(DDEckerslyke) wrote in message om...

(Wlodzimierz Holsztynski) wrote in message . com...
snip

Patriotism, nationalism, chauvinism

Patriotism cf Nationalism is a distinction worth drawing

Patriotism
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Patriotism is a positive, constructive feeling and
attitude. A patriot is a person, who wishes everybody,
hence every country, every nation, every ethniv group
well. A patriot devotes her/his efforts mostly to
"her/his" country since it is the country which s/he
knows well, including the people, the language, the
culture, the political situation... where perhaps the
ancestors were buried. But patriot will be happy to
contribute to the wellbeing of any group of people,
not necessarily of her/his own country.

Since patriotism is a positive notion, one can be
a patriot of more than one country.

This seems a very loose and generous
interpretation of patriotism and
the concluding sentence just plain wrong.

Is plain right. Use Google and your local
bookstores and libraries. Read Josephs Brodsky's
biography and first of all his poems. Read about
Ignacy (Ignacio) Domeyko, about Tadeusz Kosciuszko...
or, going back to our chess neighborhood, check
on Mieczyslaw (Miguel) Najdorf.

Some issues were mentioned in this threat, which
I'd addressed in my articles in the past, especially
the difference between the "abstract" notion of the
"fatherland" by nationalists and the human notion
of their country by patriots. Recently a great man has
died in Poland, Jacek Kuron. He was a man of action
and a social thinker, pragmatic too. He didn't quite
verbalize to the end his profound insight but he
was very close, he practiced it too--it has three parts:
education, charity and compromise. Replace "compromise"
with "the art of agreeing" (or "the art of agreements")
-- which goes still further -- and you have it.

Wlod