Political Memes

um, no... Americocentric again

Nationalism has to do with pride in a shared cultural identity, whereas Patriotism is pride for one's country.

in other countries, there are strong cultural ties that bond people together. shared language. a relationship to the land. hundreds if not thousands of years of history. some countries have dozens of such groups.

nationalism is a person from that group taking pride in that identity. patriotism is taking pride in your country as a whole. so for example, you can be proud to be Gujarati, and you can be proud to be Indian.

now, in the United States, there really isn't a national identity beyond shopping malls and jingoism. so i can see how nationalism is rarely seen positively. all you get of it is nazis and fake irish frat bros.

but, no, really I think patriotism is a far bigger problem than nationalism. one's language is your flesh and blood, it's who you are. what the fuck does a country mean to you? the people who lock you up?

Patriotism is just a nice word people invented to be proud of their genocidal and colonialist country without feeling too bad about it.

Patriotism is pride in your country.

Nationalism is not knowing the difference between your government and your mommy.

The only good fascist is a dead fascist

Nationalism is only good when people are fighting colonialism, e.g. palestine or british era India.

Strange semi related old person story -- back in highschool, one of our teachers had the class write essays on whether nationalism was good or bad. We were then given an option to either present our papers, or do a debate exercise with a kind of round robin pro or con. So you'd partner with 1 other person, debate if it was good or bad, then groups of 4 doing the same, until it was the whole class. In my paper and in my discussions, I had used a similar approach as this comic -- basically just establishing what nationalism was vs patriotism, and drawing nazi's in as an example too. No one in those discussions contested that Nazi's were nationalists -- but they still argued in favour of it.

By the end, I was the only person who thought nationalism was overall 'bad'. The tide had turned in the groups of 8 stage. Because a hot girl had declared her support for nationalism. That's all it took for people to like/excuse nazis, even back in the early 2000s. An excuse.