Nationalism makes me sick

[Sparrisen]

I was just thinking about that. I saw a norweigan song called "Yes, we love this country", and my stomach revolted.

How can love be bad?

Because it's like saying
"We have a cake, and you don't. We love that."

Ignorant selfloving nationalism is examplified in the phrase "God Bless America". I've heard this again and again, and the phrase just seems weird. Prominent people say it.
Other americans I've met, especially abroad, or travelling people within america often instead turn inwards with an selfloathing attitude.

I think both attitudes are fucked up. Because BOTH.... BOTH attidues, even if it is LOVE or HATE for your country, says ONE THING.

We are different.
We are not the same.
This is us, this is you.
Wether our team SUCK or OWN, it is still OUR team, and you're not part of it.


I didn't realize this until late in my travels, my last stop.

I have never, NEVER EEVER met so chill, relaxed, easy to talk to people in my entire existance. You just went off the plane, and you felt it in the air. It's untainted. I mean SWEDEN is liberal too, but we are BURDENED DOWN by our glorious and inglorious lengthy past and history.
The past are with us, the Kingdom of Sweden. It's like marble coloums, a temple filled of dust. You don't want to tear it down, because you hope to find a piece of yourself there, think that who you are, are reflected by history. That looking in the mirror of the past holds an image of you, and destroying it would forever banish that part.

You don't realize, that it is a burden, it is a chain. Saying this is US, this is YOU, is putting up a limit.
Here in Sweden we are proud of our past, we are proud of who we are.


"Nationality? WE don't know who we are, and NO ONE ELSE does either. We are a mix of everything, without indentity."
He didn't have to say it, I knew I was part of his family. From the moment I sat foot there, I knew people weren't different. I knew we were all the same.

This must be what it was like, when the people came together, the explorers of america. The freshness of it, it's beautiful.

From there, just from saying "it's beautiful", I can easily see the step to, "This is US, we won't let anyone else destroy this."
"WE are beautiful!"

And at that moment the dream is lost, and you don't even realize it. The freedom was THERE, but you put YOURSELVES in chains!!
Instead of BEING free, you make it an IDEAL.
The right to carry guns, democracy, capitalism... It's all ideas. None of them is truly freedom.
To be FREE of those ideals, THAT, would TRULY be freedom.

....
Most of all, the ideas aren't important. It's the pride in them that is ugly. It's the comparison between you and others. Setting you apart from eachother from the start already drops down the mental iron curtain.

Who are you?
"...I don't know"

This place is heavy, I feel it. If I remember the time in freedom, I can feel the environment around me weighing me down. I don't think I'm strong enough to keep such a vision alive on my own, and even if I did the fog here is too thick, it wouldn't make a difference. I long for the fresh air. Colours instead of black and white.


"You have to understand that we are DIFFERENT! That's why you think we are strange!"
No, I think you are strange because you think you are so different.
And I don't think you really are strange.
Because I understand the need for an indentity.
I understand the need for an explaination, for the need to define.

Isn't it nice to have a defined portrait of "This is me?".
But feels the same as talking shit about someone. Everyone wants to hear it, it feels good. You have others interest. You know this and that.
And when it's over you feel like you just overate choclate.
You feel sick.

Sure, you ate, but it wasn't good for you.

Couldn't we all just throw the history books away? Open up the borders. Removing our mental baggage of definitions for things we can never define anyway.
Not saying "My ancestors built the pyramids", just saying "Some people built this". They were the same people like you and me anyway.
See the fresh crispness of it. Letting go. Unchaining ourselves. Let go of the pride, the pride shackles you. It's like letting go of the supporting extra-wheels on your bike. It feels scary, and you're reluctant, but then you pick up speed like never before, and you can move without restraint.

And not saying,
"This will be time 0, where we let go of our past selves and opened our eyes"
You have to let go EVER DAY.
That's what fighting for freedom means.
It means having the strenght to let go.

[Oynamak]

I love you Sparr.

Just,

"I have never, NEVER EEVER met so chill, relaxed, easy to talk to people in my entire existance."

where is that? I wanna live there.

[ReverendLostLamb]

Rule, Brittania! Brittania, rule the waves! Britons never, never, never shall be slaves.
God, I hate that song.

No, really, I think we need nationalism to a certain extent. Group zeal is a survival mechanism. It is only if we work together that we can prevail. Humans are pack animals, after all. Nationalism is a natural outcome of what is considered to be humane. Solidarity is a positive trait in humans.

[HalfwayToHell]

Well sparr, everyone needs something to be proud of. And by golly, very few people in the world have something they did themselves they can be proud of.

So they cling to something else for their ickle needs for pride. everyone likes to feel they've accomplished something, left their mark on the world.

Even if it's just something someone else in that country in the past did. because when a person looks inside his own self, and his own past, when s/he finds s/he wrought nought but despair, s/he needs to find a reason to keep going.

Some people find God. Others find Homocide. MANY find nationalism. because everyone has some nationality, even if they (like you) don't particularly care about them, or don't care about having one at all.

Adding onto that, people like to think themselves better. Not different, but better. People will always, on the inside, think their country (and thus them) is better than another country. because they feel they are part of the country.

Finally, most people only keep national pride so long as that national pride doesn't hurt their own image. For example, If America was to all-out Nuke somewhere for absolutely no reason, and both countries got nigh-on wiped out, and if America subsequently got tried by international courts for it, many people probably wouldn't be proud to be american anymore.

