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Post by uz on Mar 7, 2011 20:56:18 GMT -5
Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception. -George Orwell
Historians are to nationalism what poppy-growers in Pakistan are to heroin-addicts: we supply the essential raw material for the market. -E. J. Hobsbawm
A strong nation, like a strong person, can afford to be gentle, firm, thoughtful, and restrained. It can afford to extend a helping hand to others. It's a weak nation, like a weak person, that must behave with bluster and boasting and rashness and other signs of insecurity. -Jimmy Carter
The soil of their native land is dear to all the hearts of mankind. -Marcus Tullius Cicero
Men may be linked in friendship. Nations are linked only by interests. -Rolf Hochhuth
The greatest nations have all acted like gangsters and the smallest like prostitutes. -Stanley Kubrick
I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her. -Simone Weil
The love of one's country is a splendid thing. But why should love stop at the border? -Pablo Casals
Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism - how passionately I hate them! -Albert Einstein
To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography. -George Santayana
A nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and by common hatred of its neighbours. -William R. Inge
To him in whom love dwells, the whole world is but one family. -Buddha
I have no sense of nationalism, only a cosmic consciousness of belonging to the human family. -Rosika Schwimmer
You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race. -George Bernard Shaw
I am not an Athenian or a Greek, I am a citizen of the world. -Socrates[/u]
Patriotism, the virtue of the vicious. -Oscar Wilde
If our country is worth dying for in time of war let us resolve that it is truly worth living for in time of peace. -Hamilton Fish
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Post by emer on Mar 7, 2011 21:58:54 GMT -5
You quote these people as if they are the pinnacle of piousness and righteousness. As if their word is law now, many decades after their death, when we decide they are worth something. As if most of these people you quoted didn't write fiction. Besides, people segregate on their own anyway, without knowing it. You're always going to be attracted to people similar to you, unless sex is involved.
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Post by uz on Mar 7, 2011 22:01:22 GMT -5
I quote these people for what they say, not for who they are or what they did.
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Post by laughingriever on Mar 8, 2011 0:07:10 GMT -5
I have always said that nationalism and religion are the two great hoaxes pulled on mankind.
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Post by uz on Mar 8, 2011 0:19:16 GMT -5
It took a long time for humanity to come to this point.
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Post by Emperor AAdmin on Mar 8, 2011 0:23:06 GMT -5
I changed the name of the topic to a quote I found from Einstein after researching relationship between nationalism and disorder.
Exact quote is
“Nationalism is an infantile sickness. It is the measles of the human race.”
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Post by uz on Mar 8, 2011 0:25:09 GMT -5
lol, now after reading the title, no one is going to be interested.
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Post by Emperor AAdmin on Mar 8, 2011 0:27:23 GMT -5
That is assuming there are no nationalists here to take this the wrong way and we all know that Illyria Forums is a place where nationalists are non -existent.
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Post by uz on Mar 8, 2011 0:35:41 GMT -5
To be fair, learning to let go was not meant to be easy.
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Post by Emperor AAdmin on Mar 8, 2011 0:37:26 GMT -5
Nationalism: the virus and its cure
There are so many aspects of nationalism that really fascinate me. How, for example, can a religious person be a nationalist? How can nationalist-religious people put these two mutually exclusive things together? Christianity and Islam are supposed to be universal religions but, as we know, there are so many religious nationalists in both faith groups. Even in church and mosque, extremely nationalistic discourse finds a place for itself, in sermons, for example.
I do not want to offend anyone by giving specific examples, but you can detect this mixture if you yourself are not infected by the virus. Is there any other virus that has killed more people than nationalism? Look at the wars that have taken place, including the “great wars.” Look at regional and domestic conflicts, you almost always find this virus circulating in the blood of the groups party to these conflicts. But can we not give it up? We always find fancy words to keep it. Today I would like to share with you some thought-provoking quotes about nationalism. They speak for themselves and explain a lot. Just think about them for a little bit. The first one is from one of the biggest brains of humankind. Albert Einstein once said: “Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.” Einstein would be really unhappy if he knew that we are still suffering from this “infantile disease.”
