The Dangers of National Pride

Each country has a drastically different approach to national pride and belonging. Holidays, celebrations and elections unite people together by.
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Pride, a feeling of pleasure from one's own achievements, the achievements of those with whom one is associated, or from qualities or possession. National pride, or patriotism is defined as a love and devotion to a country or homeland for no other reason than being a resident there. It has the capability to build and destroy, sometimes even at the same time, to incept unification or to lead to the destruction of a nation. Pride has lead to wars, yet it also ended them with the same passion they were embarked on in the first place.

Pride serves as a common denominator; it is a liquid concept, in as much as the motivation behind the feeling it generates within us, and may vary from person to person.

It is something that has different meanings for whoever is willing to perceive it as proud. For one person the winning of the Rugby World Cup is the pinnacle of their pride or patriotism they will feel for this country. Others would say that a peaceful transition from the previous regime to the current is a feat most countries, especially those who find themselves in Africa, would never be able to achieve with the amount of success we have, and that this deserves more patriotism than any other accomplishment we pride ourselves on.

The problem with pride | News24

For others, the ability we have to surprise the world, by keeping ourselves from imploding due to political tensions, is the benchmark of what national pride should be. Mind you, this may be the only perception keeping us from our own destruction anyway The main problem with pride however, especially patriotism, is that it is subject to abuse, both by those in power, as well as those who just want to justify their actions or views, and yield it as a weapon to instil others to a perceived state of mind, where subjective wills are punted as the truth.

Hitler used national pride as a unification tool, and in so doing managed to swindle a highly intelligent nation into blindly supporting a tainted and evil onslaught on freedom, peace and justice. Most non-Nazi Germans, at the time, would shrug their shoulders after the Second World War when asked why they supported him in the first place.

Pride, forms part the ultimate stage of development in the hierarchy, being the need for Self Actualisation, whereas the object of the pride being felt, is part of the second last step, being Esteem Needs. Simply put, our problem is the lack of national unity or patriotism, for which there are two main reasons.

The first is vested in the division of its nations, and as the division deepens day by day, it becomes more unlikely that they may be reconciled with one another in the near future.

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For purposes of this article, I will refer to the relationship between whites and Africans, although the efforts of all the other nations, coloureds, Indians and Asians are also noted. This is simply because I deem the reasons for these divisions to be mostly due to white and African perceptions. The second reason is pride. Pride used to be synonymous with the whites of South Africa during apartheid, albeit perceived and based on a system that is irreconcilable with humanity, the point remains that they, we, were proud to be who we are.

On the other hand, Africans had nothing to be proud of during apartheid, as they were fighting for something, in this case their country. Even the whites of the time felt pride in their achievement, as the referendum of credited them with the assistance to peaceful transition. It was handshakes all around, and a truce was reached where both sides maintained a mutual respect for one another.

For a while, anyway However, gradually, the sickness associated with Africa eventually showed its ugly head.

George Carlin Warns Us Of The Dangers Of National Pride

A complete lack of patriotism, which has seen the downfall of many other African countries, is on the rise, making space for vanity, perceived self pride. Corruption, poor leadership, tender fraud and a host of many other by-products of self promotion instead of pride, is evident of this decay. So, they rather focus their pride on sport achievements to fulfil their need for patriotism.

On the other hand, they cannot, and do not want to associate themselves with a minority that is perceived to have become blatantly racist in many respects. Our attempts to unify ourselves as a nation are, and will remain to be futile, until such time as our own issues with pride are acknowledged. This, and only this, will lead to a national pride that unifies us against the world as it stands today. Currently it is simply a situation where the one group retaliates with the same means as the other, solely because the other is doing so, and either perceives a threat, or criticism.

Natural wisdom would rather dictate at least one of the groups to stand back, and acknowledge the others concerns, so as to create a mirror response which is positive, rather than negative. Who that group is, remains to be seen, but what is clear is that someone will have to take the lead for the other the follow, and break the stalemate. In my view, the catalyst to this perceived tension should come from both sides, albeit that only one needs to instigate, the other needs to follow by dropping the unnecessary criticism based on race.

On the other hand, the other needs to develop patriotism again, and do away with the culture of self-pride. I know, this is a discussion that needs to be addressed in full on a different day, and maybe at a different forum. So, how patriotic are you really? Are you willing to set your possibly tainted and certainly self-serving opinion aside? Big theories — whether cast in terms of clash of civilizations, ancient tribal enmity, economic greed, economic grievance, or anything else — may be good for keynote speeches, and are certainly good for academic royalties.

But they never seem to work very well in sorting between those situations which are combustible and those which are not. Every conflict is context specific, and every risk situation can involve multiple factors — political, economic, cultural and personal. All that said I know very well from my work at the International Crisis Group, which has produced hundreds of highly detailed, case by case analyses, that identity issues have been major drivers of a great many civil conflicts and episodes of mass violence.

