Patriotism (wikipedia notes)

I'm just a wee bit behind in my Journalism assignment (mainly because it took me a number of days to finally think up a topic for my feature story). As mentioned in an earlier post its about "Patriotism", mainly because of how subjective its use tends to be, kind of like "good", "love", "real", so on and so forth, but, not so much. But still subjective.

My first online source was Wikipedia. Holy hell did the article on that have all the resources I could need for a research paper it would seem. How to sum it up and mix it with quotes from people at school that I have not interviewed yet is beyond me at the moment. Here's the main parts of the entry on patriotism, however:

The types of acts considered patriotic depend very much on ones point of view. Acts that one person considers patriotic may appear treasonous to another. For example, both soldiers and war resisters may consider their actions driven by a love of their country and a desire to see the greatest good for it, while at the same time seeing the others' actions as damaging and unpatriotic
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In his article "Is patriotism a virtue?" (1984), the philosopher Alasdair
MacIntyre addresses this question in a particularly subtle way. He first notes
that most contemporary conceptions of morality insist on a kind of impartial blindness to accidental traits like national origin in the just treatment of our
fellow humans-and therefore, that patriotism is inevitably not moral under these conceptions
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Throughout history, patriotic feeling has often been linked to religion. At various points in history, particularly in time of war, various relations of religion and patriotism have prevailed.

In one variant, patriotic participants in a war acknowledge that the enemy worships the same god, but judge that this god is on their own side, thus providing the external justification for patriotism noted just above. This is perhaps a fair characterization of the attitude of many of the participants in the American Civil War or most of the fronts of the First World War. Another variant is for each side to worship different gods, acknowledge that the other side’s god exists, and believe that their own god is superior. This may have characterized the conflicts between the ancient Israelites and their Canaanite opponents, as narrated in the Old Testament. Yet another version of religious patriotism is the belief that a god or set of gods is on one’s side, and that the god or gods of the other side simply do not exist. This view often characterized the beliefs of the European powers during the colonialist period, when their armies often fought against pagan opponents.

Under any of these circumstances, religion can provide a satisfactory account to its believers for what otherwise would be a paradox, namely, that both sides in a conflict can feel patriotic at the same time. The idea would be that the other side is in fact fighting against God’s will, and thus can be considered to be engaged in a false kind of patriotism.
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Patriotism can be both for or against the current government of a nation. Supporters of the current government may hold the opinion that patriotism implies support of one's government and its policies, and that opposition to the government's policies amounts to treason. But in other instances, rebellion against a corrupt or tyrannical government may be justified as an act needed to save the nation, and thus is likewise motivated by patriotism.
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Patriotism is sometimes associated with ethnocentrism, i.e. the belief in the inherent superiority of one's own people, however this may be defined. However, in the case of ethnocentrism, the people in question need not form a nation, but can be a smaller or larger unit. Moreover, the term ethnocentrism is generally used negatively, whereas the term patriotism is quite often used positively.
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Author George Bernard Shaw defined patriotism as "your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.".
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The Russian writer Leo Tolstoy had a particularly negative attitude towards patriotism. In his pamphlet Christianity and Patriotism he wrote: "Patriotism... for rulers is nothing else than a tool for achieving their power-hungry and money hungry goals, and for the ruled it means renouncing their human dignity, reason, conscience, and slavish submission to those in power. ... Patriotism is slavery."

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