A few days ago, Rick Perry implied that it is OK to overlook the recently released video of US soldiers pissing over dead Afghan bodies because they are just “19-year-old kids”. He additionally “accused the Obama administration of ‘over-the-top rhetoric’ and ‘disdain for the military’ in its condemnation of (this) video”. Yesterday a crowd of Americans in South Carolina chanted “U.S.A! U.S.A!” in a homicidal manner as they stood in front of their idol, Newt Gingrich; a person who suggested that the way for Black people to get out of poverty is to make their children work as janitors. In December last year Gingrich said that the Palestinians are an invented people, who have no right to Israel’s promised land. This man has a PhD. in History. George H.W. Bush (and more recently Mitt Romney) has time and again repeated that he “will never apologize for America!”
In Crito, Socrates refuses to escape from Athenian prison, even though he knows that he is going to be sentenced to death. He argues that he has a moral obligation to honor his legal obligation, since he owes all he has to the city. So do we support everything our country does, provided it deems itself a Republic?
What when the state turns against humanity in the name of security? In the fiscal year 2011, the US was providing Israel with $8.2 million/DAY in military aid to murder Palestinians in broad daylight. The Republic of India stations approximately 700,000 troops in the tiny valley of Kashmir, the most militarized region in the world, and commits human rights abuses daily.
How much nationalism is too much?
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