Sometimes it is a matter of national identity — of a kind effectively indistinguishable from that we have been discussing in the context of war between states — with a clearly identifiable national grouping within a sovereign state or, as in the case of the Palestinians, under occupation by a sovereign state demanding a separate legal existence -- as with the Bangladeshis within the original Pakistan, the South Sudanese, the East Timorese after annexation by Indonesia and, less successfully, those seeking to sever Northern Ireland from the UK, or Kashmir from both India and Pakistan.

Very often it is a matter of ethnic , linguistic , religious or regional identity, which can sometimes take an independence-seeking nationalist form as well, but more often involves groups, self-defined by one or more of these characteristics, seeking recognition and redress within the framework of a sovereign state for longstanding grievances or aspirations -- as with the Acehnese in Indonesia, the Tamils in Sri Lanka, the Darfuris in Sudan, the Hutus in Rwanda and Burundi, the Madhesis of Nepal, and the Tibetans and Uighurs in China among many others.

Occasionally the identity issue is completely different again, involving class or ideology , factors which drove some of the most murderous excesses of Stalin and Mao against their own people, and in more recent decades those of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in s. It will be a tall order to completely eliminate identity driven deadly civil conflict from the face of the earth. The issue is whether the world is going to be forever condemned to seeing those identity sentiments taking a violent form, or whether identity grievances and aspirations can be satisfied by other means, choosing peace rather than war.

Here again the news is better than most people think. Since the early s, despite all the terrible cases we all remember, and all the terrible cases still ongoing in the Congo and elsewhere, there has been an extraordinary decrease in the number of civil wars, the number of episodes of mass killing, and the number of people dying violent battle deaths. Though a number of significant new conflicts did commence, and a number of apparently successfully concluded conflicts did break out again within a few years — though less so recently than in the s — many more conflicts have stopped than started.

There has even more striking decrease in the number of battle deaths. Whereas most years from the s through to the s had over , such reported deaths — and sometimes as many as , — the average for the first years of this new century has been fewer than 20, Even more encouraging is the analysis which lies behind these figures.

The dramatic decline in wars and battle deaths is partly explained by the end of the Cold War, which — although its immediate result was more conflict rather than less in the Balkans and elsewhere — meant that there were no more proxy wars fuelled by Washington or Moscow, and a more or less complete end to the long era of communist insurgency.

But, the best explanation is simply the massive increase in international activism — across the whole spectrum of conflict prevention, conflict management, and post-conflict peacebuilding activity — that has occurred over the last decade and a half, with most of this being spearheaded by the much maligned United Nations.

And beyond the UN, significant roles of their own have been played by a number of regional organizations notably in Africa , by many individual states through their own diplomatic and peacekeeping activity and targeted development assistance with Australia playing a leading and honourable role in this respect under successive governments , and literally thousands of NGOs — including I hope my own International Crisis Group, which did not exist before On top of all this classic conflict prevention and management activity we have seen the emergence, over the last decade, of a new international determination to address the intractable problem of mass atrocity crimes — genocide, ethnic cleansing, and other major crimes against humanity and war crimes — sometimes occurring in the context of civil war, but as often as not with a dynamic of their own.

Should Libya, far from setting a new benchmark for future commitment, prove to be the high water mark from which the tide will now recede, that would be an absolute tragedy, given the extraordinary progress that has been made, and much work remains to be done to ensure that we not only hold the line that has been won, but make the responsibility to protect, in all its dimensions — preventive as well as reactive — ever more effective.

But on this, as on most of the great issues of war and peace, and human security and human dignity, with which the international community is wrestling, I remain an eternal optimist. But we should do everything within our power and competence, in all the ways that each of us find possible, professionally and personally, to emphasise not the things that divide us but our common humanity -- and to continue to find institutional and political ways of ensuring that, as people follow their identity dreams, and try to redress the injustices that their national, ethnic, religious or other identity may have caused them to suffer, that struggle will not take a violent form.

On the evidence that I see in the world around me, that job is far from done, but I think we are gradually succeeding. This feeling extends through sports teams and competition and tend to morph the sense of pride for your own country into disgust for others. The FIFA world cup exemplifies a practice that not only unites each country, but the whole world.

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In the competition, viewers reached an all time high all around the globe. Viewers want to feel like a part of their country and like to feed off the competition and victory they share. Although there is no tangible advantage to an average citizen when his country wins the world cup, he feels pride for his country and the satisfaction of winning, even if he played no substantial part in it.

George Carlin: A view words on patriotism and national pride.

This pride can increase to a level that instead of being a healthy source of entertainment, turns into a reason to commit violence. After Brazil, the hosting country of the World Cup this year, was kicked out of the competition and the cup ended a surge of violence plagued the slums of Rio de Janeiro.

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There were multiple shootings and many casualties. Fights broke out across the world due to national pride turned into national frustration. This problem expands outside of the world of sports as increased nationalism and imperialism has led to international conflicts and even world wars. Though the feeling of national pride is based off of an imagined group of people it causes very real and sometimes devastating effects.