A timely subject for discussion, with the Olympic Games looming - and with them the 20th anniversary of those sensational Black Power salutes. The saluters, it may be recalled, had to be expelled from the games and from the Olymic village because they violated the Olympic spirit. What staggering hypocrisy! The Olympic Games are mired in nationalism for which there would have been no place in the original Olympiads. And it's not just the national anthems. Whether in Hitler's propaganda coup of 1936, the cold-war boycotts or the present Chinese baton-trailing farce, the whole circus is riddled with nationalistic self-interests.

I'm a bit uneasy about the loyalty Kendall and Co claim for their country, for the same reason that I am a bit uneasy about the Mark Twain quote used by Azizi: "Patriotism is supporting your country all the time..." If some guy is fundamentally opposed his/her a country's leadership, and the leadership is representative of majority opinion, how then does he support his country?

Well Big Mick addressed the government/country question pretty well for me. I agree completely with what ard mhacha said, and I also go along with weelittledrummer's general line.

That national pride does not come naturally is evidenced in the spectacle of American children reciting the oath like automatons. Or North Koreans revering their Dear Leader. Or desperate Germans, after years of tasting dirt, rising to salute their fuehrer.

Nationality (like ones religion in an overwhelming majority of cases) is determined not by free will but by an accident of birth. How can we take pride in something that's beyond our influencing? Doug R is on more rational ground thanking his god daily for being born American. But in reality I suspect he is thanking God for having been born into privilege. He might have been less profligate with his gratitude if he had been born into deprivation and disadvantage, which is the fate for millions of Americans.

In 1980 my brother was head-hunted for an aero-engineering research job in Cincinnatti on a salary vastly in excess of what he was earning for similar work in the UK. As part of the enticement he was sent a local magazine containing nothing but real-estate ads. This rather parochial, low-budge product had a front cover entirely taken up with a photo taken from the bottom of a flag-pole, showing the Stars and Stripes fluttering against a clear blue sky. Across the photo, in white characters reversed out of the blue sky, a simple message was intoned: "Remember the hostages." This on the front of a local real-estate magazine, remember. On speaking to friends in the US we discovered that such reminders were ubiquitous across America throughout 1980. It was a major factor in deciding against the job.

I don't say hostages should ever be forgotten of course. But it's a trauma many countries have had to live with. Yet it is only in the US that national pride would require such an excess of maudlin sentiment for month after month, while many other of the world's traumas slide by unnoticed.

To those who see any merit in patriotism I would ask: is it a universal good? Or is it of merit only if ones country is (say) America?