id the slippery slope to joining the BNP is to strangle any positive emotion you may feel for your country, that you can rise above it and smugly pronounce yourself a citizen of the world, wiser and better than those poor pathetic souls who wave union jacks and cheer for Ingerland – sorry, but count me out. It’s soulless and I don’t believe it, but if that is the way he feels, then he’s the one missing out.
Patriotism
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I had a nasty experience this morning; whilst reading the above idiotic article I suddenly heard the great man himself on Radio 5 Live saying petrol prices should go up to stop us driving/flying etc. A nasty double whammy from the darling of Tinker’s bubble. I hope to be feeling better soon.
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‘My country, right or wrong’ is a thing no patriot would ever think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying ‘My mother, drunk or sober.’”
A cleverism by G.K. Chesterton which betrays a cluelessness equal to Monbiot’s.
If it were an absurdity, having a drunken mother would be painless, which is what these people are apparently aiming at. Are they saying that when it’s wrong, it’s not your country? Or your mother?
It’s just a strategy for disengagement. -
Ah but Mick, unlike parents and children, “nations” haven’t always existed as such – they are historical entities not material ones in Marxian terms, and therefore might not aleays exist. It might therefore make more sense to pose the question as to whether one should love ones country or not, whereas the same question posed in relation to our parents or children appears absurd.
I think Monbiot’s article is a good one until the last paragraph where he seems to imply that our attitudes to our own countries should be determined by exclusively rational criteria. While I wouldn’t describe myself as a patriot necessarily, I do believe nationality can be a legitimate part of a personal identity rooted in one’s own community and its history good and bad, without thinking that my community is objectively entitled to anything more than other communities, being aware of the subjectivity of my own identity. Thus such an identity is hopefully compatible with universalism and internationalism. -
G.K. Chesterton wasn’t saying that your country, when wrong, ceases to be your country or that your responsibility to your country ceases when your country is wrong. He was simply saying that to go along with your country, right or wrong, is as foolish as, to expand his example, giving the car keys to your drunk mother. He was saying that true patriotism alway places patriotism under morality. Without morality, patriotism is nothing more than a power play. Cf. Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s experience in Nazi Germany. Bonhoeffer believed that to love Germany, he had to stand against those who were destroying it, i.e. Hitler and his party. I do not mean this explanation to refer to the current administration or any other country/leader, but I do think it is rational to oppose your country or any other authority when morality demands it.
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