In all of the mainstream news and media outlets, you will always find obsessions with the nation -- they're selling an identity based on country. "We are Americans, with American ideals, and American hopes!" This is the Patriotism of the United States, but in other countries, nationalism is precisely the same. It is an ideal that wants you to associate with "your" country, people, heritage, culture, way of life, or even language. When judging an act as right or wrong, your sole question is whether it helps or hurts the Nation. This is the morality of the Nationalist.

     But does the country really represent you? You're living here not by choice, but simply because you were born here. And, after having lived only a short while, you should have realized something. People from other parts of the world have the same thoughts that come to you; they grow and develop through many of the same sufferings, the same longings, and the same hopes. To be a Nationalist is to sympathize with the suffering of one people and not the suffering of another people -- to consider someone as a friend or a foe based on artificial, geographic borders.

     Where did the borders come from, anyway? Why is one area recognized as a county, another as a province, another as a state, and another as a nation or empire? The lines of a political map can be explained only through centuries and centuries of war. Those who considered wanted the glory of the nation sacrificed their own people in attaining it. This was the comradeship and mutual cooperation that existed between the masters of a nation and its poorest.

     In the Spanish American War, or the Mexican American War, or the Vietnam or Iraq War, we find wars of conquest; wars that took the youth from poor families, and gave wealth to the greatest property owners. During the World Wars, or the many wars preceding it, or the wars of the ancient world in the Mediterranean, or the African continent, or throughout a ten thousand years of Chinese history -- these wars swallowed families, communities, and entire cities, but they produced gold and riches to the wealthy.

     Where there is not a war, the Capitalist and landlord are still just as vicious, cruel, and unrelenting. Unemployment and poverty have always been rampant since the existence of property deeds. The common people seek to sustain themselves, as all animal-kind naturally seek. But where they desire this, they are held back. Land isn't used for farming and feeding the people, because it's "appreciating in value" in some real estate scheme. Factories stand idle, not because they can't produce value, but because "it would flood the market." You could be poor, starving, broke, and without any prospects for a job, and they'd let you starve, because it improves the bottom line.

     That is the real "solidarity" that the American Capitalists and American bankers have with you! Or the British, Italian, French, German, or Russian masters of industry. In all countries, a top, few elite hold control and domination over the majority of society. At any moment, they could open up the fields, and let the hungry produce and feed themselves; they could let the workers have the technology that they produced, and let them feed the world several times over. The labor is willing, but the possessor of land is speculating.

"All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by 'our' side."
          --George Orwell, 1945
          "Notes on Nationalism"