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Is extreme nationalism really a bad thing?

Is extreme nationalism ALWAYS bad in every situation?

  • yes

    Votes: 25 64.1%
  • no

    Votes: 10 25.6%
  • other

    Votes: 4 10.3%

  • Total voters
    39
This is not about Iraq, but you will be answered...

The most powerful country on the planet attacked one of the weakest, and we still have thousands of troops there to prevent rebellion and protect the oil. Does that mean we won?

Yes. Iraq is in the hands of Iraqis and what ever remains from our forces are advisors only. Much the same as every nation we have been in since World War II. The war was won a long time ago and their fate is in their own hands. Success or failure is up to them. Our mission is complete. Of course, if they fail, you will rage about our failure as if we should have stayed indefinately to hold their hands. You will have Iraq a failure no matter what so why am I bothering?


This war is one of the best examples of why extreme nationalism is not a good thing.

This war is an example of nothing of the kind and if this is all you have to go on when defining extreme nationalism than you have missed the boat. There were no concentration camps, no ethnic slaughter, no new dictator, and and no intent to conquer and remain. From the beginning the mission was clear enough (to the honest of us) and now we are gone in accordance to our own agenda. We did not have to be forced out and we did not have to answer to any war crime behavior. Our "extreme" nationalism watched Iraqis freely vote on the laws that would govern them and then in elections. There are many examples in history of what cultures outside the U.S. do with their power and extreme nationalism. Perhaps you should look into them and then place the U.S. into perspective. But that wouldn't fit your expressed agenda, right?

So do you have any real evidence of extreme nationalism being a force for negativity and evil on behalf of America? I remind you that extreme nationalism motivated this country against the Germans and the Japanese. Other than grabbing at straws and seeking to exaggerate exceptions, you have none. Extreme nationalism from America has been historically positive for the world. And you are being foolish if you still pretend that Iraq's future success hasn't anything to do with the entire region's health.
 
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Do you know anything about Italy other than 'it looks like a boot'?

Second Italo-Abyssinian War - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia



Are you going to dispute the meaning of en masse?



Ah so now Mussolini wasn't as bad as the other guys? lol mkay there.



Did you read the rest of my statement? Obviously not considering you have proven time and time again that you can't read.

You didn't even read your own evidence, did you?

Campagna concentration camp, located in Campagna, a town near Salerno in Southern Italy, was an internment camp for Jews and foreigners established by Benito Mussolini in 1940.

The first internees were 430 men captured in different parts of Italy. Most of them were Jewish refugees came from Germany, Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Dalmatia, there were also some British citizens and a group of 40 French and Italian Jews. The number of inmates, during the three years varied considerably, ranging between 230 (February 1941) and 150 (September 1943).

The camp was never a concentration camp in the German sense of the term. Internees were allowed to receive food parcels and visit sick relatives. In addition, there were no mail restrictions. None of the internees were killed or subjected to violence. In fact, the internees were constantly protected from deportation to Germany, as the Nazis requested. Prisoners were allowed to organize a library, school, theater and a synagogue.

In September 1943 Italy capitulated and the Allied troops invaded South Italy. In response the German troops invaded Italy from the North. However, by the time they got to the Campagna concentration camp, all the inmates had alredy fled to the mountains with the help of the local inhabitants.
 
This is not about Iraq, but you will be answered...

I didn't bring up Iraq -

Quote Originally Posted by Solace
"I have, but what was bad? We won the Iraq War."

Yes. Iraq is in the hands of Iraqis and what ever remains from our forces are advisors only. Much the same as every nation we have been in since World War II. The war was won a long time ago and their fate is in their own hands. Success or failure is up to them. Our mission is complete. Of course, if they fail, you will rage about our failure as if we should have stayed indefinately to hold their hands. You will have Iraq a failure no matter what so why am I bothering?

All other nations have removed their troops. As of November we still had 48,000 troops there including my son because the new govenment we set up there cannot stand on its own.

Without extreme nationalism brought on by unfounded fear promoted by the administration, it is my opinion the American people would never have agreed to attacking one of the most defenseless countries on the planet at the time due to our previous Persian Gulf war and ten years of brutal sanctions.
 
Considering that Ultra-nationalism always leads to government thuggery towards a group of people that the ultra-nationalists manage to convince the majority of the said nation's citizens for said nation's woes, Im going to say no.
 
Considering that Ultra-nationalism always leads to government thuggery towards a group of people that the ultra-nationalists manage to convince the majority of the said nation's citizens for said nation's woes, Im going to say no.

Though that's not nationalism, generally that's xenophobia.
 
This is not about Iraq, but you will be answered...



Yes. Iraq is in the hands of Iraqis and what ever remains from our forces are advisors only. Much the same as every nation we have been in since World War II. The war was won a long time ago and their fate is in their own hands. Success or failure is up to them. Our mission is complete. Of course, if they fail, you will rage about our failure as if we should have stayed indefinately to hold their hands. You will have Iraq a failure no matter what so why am I bothering?




This war is an example of nothing of the kind and if this is all you have to go on when defining extreme nationalism than you have missed the boat. There were no concentration camps, no ethnic slaughter, no new dictator, and and no intent to conquer and remain. From the beginning the mission was clear enough (to the honest of us) and now we are gone in accordance to our own agenda. We did not have to be forced out and we did not have to answer to any war crime behavior. Our "extreme" nationalism watched Iraqis freely vote on the laws that would govern them and then in elections. There are many examples in history of what cultures outside the U.S. do with their power and extreme nationalism. Perhaps you should look into them and then place the U.S. into perspective. But that wouldn't fit your expressed agenda, right?

So do you have any real evidence of extreme nationalism being a force for negativity and evil on behalf of America? I remind you that extreme nationalism motivated this country against the Germans and the Japanese. Other than grabbing at straws and seeking to exaggerate exceptions, you have none. Extreme nationalism from America has been historically positive for the world. And you are being foolish if you still pretend that Iraq's future success hasn't anything to do with the entire region's health.
It all depends on how you define "extreme" nationalism.

What you describe may be nationalism, but I wouldn't call it extreme - in my mind, extreme nationalism is like Nazi Germany or the USSR.

So while I think nationalism is a good thing, I think extreme nationalism is a bad thing.

If we had gone the extreme nationalistic route after 9/11, today we would be hunting down all Muslims inside our country...if they were not already hunted down...and that would be bad.
 
Extreme nationalism is like a cancer to the well being of the country. It combines self delusion with militarism, a lethal combination. Absurd hubris leads to a failure to compensate for flaws or have contingency plans for failure. Japan ended up getting obliterated because its leadership was so convinced of their own superiority that they ignored the overwhelming evidence that they had no chance of winning of the war. People who claim to love their country destroy it because of their blind-stupidity. A true patriot must first recognize his country's flaws before he can improve it.
 
As of November we still had 48,000 troops there including my son because the new govenment we set up there cannot stand on its own.

This is a false statement. I will explain. Your son is in the Army. He is doing his job,much like soldiers did for Germany, Kuwait and others after the job was complete. The Marine Corps' role in Iraq is complete. This means that Iraq's aggressive foes are subdued enough so that Marines do not have to be there. Remaining troops remain for the time being as a precaution. This number is lowering as time consumes and most of them are still training Iraqi forces. 48,000 soldiers are not enough to do anything if Iraq explodes. This means that Iraq is stable enough to stand on its own. Whether they succeed or fail is up to them. They have been provided opportunity and given the security forces to persue what ever path they choose. The problem with Iraq (and Afghanistan) is that people far away have allowed the media to engineer a specific impractical definition for "victory" so that anything practical is unacceptable.


Without extreme nationalism brought on by unfounded fear promoted by the administration, it is my opinion the American people would never have agreed to attacking one of the most defenseless countries on the planet at the time due to our previous Persian Gulf war and ten years of brutal sanctions.

I have more faith in the average American and believe that if Bush sold the mission correctly that not even the French would turn their backs. Most Americans agreed with Iraq out of anger, not fear. You civilians wanted your revenge and you didn't care who received it. For the military, we were just finishing the job civilians wouldn't let us do in th Gulf War. And the ten years of brutal sanctions was exactly why Bin Laden chose it as an excuse for 9/11. No matter how the administration sold it, it had to happen. But don't confuse the average American's desire for revenge for fear of Saddam Hussein.

But even if it was out of fear, Iraq is a poor example of American nationalism. With no WMD, Americans and the media turned quickly enough on their desire for revenege.
 