Another great brain that called nationalism a disease was the iconic figure of psychoanalytic thought, Eric Fromm, who said: “Nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our insanity. ‘Patriotism’ is its cult. It should hardly be necessary to say that by ‘patriotism’ I mean that attitude which puts the own nation above humanity, above the principles of truth and justice; not the loving interest in one’s own nation, which is the concern with the nation’s spiritual as much as with its material welfare/never with its power over other nations. Just as love for one individual which excludes the love for others is not love, love for one’s country which is not part of one’s love for humanity is not love, but idolatrous worship.”
Fromm’s words should be a wakeup call for everyone, but especially for religious people. If nationalism is “idolatrous worship,” then it should not find any place in the discourse and actions of religious people.
For people who are concerned with unhealthy habits, Dan Fried tried to make a useful analogy. Nationalism, according to Fried, “is like cheap alcohol. First it makes you drunk, then it makes you blind, then it kills you.”
The opposite of nationalism is universalism, being global citizens and not trying to love people on the basis of their ethnicity or nationality. Nationalism may be a disease which has been affecting our world for the last couple of centuries, but the cure has been available for centuries.
Lend an ear to Diogenes, who lived and died 2,400 years ago. Diogenes mocking Alexander by telling him, “Stand out of my sunlight,” is very well known in every corner of the world, but I guess few people have ever heard Diogenes’ remarks indicating his feelings of belonging. “I am a citizen of the world,” he had said.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, Thomas Paine and H.G. Wells updated Diogenes’ remarks by making a reference to “mankind.” “The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion,” Thomas Paine had said and H.G. Wells agreed, saying, “Our true nationality is mankind.”
I would like to finish this piece with two other quotes that I like very much. The first from Mark Gerzon, author of “Global Citizens.”
“If we spend our entire lives ‘learning’ inside the cultural and national borders in which we were raised, we develop a colonized mind,” he had said.
And my final quote is from Einstein, with whom I started this chain of quotations. Einstein shows us the path to solve the problems that nationalism caused. He says, “We cannot solve problems on the same level of awareness that we created them.” Meaning? Get rid of this virus! Have a good Sunday. beta.todayszaman.com/columnist-228734-nationalism-the-virus-and-its-cure.html
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Post by uz on Mar 8, 2011 0:48:26 GMT -5
Using logic reasoning all this makes sense, but the problem is deeper than that. It's in our psyche, our genes and DNA. We Balkan people especially have this inherited us. They're was always a strong sense of passion in the Balkans, when it came to identity.
The basic premise of nationality is to label differences. Look past nationality, and there is no difference.
===
8-)Great article by the way !
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Post by Emperor AAdmin on Mar 8, 2011 0:53:10 GMT -5
(more quotes on this mass disorder)
A second characteristic of our time is the prevalence of nationalism. This is still spreading, affecting new communities, more peripheral regions and so-called backward peoples. Emily Greene Balch
Born in iniquity and conceived in sin, the spirit of nationalism has never ceased to bend human institutions to the service of dissension and distress. Thorstein Veblen
Christianity has not conquered nationalism; the opposite has been the case nationalism has made Christianity its footstool. Arthur Keith
I do not believe that the values which the Western democracies consider essential to civilization can survive in a world rent by the international anarchy of nationalism and the economic anarchy of competitive enterprise. Arthur Henderson
I don't think nationalism is alone holding the field; it's in contention with a lot of different things. Peter Singer
I have been thinking about the notion of perfect love as being without fear, and what that means for us in a world that's becoming increasingly xenophobic, tortured by fundamentalism and nationalism. Bell Hooks
In Europe the right wing is bogged down in Nationalism in most cases and still fighting so called Reds. Tom Metzger
In the First World War, there was the sudden passion of nationalism, and the killing took place because of these emotions. But the Soviet case is different, because you had systematic murder, like the Holocaust. Ryszard Kapuscinski
Independence did not mean chauvinism and narrow nationalism. Said Musa
It is not easy to see how the more extreme forms of nationalism can long survive when men have seen the Earth in its true perspective as a single small globe against the stars. Arthur C. Clarke
Nationalism - in other words, the dividing of the church into bodies - consisting of such and such a nation, is a novelty, not above three centuries old, although many dear children of God are found dwelling in it. John Nelson Darby
