism and nationalism

Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism.  Both words are normally used in so vague a way that any definition is liable to be challenged, but one must draw a distinction between them, since two different and even opposing ideas are involved.  By “patriotism” I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people.  Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power.  The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.

— Author and journalist George Orwell

Boy does this hit the Nail on the Head, at least in this Part 1.

Robert Parry: After 28 years of drunken optimism and blind nationalism the US wakes up to a grim future

Samuel Johnson famously wrote in 1775 that “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” In The Devil’s Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce made the appropriate correction: “With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit that it is the first.”

The past eight years proves Bierce’s thesis once and for all.  

The remorseless gangsters currently in charge of the executive branch aren’t the first American leaders to falsely define patriotism to include torturing, racketeering, warmongering, privatizing, fraud, fecklessness, betrayal, incompetence, injustice, absolutism, corporatism, cronyism and horses’ assism. They aren’t the first to wave the red-white-and-blue while committing sedition against the nation’s citizens by lying them into a war. Nor the first to spy on dissidents of that war. Nor to treat the veterans of that war with public accolades simultaneous to budgetary disdain.

Nor, it must never be forgotten, the first to commit war crimes under a patriotic banner.

But these particular scoundrels have managed one new audacity: cramming the full roster of such behavior into two presidential terms. For this Herculean effort, the cabal of grifters who took over seven-and-a-half years ago surely deserve medals.  

There is a BIG difference between a protester and a separatist. A protester is a white man, holding a Tibetan flag, yelling, screaming and cussing at Chinese, a man ill-informed and stubborn. A separatist is a Tibetan man holding a Tibetan flag, yelling, screaming and cussing at Chinese, with the intent of separating the People’s Republic of China. In total, about 30 “protesters” came, and 2 “separatists” came. That’s right, only 2 Tibetans, and two or so dozens of ill-informed westerners.

Quote from text accompanying this pro-China YouTube of the protests surrounding the Olympic torch relay in Australia today: