patriotism
...housands. Hundreds of thousands, people. We only lost 38,000 in Vietnam, yet we butcher hundred s of thousands of Iraqis while cheering on and waving the American flag. And if you're one of those who believe that it's only the American lives that count; that foreign lives are expendable, then I've gotta tell ya: You sure are patriotic. And ask yourself this: what did we achieve in the Iraqi war? Saddam Hussein is still in power. The Bush Administration felt it would be too costly to depose him. Of course, this is utterly ridiculous. The man is supposedly worse then Hitler, remembe r? I doubt if anyone would have wanted Hitler to keep control of Germany. And as for Kuwait-- we saved the government but not the citizens. It's still a monarchy there. All we defended was the right of the people to be ruled by their own dictator. In fact, once we drop all pretenses, we can see that the only things that were helped in the Iraqi war were the oil supply and George Bush's reelection chances. And yet most people still feel good about the Iraqi war. After all, we weren't the ones who we re hurt, and all those pretty flags and yellow ribbons made us all feel nice and patriotic. And of course, one of the things that got George Bush elected in the first place was patriotism. When Michael Dukakis wanted to make the pledge of allegiance optional in schools, George Bush accused him of being unpatriotic, and many people agreed. Whe n George Bush said "Read my lips," he didn't just make a promise, he also tried to give people the impression of an old fashioned, red-blooded American, the kind of impression that patriots always seem to fall for. Perhaps the scariest thing of all is th at strategies like that worked. Patriotism is not an American invention; you see it in foreign countries too. And along with patriotism you see the problems caused by it. It was patriotism that let Adolph Hitler rise to power in Germany. The adoring masses of people wanted him to re turn Germany to its former, pre-WW1 glory. Well, we all know what happened then. He embarked on the bloodiest campaign of torture, death camps, mass exterminations, and foreign invasions since the dawn of time, which culminated in the largest and most t ragic war in human history. And it all would have been avoidable if only the German people had been a bit less patriotic. Perhaps patriotism's greatest fault is what it always eventually leads to: prejudice. Or, to be specific, patriotism has always been used as a way of hiding prejudice. We all see these "patriotic² messages every day: Buy American. Don't let the evil Japanese companies take over our country. Don't allow immigrants. All they do is lie around sucking up our tax dollars in welfare, or if they do get a job, it means they're taking away our American jobs. Our first reaction is always to laugh at this kind of lunacy, but then we sober up and realize that the people who repeat that junk are dead serious. And that scares me . That scares the hell out of me. You can also turn to foreign countries to see countless examples of prejudice replacing patriotism. Take the Middle East, for example. Ask a Syrian nationalist why he hates Israel, and he'll tell you that it's because he's patriotic. But that's not th e real reason at all. The real reason is that of his prejudices against the Jewish faith. And in Israel itself, the patriotism in that country has led to a prejudice against the Palestinians whose country was destroyed by Israel. This blend of patrioti sm and mutual prejudice has made the Middle East one of the most volatile areas in the world. In the past, too, patriotism was used as an excuse for harboring prejudice against others. In WW2, all Japanese-Americans were shipped away to death-camps IN AMERICA. The official excuse was to protect our country, which, although it is a very nice and patriotic excuse, is an utter lie. There was not one recorded case of a Japanese-American betraying our country in WW2. No matter, said the officials, we're just preventing that from happening. So why weren't German immigrants ever bothered? Because, according to one official, "A Jap is a Jap." Such prejudice must NEVER be allowed to occur again. Of course, not all patriotism is bad. If it wasn't for patriotism, we would never have won the American Revolution, or the Civil War, or the second World War. If we didn't have patriotism, our space program would have never taken off. Literally. We n eed patriotism to provide that motivation and d...