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I love America. I love George Washington. I love Thomas Jefferson. I love Betsy Ross. I love our stupid national anthem with notes that most people can't reach. I love the Constitution, and the Liberty Bell, and our National Parks. I love the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, and the Federalist Papers. I love our aircraft carriers and our war planes. I love the Grand Canyon and the Bald Eagle. I love supermarkets and farmer's markets. I love our long and fraught journey to secure each citizen the greatest freedoms enjoyed by man on Earth.
I love them in the same way I love my parents, who I didn't choose and aren't necessarily the best, but they raised me as best as they were able. To say that one country is the same as another to me would be to say that one random couple is the same as my parents to me.
Is this something only people raised in America feel, or does anyone else feel that way about their homeland?
I would assume both your parents and your country (in general) are too far above the minimum acceptable level of "good" for you to consider not loving them.
I value the cultural connection to my people, and begrudgingly grant that having our own state is better for our culture and our people than not having one, much like having abusive parents is still often better than an orphanage. That does not mean I feel obliged to grant any warm feelings to my country as a political entity. Lately especially, it is far too focused on supporting its expansion at the expense of its people.
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I feel that way about Britain. I am... deeply annoyed by many of the things that large chunks of it have got up to lately, and the apparent suicidal instinct of its leaders, but it's my home. It has a great and noble history, rich traditions, beautiful landscapes, etc. etc. I just wish one of those traditions wasn't stamping on all the others.
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I feel...differently about Germany.
I'd certainly describe myself as a patriot. A nationalist even. But it's the culture, the language, the actual physical country, the people and their ways, and the everyday architecture that I love. Not the institutions, the state, the monuments and symbols. But that may have an obvious historical explanations. For the Americans, those things were always theirs - a democracy from the get-go, by the people and for the people. Tacky as their symbols might be, they are theirs. But for us Germans, the state was never truly a democracy; the most we ever managed was to be handed whatever form of democracy our betters thought suitable for us, by the state and against the people. We accepted it, of course, having always been a people of loyal subjects. We are now loyal subjects of our democratic constitutional order, but it's by social convention and pragmatism, and not in our hearts. As a people, we remain subjects, and our relationship to the state is little different to that our ancestors had to the Reich, or to their local princes. Those on high decide, and we obey. So what does that make the monuments, the symbols and the institutions? Those are the emanations of the ruling class, or the ruling gestalt entity anyways. They aren't truly ours. The local church, alright, that at least is or was relevant to people's lives. The ruins of a castle, picturesque and one can picnic there. But the statue of some Prussian Junker or King? Some neoclassicist monument to the Kaiserreich? A memorial to holocaust victims? The halls of government? None of that is of us and for us, but is of the state and against us. We are to obey in actions, but our hearts are irrelevant. Our constitution, our institutions, our relationship to the military, all that are artificial post-war creations installed to dictate specific behaviors to us. It's not from us. It's not for us. It's to make us behave.
At the most one could say that our tricolor flag, the black-red-and-gold, is by and for us. But in truth it was by a small subset of the population, ideologically charged and by no means organic. It's still our flag, we rally around it for identification and for sports, so I suppose we have taken to it.
Still, it's my country and my people and my language and my culture and my land, and all those are the best in the world. Obviously.
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Definitely not unique, I feel this way about Poland and there were are/many people who described their feelings this way (even if they targeted say willows rather than supermarkets and so on).
Many people in history also had opportunity to prove it be their deeds.
Similar applies elsewhere. I see nothing whatsoever to indicate that it applies uniquely to USA.
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I'd feel that way if my homeland was as free, and its society as well-regulated, as the US is.
It is not.
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The majority outside the West surely do. 89% of Pakistanis are prepared to fight for their country, vs Italy and Germany at 22%.
https://old.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/39dqfw/would_you_be_willing_to_fight_for_your_country/
Considering Pakistan's track record, they're likely to lose. Yet they're still ready to try!
I'd take those numbers with a grain of salt; in 2021 we saw that a stunning 0% of Afghanis were willing to fight for "their country", which is nowhere near the 76% the survey says.
Eh, quite a few Afghans were willing to fight for their country. Against the remains of the forces the former occupying Americans had propped up, that is.
If you're defining "their country" that way then yeah, I guess you could say the number was actually about 3%. Maybe they were under-counting the Taliban; I don't think they even get cell reception out there (that isn't via a drone pretending to be a tower to launch missiles at devices that try to connect to it).
Any army of any country is usually a single digit slice of the entire population. If your portrayal was accurate, and the forces US was propping up were representative of Afghanistan, the Taliban would have no chance of winning.
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I imagine the confounder with Pakistan is that they're next door to people they really, really don't like. Italy and Germany, meanwhile, have never really had beef with each other since, what, the dawn of the 19th Century?
They, uh, were on opposite sides in WWI. And again towards the end of WWII. Germany didn’t exactly get a long leash during the Cold War, but I guess half of it was on Italy’s side.
I understand that Italy's motivation in WWI was more against the Austrians than the Prussians (irredentism over Trieste, IIRC?), though I did forget about the second war.
WWI motivations were weird. It does look like A-H had a lot to do with Italy's involvement, to the point where they call it the Fourth War of Independence.
I mostly remember Italy's involvement because of Rommel narrating how badly he owned them at, uh, the Isonzo? Oh. The last of those twelve battles was a humiliation which apparently became a byword for crushing defeat. So I could see that leaving a lasting impression.
Clearly they get along okay, now, in a way that's hard to imagine for Pakistan and India.
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