Link between Patriotism & Mental Illness?
Has anyone out there heard anything about a possible relationship between patriotism and mental illness? Just wondering because to me it seems inevitable that we’ll one day find this to be the case. This is not to say that anyone that feels the pangs of pride for their country is nuts. It’s relative. I’m thinking specifically of those growing numbers of people in our society that take it to an extreme. Those citizens’ whose patriotic flames are ignited by hatred. After all, when you see someone waving a flag there too often is an implied or overt hostility toward something or someone else. That phenomena is quite evident in our society today.
Ok if you want to quibble you can say it is Nationalism I’m talkng about. But it’s fairly indestinguishable. When you come right down to it, devout patriotism and Nationalism, are basically the same thing. But semantics is not what I’m looking for here. I have a critical agenda, and that is to point out that patriotism or nationalism cause people to act irrationally — insanely!
It’s quite simple if you think about it, it’s patriotism that paves the way to consent and participation of the masses for war. War wouldn’t be possible without that consent, and children would not be willing to become cannon fodder without “love of country”. I believe patriotic nationalism tops organized religion as the leading cause of senseless deaths and the demonization of fellow human beings.
If you don’t believe me just look around you. We’re so fortunate to live in the US, many of us because we see ourselves as a “free people”. But is it ok with you, my fellow free citizens, if our military keeps dropping bombs on other people, many of whom are innocent civilians? Noam Chomsky has labelled us a “rogue state” and the world’s #1 terrorist state. Yet no one seems to be concerned. It’s just not on the radar! There was not a single question in last week’s US Presidential Debate about our perpetually being at war. Think about that. To me this actually terrifying. As it should be to anyone in their right mind.
So here we are in the year 2020. Orwell’s 1984 is history. The book is still required reading in many US middle and high schools. It’s admirable how our social engineers have fashioned society. It’s a true art form. The world George Orwell foresaw was created right under our noses, and with time, like anything else, it evolves. You might think that Orwell’s ideas would be taboo in the totalitarian society we now have, but we-the-people have swallowed whole the American delusion we’ve been sold.
This is nothing new however. The NAZI Party was able to trigger wide-scale hatred of Jews. A hatred deep and wide enough to form a general consensus that they needed to go. In the end the NAZIs thought killing 6 million Jews was a “final solution” and I’m sure they were very confident the public would go along with it. Logic? None at all. Only mental illness on a mass scale brought about by a cocktail of fear and patriotic fervor. NAZI leaders, it turned out, were formed by formerly downtrodden outsiders (eg. Hitler, Himler,and Gobbels come to mind) who had a score to settle. So the Jews were an easy target. With the benefit of hindsight we can now see that the Jews were the only likely target, perpetually stigmatized and belonging to the merchant class which made them very worthwhile victims of the NAZI thugs.
But in a story book ending, WE won that war! Where did those NAZIs end up? With US of course, because we had another so called “evil” to contend with — the Red scare was what they sold us. At the time there was a potent movement world-wide toward Marxist doctrine that implored workers to unite. A potential nightmare to the fat cats whose descendants’ are today’s elites.
So the US government enlisted those NAZIs because they were needed to fight the “bad guys”. You might ask, are these not the same Jew-hating, anti-humanitarian NAZIs that fostered such evil? Not to worry, they are with us now! Our goodness is bound to rub off on them after all!
If you rise up to 10,000 feet and look at this, you’ll see that the elite class, working with our government manipulated into a mindset that viewed a system that called for human dignity for all and sharing of wealth as something evil. This movement took shape around the start of the 20th century and intensified after WWII. If you ask any fat cat they’ll tell you there’s nowhere near enough wealth to be shared and there sure as hell is not enough dignity to go around!
