Just a brief statement here, cos I'm off to the Mariposa Folk Festival in a few minutes...

Everyone feels a natural and deep love for the land they were born upon, and that is the source of patriotism. It's an extended sense of the love and loyalty one feels for one's own family and home and one's immediate surroundings.

A tribe or nation becomes a larger extended family, and the land they live on is the larger extended home.

Politicians naturally make use of that instinctive love in a variety of ways...some scrupulous and some quite unscrupulous. The fact that politicians use it to stir people up into going somewhere else and killing some other people who feel exactly the same way about the land they were born on is extremely sad, but I expect we will see a great deal more of that yet as feeble excuses continue to be found for opportunistic foreign wars of aggression.

Everyone who fights willingly for his country sees himself as a patriot...and those who protest against a war their country is waging also see themselves as patriots. This too is completely natural (since everyone is instinctively patriotic at least to some extent), but the people on the home front who oppose a war of choice are always accused of lack of patriotism by their government and its most enthusiastic backers. They may put themselves in considerable danger on behalf of what is, in fact, their way of expressing patriotism.

Japanese, for instance, who opposed their country's reckless involvement in WWII...or who had doubts about it...were in the greatest danger of being arrested, beaten, perhaps even executed unless they kept their mouths shut. "My country right or wrong" was a credo being pushed very hard in Japan at that point. Germans had the same problem at that time.

Always watch out for a government that launches foreign wars of its own choice...wars in which it is the attacker...and which brands all dissent on the homefront as "unpatriotic". Those governments imagine themselves to be bulwarks of patriotism and morality, but their notion of the concept is not based on morality, it is based on ruthless powerseeking and profiteering at the expense of other people's lives and property.

Such, I believe, is true of the American government in its dirty little wars in the Middle East...and its long record of imperial policies throughout Latin America.

The more dirty laundry a government is hiding, the more it blathers on endlessly to its people about "patriotism"...the flag..."sacrifice"...etc. Don't believe them. It's exactly what the Fascists did in Germany, Italy, and Japan, and you see how they are remembered now.