My god it took me awhile to change all the He's to S/he's FUCKING ZHEIS(that's how you pronounce s/he in case you didn't now. Zhei. the shay, but with a z. Yeah.

[Sparrisen]

The need for nationalism is like the need for those training wheels. You think you need it- but you just don't.

You don't NEED to think you're better than other people.

Just let go of that.

Someone said "love is seeing yourself in other people".
I may or may not agree, but there's something to is anyway.

[Doombringer]

The right to carry guns, democracy, capitalism... It's all ideas. None of them is truly freedom.
To be FREE of those ideals, THAT, would TRULY be freedom.

that would TRULY be communism...



BTT: i think you have to differ between patriotism and nationalism

As i´ve learned patriotism is like saying: i love Austria cause of it´s landscape and the people who live there

imo thats ok, but saying something like Austria is better than xy cause we just own and every1 else is fat, we should kill em is nationalism and you are right, some1 who says that sucks

[Sparrisen]

Communism is yet another idea. I'm not saying Idea's are bad. Pride in them is.

Some ideas might be beneficial, some ideas might not.

But people say:

"Democracy is freedom"
"Capitalism is freedom"

But they just go after an idea, as a substitute for freedom.

and I was referring to NZ as being the place with the most cool vibe

[ReverendLostLamb]

Well, pride is one of the cardinal sins.
I also realised that without some concept of 'nationalism' ancient states such as Greece and Rome wouldn't have thrived as they did. In the city-states, for example, only citizens of the city-state were allowed to vote. You also had to be a freeman of age.
Now, if we say that there lived approx. 300.000 people in and around the city of Athens a direct democracy wouldn't have been the most efficient way to rule. But seeing as how a third of the population consists of slaves, half of the population consists of women and there's a bunch of kids we've narrowed the entitled class down to, what, 20%? And not all of those are citizens, if my numbers are correct. Citizenship was, according to my knowledge, passed down to the next generation only if both parents were citizens. If citizenship was granted to every other merchant that's passing by their whole system would have collapsed.

I'm not saying democracy is freedom or anything, I agree with Sparr on the freedom thing 'n' all, but it's kind of what we remember the Greeks for today. I also think that the state would have been off worse without the idea of democracy.

[Sparrisen]

Ideas are good and fine. I'm not saying democracy is bad.

It might WORK, and then it's BENEFICIAL.

But it doesn't make YOU good or bad. It doesn't make a nation good or bad. The same people would live there no matter how they're governed, people, just like you and me. 

[Bernhardt]

I think nationalism is great for team spirit. It's lame to even say that it shouldn't be taken to extremes though.

I had this talk with a guy from Ecuador. He couldn't grasp why anyone would support nationalism. He disliked his country and had lived around the world ever since.

For me this was a key point. It's easy to not understand nationalism when you've had no loyalty to your birthplace. But for me I see my home as a place, and I say not the only place, worth embracing.

Nationalism is a force that keeps a country together when in need.

A snotty attitude about anything sucks ass.

[Sparrisen]

WAR
Is a process where humans kills themselves, i order to move some of them about, and move where some of them lives. This sometimes also involves, starving, torturing and inprisoning themselves.

 

If we didn't have nations, if we didn't consider ourselves more than our neighbur, this could be a definition of war.

[ReverendLostLamb]

War and conflicts would still exist. What you did there was just changing the wording of the original definition, it still means the same thing.

[Oynamak]

I think what he meant was the way we psychologically see "human". Own nation = best, other nations = are anything but not equally, probably "worser", or we are just "better", whatever other nations are.
So the "value" of human gets influenced by the "we are different as a group, as a nation" on a psychological basis.

So instead of "americans kill japaneses", "nation kills nation", it's "human kills human".

While "nation vs nation" is then some kind of belittlement, if we wouldn't differ ourselves from others it was just "human vs human" (while vs includes killing, torturing, slaving etc.) which then is much closer to reality, which makes WAR look just as stupid as it is (ain't it?),
and not comprehensible because of "we as a nation, WE, who are BETTER, we have more right to live and we fight for it" or whatever. It should be "we as a human act just as stupid as other humans living at a different place on the same earth, and calling ourselves "nation" is an excuse and gives us the right to kill other human we simply call "another nation".

If aliens would obverse human, they don't see "ah nations kill nations for XY reasons", rather than "why do human kill themselves?" And for what benefits? Ya find some who are ethically justifiable? Seeing ourselves and others as a "nation" (instead of what they actually are, 100% human, not more or less) MAKES IT ethically justifiable. "Go americans, kill the japanese" is "Ok", saying "go all and kill your parents" is NOT, some might do the first but they'd never do the second, and why?
We just don't see other nations as human in war, or we simply shouldn't. That's why sparr wanted to define it as it is, insanely sick,  not as it's actually seen and defined to make it look like it's "ok".


I think thats what he was intented to say, not to make "war" have another meaning like "its not war and conflict anymore when we define it like this", rather to define it as it REALLY is.

Maybe all-in-all farfetched, to make it 100% understandable.

[ReverendLostLamb]

It's not about nations. It's about groups.
If we didn't have nations it'd be "Our village" vs "their village, "our family" vs "their family" because essentially the human mind always goes like "me" vs "the others".
If we were one mind it might not be like that but as long as we're unique there's always gonna be a grouping of X vs Y.

[Oynamak]

That's not what I meant. But on the other hand, your misconception of what I tried to explain is kind of what I meant.

Your result is totally not what I've tried to say.


Good example of how useless speech can be. We all use it, but still we don't understand each other. (But we think we do)