problamatic patriotism

I'v alwayz been quite uncomfortable with the idea of nationalism or even patriotism....especially military nationalism....actually just military patriotism.

I am aware of the linguistic crime i am commiting by using both the terms nationalism and patrioatism simultaneously...

But the irony never escapes me when the culture tries to justify the war and bloodshed for peace and when the jingoists shout out for unmitigated revenge for some political hulabaloo.......hulabaloo, yes its nothing more.....the term used for monkeys and "imaginative" children can be used for the people who run the countries for us beacuse we do not have enough time to spare from our corporate lives...but that some other time

Does the justification of the 'naughty child' in all of us justify the waging of wars for nothing more than ego?? some psychologists claim that the childhood fantasy of planes and bombs and guns gets transformed into the frenzy, the madness which kills more men than any other "cause" year after year....

Whats more men revel in gore.....

What is the parameter of civilisation which bases itself on such violence??? the supremacy one can claim in the hobbsian world?????being the fittest in the race for survival?? or the ability to transform oneself like a warewolf....the perfect gentlemen off the battlefield and the savage-est man on it????

I saw the movie 1971 today....about the POWs who are still stuck in Pakistan.....the ending wherein an Indian soldier who has gone through hell to reach the border of India, a runaway from a prison-camp from Pakistan dies jus a couple of meters away from the border of India...piognantly wearing a Pakistan army uniform which was supposed to be his "passport" to freedom ultimately led him to be dragged away back into the Pakistani territory....and left to rot.....is this what nationalism and patriotism make of men....scavengers...

That was just a movie...but there have been men living in those jails beacuse there are'nt enough people who can see them as men....sharing something in common with them but as those who wear another country's colours and swear by another constitution.....and i am not jus refrring to the Pakistani jails....

It reminds me of one line from a novel by an irish guy called Josef Conrad i read once.It is about a white man going into the heart of africa...the dark continent....the man kurtz, sees black men on the shores and feels a shudder when he realisez that he is afraid of these people not beacuse they mite be primeval but because he could percieve some sort of a primordial-rudimentary-genetc link between him and what he pronounced on behalf of the civilized world, to the civilized world as savages.....the threat is of all the distinctions being dissloved.....supremacy cannot be claimed then.

There is no winner no loser...no rite side....no wrong...only men dying and others who see them suffer and do not flich from feeling proud about their contribution in it!!!!

The irony at a personal level is ofcourse that this line of thinking is not in conjunction with what has been taught to me all through my life. Of saluting the flag as it stands for the nation...of feeling a sense of awe for the men who are ready to sacrifice their life for the country.....there is even some amount of sex-appeal attached to it!!!!!!!!!!!

Sometimes i feel that there are more who can see this the way i see it...who can understand why i feel it is all hollow...and perhaps that is why they carry on with the pretene.....there needs be some justification for all the effort, energy,emotion and resourse which goes into sustaining this brand and strand of nationalism....

There needs be some justification for the sacrifices made by the soldiers and their families.....the idea has to be worth the history of sacrifices and the future of scarifices which lie ahead....the glory has to be worth it...

One ashoka was enough for history and the world....