It all depends on how you define "extreme" nationalism.

What you describe may be nationalism, but I wouldn't call it extreme - in my mind, extreme nationalism is like Nazi Germany or the USSR.

So while I think nationalism is a good thing, I think extreme nationalism is a bad thing.

If we had gone the extreme nationalistic route after 9/11, today we would be hunting down all Muslims inside our country...if they were not already hunted down...and that would be bad.

This is a matter of design. You (like many) have purposefully chosen to attribute extreme nationalism to the evils of the world and chosen to attribute less results to mere nationalism. The truth is that it is a matter of culture. History is proof. The Germans are famous for slaughtering and torturing ethnic people. Before the holocaust the German people rallied behind their colonial power and cheered even as their forces tortured and slaughtered unarmed blacks in Africa. The abuse was so bad that even the other European colonial powers evicted them from the continent. This is a matter of culture. Germans have proven that they have no restraint in their nationalism. However, Americans have proven to have resraint. Our nationalism has limits. In our extreme cases, we pitted our entire culture against the Germans and the Japanese. We demonstrated extreme nationalism during the Cold War by applauding senate hearings into "communists" and it pitted us against the Soviets.

I would submit that the health of nationalism absolutely depends on the culture behind it. Europeans scoff at nationalism because their continent's history is one of great turmoil because of it. We do not have that problem. Our history is one of drawing lines. We can drop two nuclear bombs on civilian cities and then lead the world in the refusal of nuclear weapons. We can invade a regional antogonizer with expressed rules and limit our goals to a confined space while surrendering the territory directly back to the people. We can mobilize an entire civilization in the name of "America."

If you reserve "extreme" nationalism to only evil intentions than you deny America it's unique position as a culture.
 
Extreme nationalism is like a cancer to the well being of the country. It combines self delusion with militarism, a lethal combination. Absurd hubris leads to a failure to compensate for flaws or have contingency plans for failure. Japan ended up getting obliterated because its leadership was so convinced of their own superiority that they ignored the overwhelming evidence that they had no chance of winning of the war. People who claim to love their country destroy it because of their blind-stupidity. A true patriot must first recognize his country's flaws before he can improve it.

So mobilizing an entire American culture behind the war effort to defeat the Japanese and the Germans was mere regular nationalism? If we went on to conquer the world with this nationalism and oppressed it then we would call it "extreme" nationalism? It makes no sense. Culture is more important than anything else when it comes to defining these things.

Extremism is associated to all the bad things in history. Therefore, we can't fathom a nation that has displayed it for good time and again. We deny it and pretend that there's such a thing as "regular" nationalism even though it has culminated into massive mobilizing movements for the good of man kind. But we can't get over our traditional thinking and how we attribute words.
 
Look at the poll. Overwhelmingly, people said that extreme nationalism is always bad. This is because people don't think and are automatically wired to see "extreme" as bad. Europeans example of extremism culminated into fascism and communism. The Middle East's examples of extremism culminates into Al-Queda, Hamas, the PLO, the Muslim Brotherhood. But what has American extremism culminated into? The example of Iraq is very poor. In our entire history, our nationalism has mobilized an entire culture against other extremisms. The only way around this truth is to pretend that our examples is just plain old regular nationalism. But no other nation on earth can mobilize like us behind our sense of national pride. The difference is that we are not a culture of blame or scapegoating. Our culture will allow a national voice to invae a Saddam Hussein's Iraq, but it will also insist on democracy and humane goals. There's your difference and pretending that ours is just regular, despite there being nothing regular about it, denies America's uniqueness for the sake of everybody else's self identity.
 
As far as extremism is concerned, I would ask people to consider the OTHER end of the scale as well. The extreme moral relativism that results in a certain sort of cultural self-loathing is as destructive to the culture from within as any real or perceived threats arising from without.

The "everything about us is wrong" folks are just the flip side of the jingoism people are rejecting, and if anything, even more prevalent.
 
