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.

  • atopi@piefed.blahaj.zone
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    17 minutes ago

    But they also considered themselves to be good people

    Are we supposed to redefine the word good to mean bad?

    • DandomRude@lemmy.worldOP
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      35 minutes ago

      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.