As hairymarx writes in post #4 there are two types of nationalism. These are the two basic types of 'political nationalism' of which there are various strands. However, there is also a third type of nationalism - cultural nationalism - which is more concerned with the preservation and advancement of the culture and history of a nation and/or that of a specific group/groups within it. I have been an activist in the Scottish National Party for over 33 years and strongly advocate a civic nationalism in which all people have a responsibility to one another. Individualism has no regard for others, is selfish and leads to anarchy. A saying which I recall from the 1970's is -

'In order to be an internationalist you must first be a nationalist.'

'It's coming yet for a' that
That Man to Man, the world o'er
Shall brithers be for a' that.'

- 'For A' That and A' That' by Robert Burns (1759 - 1796)

I agree with you. Nationalism is generally regarded in the 'bad' sense by all those petty xenophobes and racists who have essentially hijacked the term. However, nationalism is best understood from the perspective of the oppressed as the necessary precursor to obtaining freedom from that oppression. The notion that nationalism ought to be seen from the perspective of power and the dominate forces in society is a misnomer. The notion therefore, that the BNP for example, is anything other than a xenophobic anti-semetic and racist organisation disguised as a nationalist and patriotic organisation supporting the oppressed masses, is pure fantasy. In this sense, Dr Johsons famous remark still rings true to this day: "Patriotism", he said, "is the last refuge of the scoundrel".

I'm not sure I understand the question, but I would say that I see myself as a human being and a citizen of the world first, an American second, and regardless of nationality I feel that everyone should think this way.

Practically, in matters of governance, obviously the government should put America first and I'm not saying we should allocate tax money and our resources with this mentality, however. In economic matters you've got to put your own country first, it's just business.

Putting your nation first economically and politically, though, doesn't mean falling into the trap of viewing your countrymen as somehow "better" or more important than anyone else in the world. Most Americans would say that the life of one American killed has more of an impact on them than the life of some random African or Asian or whatever (some would even go as far as to say its worth more than 2 or 3 foreign lives). That's an absolutely horrifying and inhumane perspective.

Well said. The sad reality is that the lives of others especially if those others happen to have black or brown skin are deemed by the powerful as essentially expendable. Their value as human beings are measured purely in terms of how useful they are to the rich and powerful. Yesterday, 47 innocent Afghans were slaughtered at a wedding ceremony by US bombs. This hardly got a mention anywhere in the mainstream media. Yet at the same time we are being fed, for instance, saturation coverage of Mugabe and Zimbabwe's regime. Why? Because white imperialist and land interests are being threatened. Last month prior to the Zimbabwean election, 80 political dissidents were murdered by Mugabe's regime. Meanwhile, in Somalia, Sudan and the Congo people are being murdered in epic proportions but hardly a whisper from the media.

I have just read this article by investigative journalist John Pilger that expresses brilliantly the duplicitous nature and wickedness of Western power. If this is the supposed virtuous expression of patriotism and nationalism, then I beg to differ.

www.johnpilger.com/page.asp?partid=496

Tell me sir, what do you think this will accomplish?

Britain is now and has ben for some time, a fully fascist state. The United States, will become the same if the US left manage to get the Socialist B. Hussein Obama.

You see, as was the case with the British public, they could not be made o embrace socialism per se. So they accomplished the transition by simply combining socialism with nationalism and presto, Great Britain is no more and in its place is "So-So Britain," Mediocre Britain which retains the mere resemblence of a once proud and great nation.

It's the slow death of freedom and there is only one chance to stop it and that is violent, merciless, total war. If it comes, mankind has a chance; if it does not, the species is doomed to an existance not too far removed from slavery and the single responsibility for it is the Advocacy of Social Science and the myths and lies spun by those who sell it.

Bushfan - clearly, in need of some therapy. Man, you are so so far off the radar its untrue.

Um....amen!