These days Nationalists wave the flag and tell us immigrants are the cause of all our problems, so we use the military to keep them out and we put their children in cages. We also militarized the police to keep the riff-raff in line. This is something that is already coming back to bite hard. Meanwhile we ignore the facts that 1) we’re all from somewhere else originally, and 2) high-levels of immigration have historically strengthened the economy more often than weakening it. But maybe I’m nitpicking now, because there’s so many of us that are out of work and living for each paycheck. Let’s just agree the immigrants are to blame so we can just stop thinking about that.
Thinking is a major problem category for us Americans nowadays. We’re sold an idea of a two-party system in the US and we swallow it whole. But these two parties are both funded by the same elite ruling class.
The so-called progressives hated George W Bush (not very difficult really) and rejoiced with Obama, me included. But it turned out Obama dropped more bombs on the world than Bush. Yet they love Obama and mourn him in the Trump age. Where is the logic here? There is no logic. It’s dogma. Is this mental illness or it is pure ignorance? I’m not sure. People who call themselves progressives or liberals give Obama a pass because they are either nuts or willfully ignorant — blinded by the dogma of the two-party system. Sorry but there is no other option here. The fact that we now have a jackass like Trump in office causes fits for progressives. But we would not have Trump today if these same people who call themselves democrats, liberals or progressives, could just see through the smoke screen they create using our mainstream media.
The strawbreaker for me, and un-refutable proof that we are now not right mentally on a mass scale is simply that Americans now accept war without question. Back in the 60’s and 70’s — even the early 80’s, when a reasonable candidate positioned him or herself as a “Dove” or peace candidate, that would automatically guarantee them at least 30–35% of the vote. There were sometimes multiple doves, like in 1968, who would split that vote.
In that year there was a major movement across the country to end the Vietnam War. Things really looked promising, but then Bobby Kennedy was murdered and Eugene McCarthy became the last hope, and the Democrats in their infinite wisdom went with Hubert H. Humphrey, who was enough of a centrist to squash the anti-war energy of the time. That’s why the 60’s went out with a whimper. For those who don’t realize it, JFK with his many faults, was assassinated because he was seen as a threat to some key factions of the behind the scenes elitist power structure. Same with RFK. We’ve not looked back since. Looking back to 1960, in his farewell address, President Eisenhower warned us about the Military Industrial Complex.
In the 2020 race we had Tulsi Gabbard as the lone voice of sanity. A female veteran who has personally witnessed our act in the middle east and who looks at world differently than any of the mainstream candidates, all of whom are bought by the mega-corporations and the military industrial complex. Predictably Tulsi was marginalized as a Russian agent and some kind of flake. That’s what this system does to anyone who looks at things too deeply and questions what is really going on.
Similarly anyone who presents these ideas in media is quickly written off as a flake by the same white middle class people who used to have the ability to discern fact from fiction. But thanks to the current state of media, discernment is no longer allowed. They’ve decided that we need to be told what to think. This is because the actual truth when it comes down to it is the greed and thirst of our mega corporations and war profiteers is forever increasing. But clarity of thought just does not seem to be our forte.
White sports fans, most of whom don’t really give a crap about the National Anthem are angry with black athletes who kneel when its played. What they don’t understand is what it feels like for a parent to suffer from extreme anxiety whenever their children leave the house, because they could be shot by a police officer. I’ve heard them say “enough with Black Lives Matter!” But it is not nearly enough, and the longer we let this go, the more it will cost us all in the long run.
I still see enough decent, compassionate, humanitarian people out there to ”keep hope alive” (Jesse Jackson). We simply need to wake up and understand we’re being spoon fed propaganda after being lulled into a trance with technology and creature comforts for the fortunate among us that is.
Just think about it this: we are a country that has existed for 244 years and has been at war for 227 of those years! Is that not stunning?!! Are we not a peace-loving people? Yet the Military Industrial Complex grows more and more greedy by the year, so our politicians — in order to satisfy their donors — keep us in fear and keep us believing the twisted logic that ends in the killing and maiming of millions of people.
Is that acceptable to you? If your answer is Yes, I suggest you seek medical help — and don’t worry about voting for now, you can be excused.
