> Having positive feelings towards one's country is a pretty normal, pretty emotionally healthy thing. Their absence indicates some internal or external conflict or trauma.
That is pub psychology at its most patronising, its most flawed, and its most self-serving.
For those of us not so indoctrinated, expressing feelings for any inanimate or noncorporeal object sounds pathological and fetishistic. Indoctrinating children into the same through repetition of a daily mantra is indistinguishable from religion. If nations were an object capable of returning your affection, the routine exploitation, injustice, violence, mismanagement and desecration of trust would make it a situation to be urgently extracted from.
Those who haven't experienced any of those things first-hand, including from the systems and institutions of nations that make the cosmically ironic claim to be the "good guys", are astonishingly, overwhelmingly, revoltingly privileged - and only a small fraction of humanity.
To sum up: patriotism is an abusive relationship with a memetic virus.
Only a monster would promulgate it.