This is a false statement. I will explain. Your son is in the Army. He is doing his job,much like soldiers did for Germany, Kuwait and others after the job was complete. The Marine Corps' role in Iraq is complete. This means that Iraq's aggressive foes are subdued enough so that Marines do not have to be there. Remaining troops remain for the time being as a precaution. This number is lowering as time consumes and most of them are still training Iraqi forces. 48,000 soldiers are not enough to do anything if Iraq explodes. This means that Iraq is stable enough to stand on its own. Whether they succeed or fail is up to them. They have been provided opportunity and given the security forces to persue what ever path they choose. The problem with Iraq (and Afghanistan) is that people far away have allowed the media to engineer a specific impractical definition for "victory" so that anything practical is unacceptable.

Precaution against what? To equate the military power of Germany and Japan with Iraq, post Persian Gulf War, is ludicrous. Iraq if no threat to us, never has been since the Persian Gulf War, the only threat the presented was their threat to the flow of oil from their country which holds the planets second largest reserves.



I have more faith in the average American and believe that if Bush sold the mission correctly that not even the French would turn their backs. Most Americans agreed with Iraq out of anger, not fear. You civilians wanted your revenge and you didn't care who received it. For the military, we were just finishing the job civilians wouldn't let us do in th Gulf War. And the ten years of brutal sanctions was exactly why Bin Laden chose it as an excuse for 9/11. No matter how the administration sold it, it had to happen. But don't confuse the average American's desire for revenge for fear of Saddam Hussein.

But even if it was out of fear, Iraq is a poor example of American nationalism. With no WMD, Americans and the media turned quickly enough on their desire for revenege.

We are not talking about Nationalism here, we are talking about extreme Nationalism. The unreasonable fear by the most powerful nation on the planet of one of the weakest was certainly from extreme fear mongering by the administration. I can still hear them as if it were yesterday - Bush in his own words.
 
Extreme anything is a bad thing.

extreme charity?

extreme nationalism can drive people to sacrifice themselves for the betterment and protection of their people. i don't see that as a blanket 'bad'.





as for the discussion of the OP: the poster (and several others here) get it wrong. Americans don't see America as superior because we believe Americans to be superior, but rather because we percieve our method of governance as superior.
 
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Like anything else in life.

There's a good side to it.

And a bad side to it.

It depends on what ideals the said nationalism stands for.
 
exactly. American nationalism, for example, tends to be tied less to notions of blood and land, and more to our founding ideals.

is extremism in defense of liberty a vice?
 
exactly. American nationalism, for example, tends to be tied less to notions of blood and land, and more to our founding ideals.

is extremism in defense of liberty a vice?

Again, even if the said ideal is noble, it can be turned into something bad.

I'd say SOME of the opposition to the Ground Zero Mosque had tinges of nationalist sentiment.
 
Look at the poll. Overwhelmingly, people said that extreme nationalism is always bad. This is because people don't think and are automatically wired to see "extreme" as bad. Europeans example of extremism culminated into fascism and communism. The Middle East's examples of extremism culminates into Al-Queda, Hamas, the PLO, the Muslim Brotherhood. But what has American extremism culminated into?

The deaths of hundreds of thousands of people over the control of oil. That's the problem with extreme nationalism, it tends to make people blind to horrible things done in their name.
 
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So mobilizing an entire American culture behind the war effort to defeat the Japanese and the Germans was mere regular nationalism? If we went on to conquer the world with this nationalism and oppressed it then we would call it "extreme" nationalism? It makes no sense. Culture is more important than anything else when it comes to defining these things.

Many American's were highly isolationist up until the war. FDR may have been going for a fight from the beginning, but the entire American populace wasn't convinced until after Pearl Harbor and the German declaration of war. Most importantly, we were aware of our own weaknesses when the conflict began. We avoided direct confrontation with both Japanese and Germans at first because our forces were too small and needed time to be built up.

Extremism is associated to all the bad things in history. Therefore, we can't fathom a nation that has displayed it for good time and again. We deny it and pretend that there's such a thing as "regular" nationalism even though it has culminated into massive mobilizing movements for the good of man kind. But we can't get over our traditional thinking and how we attribute words.

Even terrible attributes may be occasionally useful, that doesn't make them a generally good idea. Stalin is the best example of that. His forced industrialization and callous ability to sacrifice millions of lives ended up being vital in defeating Germany. The problem is that most of the time men like Stalin simply commit terrible atrocities without mitigating acts of good. Overall, the negative consequences far outweigh the potential use.
 
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