> Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.
Patriotism is both a wonderful and terrible thing, and it is made worse by fearing the "other". Any time people create a boogeyman (China, Mexico, Muslims, what have you), be on the lookout for what the true motivations are.
I found that hypothesis widely accepted, without so much for it.
Patriotism fuses core values like freedom or solidarity with a flag. That's why it is easier to pervert.
Patriotism tells people that because there are people born in the same line limits that you, you should be proud of what they do, and you should help them first.
Patriotism distorts history.
> "Fourteen thousand years ago, Sweden was still covered by a thick ice cap." https://sweden.se/society/history-of-sweden/
Bullshit. Sweden didn't exist 14000 years ago. All history is learned as if the current countries were an inevitable result thousands of years ago. World history, human history, gets displaced to be able to build a national sentiment.
> "The colonial history of the United States covers the history of European settlements from the start of colonization until their incorporation into the United States of America" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonial_history_of_the_United...
Again, we get that feeling of pre-determination. As if those people weren't free to choose their future as if they weren't individuals but just a means to create a country.
Patriotism narrows the mindset of populations. I don't see that usefulness. Anything that people does for patriotism will be better done for freedom, equality, fraternity, etc.
Why is patriotism a wonderful thing? What arguments am I missing?
Now we have more than enough resources to provide basics for all 10 billion of us (and decreasing) so patriotism has largely been confined to friendly rivalry around sports and regional cuisine. It was just a matter of mapping out the world's local customs and needs so the resources could be distributed intelligently.
And even at that, only about 4% of GWP goes to basic food, shelter, health, education, and cultural-ecological preservation these days. Entertainment and luxury goods make up the rest. This was unthinkable in the 2020s, but there was a lot of duplication of effort due to the maintenance of corporate moats in the basic sustenance industry at that time.
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Keep the temperature up, and it eventually leads to civil war, just like amped up patriotism / nationalism leads to wars between states.
This can be a wonderful and terrible thing.
But it's often patriotism that is seen as what enabled things like the congressional Republicans in the Nixon era to authorize the special investigations which brought him down.
That's only one example - there are plenty of others where an individual puts the interest of the group ahead of themselves. That isn't always a bad thing: the alternative is the tyranny of the strong, where the strongest individual has the most say.
Patriotism always leads to "us" vs "them", it seems.
But if you phrase it to something like "Can the government be trusted with backdoors to protect us from terrorists and Chinese hackers", then suddenly public sentiment will change dramatically.