Nationalism is a silly c**k crowing on his own dunghill. Richard Aldington
Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first. Charles de Gaulle
Pervading nationalism imposes its dominion on man today in many different forms and with an aggressiveness that spares no one. The challenge that is already with us is the temptation to accept as true freedom what in reality is only a new form of slavery. Pope John Paul II
The negative aspects of Scottish Nationalism are a kind of aggressive complacency, that sort of boasting; but that's an expression of insecurity, I think, of a lack of confidence. Douglas Dunn
The sublimated idealism of the Enlightenment, the spirit of the League of Nations and of the United Nations Charter have not proved strong enough to control the aggressive dynamism of nationalism. Christopher Dawson
There is a fuzzy but real distinction that can and I believe should be made, between patriotism, which is attachment to a way of life, and nationalism, which is the insistence that your way of life deserves to rule over other ways of life. Todd Gitlin
To realize that new world we must prefer the values of freedom and equality above all other values - above personal wealth, technical power and nationalism. Herbert Read
War springs from the love and loyalty which should be offered to God being applied to some God substitute, one of the most dangerous being nationalism. Robert Runcie
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Post by emer on Mar 8, 2011 7:45:23 GMT -5
I quote these people for what they say, not for who they are or what they did. Right, why not quote Hitler too then? He had some really good quotes, especially the one about lies, which is probably one of the most truthful quotes in history. Nationalism is a necessary evil. People need things to identify with. Take these things away and there's not much of a difference between people and animals. All quotes are manipulated to fit a person's own agenda and most of those people you quoted where white European men. Did anyone ever stop to ask the opinion of gypsies for example? They say those who can't do teach, well they also write, sometimes really dumb quotes.
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Post by Emperor AAdmin on Mar 8, 2011 11:08:38 GMT -5
I am sure there are multitudes of other, better, things people can identify with which are far more sane. Nationalism is nothing more then stripping individuality and herding people into packs and leading them towards the water well of hate. It is behavior that is fully animalistic come to think of it since there is no logic involved but pure (usually negative) emotion. When it is presented in a more intense light it appears to have a form of mass insanity. There is no way that this is necessary evil but something that future world will regard as form of mental disorder. The only thing that will be necessary about it is the medications for more severe cases.
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Post by Croatian Vanguard on Mar 8, 2011 11:24:22 GMT -5
Nice, I also detest nationalism.
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Post by Emperor AAdmin on Mar 8, 2011 11:45:19 GMT -5
I would not say I detest it but pity anyone under its spell. It is a person that is still infantile or child-like meaning filled with emotions unable to control. Einstein was right. Ones who are susceptible to fall under its spell are usually younger people due to their age. People are are older and or wiser are not. It again comes down to the fact that 90% are strictly mindless followers. Plato was right about them not being intellectual enough (or being emotionally infantile) and in need of babysitting by so called "Philosopher king's". Plato's Allegory of the Cave comes to mind when it comes to these nationalists. Allegory of the Cave en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_Cave
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Post by Croatian Vanguard on Mar 8, 2011 16:09:10 GMT -5
I detest the 'philosophy' of nationalism not the people who were brain washed into it. I pity them to a point and that point is when they are shown reason by way of logic and evidence and still refuse to be rational and discard such beliefs. Then I'm just annoyed and prefer to not associate with toxic people like that.
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Post by Croatian Vanguard on Mar 8, 2011 16:13:02 GMT -5
Even though I'm a Croat I would consider a rational like minded Serb or Greek more of my brother than any other Croats that happen to be hardy nationalists or religious zealots.
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Post by srbobran on Mar 8, 2011 16:33:39 GMT -5
+1
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Post by Caslav Klonimirovic on Mar 8, 2011 17:21:52 GMT -5
The greatest nations have all acted like gangsters and the smallest like prostitutes. -Stanley Kubrick To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography. -George SantayanaI love that these do not apply to Serbs. The second one is particularly poignant to Bosniak nationalists who expect Serbs and Croats to be loyal to its nation because they are within its borders. I find that stupid.
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