Often treated as an unquestioned virtue, patriotism can easily slide into nationalism, exclusion and hostility towards others.

These days, patriotism is everywhere you look. It’s not as positive a thing as many believe, and we should be more worried about where it can lead than we are. It is often “over the top.”

Bob Wurth’s book _1942: Australia’s greatest peril_ (2008) is about how Japan eyed Australia during World War II. In it, Wurth recounts an anecdote about a Japanese student visitor decades afterwards: she was shown the inscription on the memorial at Caloundra to the hospital ship Centaur, which was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine off the Sunshine Coast with much loss of Australian life. “That’s a lie,” the young woman said angrily on reading the inscription, and stormed off. Her love of her country made it impossible for her to accept as real an event which made her countrymen appear flawed. The facts made for an inconvenient truth, and they failed to trump her sense of patriotism.

Patriotism can condition behaviour, too, and in far-reaching ways. There were the kamikaze pilots and those who manned the mini-submarines, young men infused with love and obedience towards an emperor who embodied the Japanese nation and its people. Indoctrinated into believing that spectacular death in the service of their emperor and their country was heroic, they crashed their planes into American ships and embarked knowingly on one-way trips in hostile waters to fire torpedoes at enemy........

© Pearls and Irritations