Why I Hate Patriotism -- As Explained by Emma Goldman, Leo Tolstoy, Albert Einstein, and Bertrand Russell

I've always loved team sports, but whenever I go to a ballgame I try to be absent during the ritual playing of the National Anthem.

Also, fighter jets -- more literally bomb droppers -- roaring over stadiums before games almost make me want to vomit.

In other words, I intensely dislike patriotism.

My reasons for this have been articulated far better than I can by several people who write better than I can. So I am just going to turn this over to them.

Emma Goldman is a good place to start. She once said:

 “Patriotism ... is a superstition artificially created and maintained through a network of lies and falsehoods; a superstition that robs man of his self-respect and dignity, and increases his arrogance and conceit.”

 Here’s another one by Goldman:

 Patriotism assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate. Those who have had the fortune of being born on some particular spot consider themselves nobler, better, grander, more intelligent than those living beings inhabiting any other spot. It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight, kill and die in the attempt to impose his superiority upon all the others.

 

Leo Tolstoy was no fan of it either:

 Patriotism in its simplest, clearest, and most indubitable signification is nothing else but a means of obtaining for the rulers their ambitions and covetous desires, and for the ruled the abdication of human dignity, reason, and conscience, and a slavish enthrallment to those in power.

 

Then there was Albert Einstein, who said it this way:

    Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the     loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of             patriotism - how passionately I hate them!

Einstein also commented on "nationalism," which, for all practical purposes, is what most people mean when they refer to "patriotism" today:

 "Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind."

And it seems fitting to let Bertrand Russell have the last word:

    

    “Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial         reasons”