Both concepts specifically appeal to those who are unable to achieve anything on their own—they serve to recruit these people against their own interests and therefore have parallels with and often the same effect as religion.
Both concepts specifically appeal to those who are unable to achieve anything on their own—they serve to recruit these people against their own interests and therefore have parallels with and often the same effect as religion.
They really don’t.
Nationalism is much more jingoistic and dogmatic - unflinching and unquestioning loyalty to a flag (or regime).
Patriotism is more along the lines of appreciating the positive aspects of one’s country, wanting to make the good parts materially better, and wanting to make the bad parts materially less bad. One can, for example, be a patriot, and simultaneously hate what one’s country is doing.
Here’s an example of what I mean: Every ICE employee in the US will claim to be a patriot. I don’t think there’s much more to say about that.
I’m from Germany myself, and I can assure you that every Nazi in the Third Reich also considered himself a patriot.
Your distinction may be relevant in theory, but it is not in practice.
Claiming you’re a patriot has no bearing on whether you are a patriot, or are simply confusing it with nationalism - either through stupidity or bad faith. ICEcubes are not patriots. They are the American Sturmabteilung.
The actual Sturmabteilung (SA) and all other Nazi divisions also claimed to be patriots—they killed millions of people under this premise. That is a fact, and that is what I am getting at.
That alone does not make one a patriot
But they also considered themselves to be good people
Are we supposed to redefine the word good to mean bad?
No, but give them as few opportunities as possible to justify their misdeeds. Patriotism is traditionally the favorite argument of unscrupulous oportunists: they invoke it because it appeals to people and offers them a way out, a way to legitimize morally reprehensible acts—in the sense that you can do whatever you want because it is in the service of the fatherland.
How this works can currently be seen in Israel, for example: here, soldiers commit terrible atrocities and claim that human rights do not apply to enemies of Israel, enemies of their holy fatherland. So they act as ruthlessly as possible because it is supposedly patriotic.
It is important to make it clear that people remain people, even if they have a different nationality. Emphasizing national pride and all that makes this more difficult, because if you always emphasize how proud you are of your country, you inherently emphasize at the same time that people of other nationalities do not belong. For reasonably rational people, it is of course perfectly obvious that this does not imply any judgment of people of other nationalities—on the contrary, many are rightly proud that their country is just and guarantees human rights. The problem, however, is that many people are anything but rational—and some of them are only looking for (spurious) arguments to use against others: patriotism is ideal for this purpose because it is an abstract concept - there is no universal definition of what it means.
That’s why I believe we should emphasize patriotism as little as possible and instead stick to concrete issues—such as emphasizing a fair legal system and so on. This makes it less abstract and offers less potential for abuse.
If patriotism couldnt be used to spread propaganda, wouldnt people just find another word to use?
If people didn’t invoke patriotism so excessively, as they do, for example, in the US with flag pledges in schools, Stars and Stripes air shows at sporting events after the national anthem, that gets played nearly every time, flags everywhere from houses to tv shows, and much much more constant declarations of love for this proud nation, if all that would not happen every day, don’t you think it would be way harder to spread propaganda on this basis?
Not being able to use a word wouldnt stop all the other things mentioned
But stopping things like flag pledges that I mentioned would make the word less powerful for misuse.
Well, I can see that you disagree and I don’t think we’ll ever see eye to eye on this.
My opinion is that patriotism and nationalism cause far more harm than good. Of course, one can disagree, but I haven’t read a single comment in this entire thread that addresses why patriotism is so important or what positive effects it has.
Only references to the fact that nationalism and patriotism are not the same thing, which is clear to me — still: interestingly, no one has addressed where the difference lies. And no one has addressed the actual statement, namely that both concepts are abused as instruments of power.
That’s a shame.
Would stopping people from using the word “patriotism” help to stop that?
Even though i personally dont care about the word, i believe that allowing people to so easily erase the meanings of words can be more harmful than not forcing fascists to go from one word to another
North Korea has “Democratic” in it’s name, but does that mean “Democracy = Bad”?