From George Orwell's "Notes on Nationalism" :

Indifference to Reality. All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side. The Liberal News Chronicle published, as an example of shocking barbarity, photographs of Russians hanged by the Germans, and then a year or two later published with warm approval almost exactly similar photographs of Germans hanged by the Russians(5). It is the same with historical events. History is thought of largely in nationalist terms, and such things as the Inquisition, the tortures of the Star Chamber, the exploits of the English buccaneers (Sir Francis Drake, for instance, who was given to sinking Spanish prisoners alive), the Reign of Terror, the heroes of the Mutiny blowing hundreds of Indians from the guns, or Cromwell's soldiers slashing Irishwomen's faces with razors, become morally neutral or even meritorious when it is felt that they were done in the ‘right’ cause. If one looks back over the past quarter of a century, one finds that there was hardly a single year when atrocity stories were not being reported from some part of the world; and yet in not one single case were these atrocities — in Spain, Russia, China, Hungary, Mexico, Amritsar, Smyrna — believed in and disapproved of by the English intelligentsia as a whole. Whether such deeds were reprehensible, or even whether they happened, was always decided according to political predilection.

The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them. For quite six years the English admirers of Hitler contrived not to learn of the existence of Dachau and Buchenwald. And those who are loudest in denouncing the German concentration camps are often quite unaware, or only very dimly aware, that there are also concentration camps in Russia. Huge events like the Ukraine famine of 1933, involving the deaths of millions of people, have actually escaped the attention of the majority of English russophiles. Many English people have heard almost nothing about the extermination of German and Polish Jews during the present war. Their own antisemitism has caused this vast crime to bounce off their consciousness. In nationalist thought there are facts which are both true and untrue, known and unknown. A known fact may be so unbearable that it is habitually pushed aside and not allowed to enter into logical processes, or on the other hand it may enter into every calculation and yet never be admitted as a fact, even in one's own mind.

Every nationalist is haunted by the belief that the past can be altered. He spends part of his time in a fantasy world in which things happen as they should — in which, for example, the Spanish Armada was a success or the Russian Revolution was crushed in 1918 — and he will transfer fragments of this world to the history books whenever possible. Much of the propagandist writing of our time amounts to plain forgery. Material facts are suppressed, dates altered, quotations removed from their context and doctored so as to change their meaning. Events which it is felt ought not to have happened are left unmentioned and ultimately denied(6). In 1927 Chiang Kai Shek boiled hundreds of Communists alive, and yet within ten years he had become one of the heroes of the Left. The re-alignment of world politics had brought him into the anti-Fascist camp, and so it was felt that the boiling of the Communists ‘didn't count’, or perhaps had not happened. The primary aim of propaganda is, of course, to influence contemporary opinion, but those who rewrite history do probably believe with part of their minds that they are actually thrusting facts into the past. When one considers the elaborate forgeries that have been committed in order to show that Trotsky did not play a valuable part in the Russian civil war, it is difficult to feel that the people responsible are merely lying. More probably they feel that their own version was what happened in the sight of God, and that one is justified in rearranging the records accordingly.

Indifference to objective truth is encouraged by the sealing-off of one part of the world from another, which makes it harder and harder to discover what is actually happening. There can often be a genuine doubt about the most enormous events. For example, it is impossible to calculate within millions, perhaps even tens of millions, the number of deaths caused by the present war. The calamities that are constantly being reported — battles, massacres, famines, revolutions — tend to inspire in the average person a feeling of unreality. One has no way of verifying the facts, one is not even fully certain that they have happened, and one is always presented with totally different interpretations from different sources. What were the rights and wrongs of the Warsaw rising of August 1944? Is it true about the German gas ovens in Poland? Who was really to blame for the Bengal famine? Probably the truth is discoverable, but the facts will be so dishonestly set forth in almost any newspaper that the ordinary reader can be forgiven either for swallowing lies or failing to form an opinion. The general uncertainty as to what is really happening makes it easier to cling to lunatic beliefs. Since nothing is ever quite proved or disproved, the most unmistakable fact can be impudently denied. Moreover, although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge, the nationalist is often somewhat uninterested in what happens in the real world. What he wants is to feel that his own unit is getting the better of some other unit, and he can more easily do this by scoring off an adversary than by examining the facts to see whether they support him. All nationalist controversy is at the debating-society level. It is always entirely inconclusive, since each contestant invariably believes himself to have won the victory. Some nationalists are not far from schizophrenia, living quite happily amid dreams of power and conquest which have no connection with the physical world.

__________________
"I think the deregulation was probably helpful to the growth of our economy."
-Sen. John McCain 09/22/2008