With the most recent tragic event of the World Trade Center attack, patriotism has spread like disco music in the 70s, across the entire United States. Flag stores have been selling out like never before and you can see red, blue and white on everybody and everything you see. People are displaying flags on their doors, windows, cars, and everywhere else where they can stuff a sheet of red, white and blue. Despite the attack's attempt to destroy America, the World Trade Center incident has ironically brought America together through patriotism instead. However my point is, is that all this patriotism is not neccessarily a good thing.

For one thing, I have a few things against patriotism itself. I'm a big fan of books such as All Quiet on the Western Front, Farewell to Arms, Catch-22 and all other anti-hero books. I find it to be very dangerous. There is a very thin line between patriotism and nationalism and one often leads to the other. When people start becoming patriotic, they start becoming irrational and see things only through their own perspective. They start believing everything the government tells them and they start thinking that their own country and kind is superior above all others. The world scale wars have been started because of nationalism. And really, nationalism is not at all that different from patriotism.

Due to all this, I try to avoid becoming patriotic. Of course I think Bin Laden and all the others involved should be staked through the ass for their crimes, but I don't think I should get all jumpy over my country just because of that. Nor am I saying that America is a crap-ass country. I think America is a great country unlike all those online nerds with too much time and too little attention. America is undeniably one of the greatest, most prosperous, and under-apprciated nations in the world. Of all things I think America is underappreciated than anything else, but no matter what I'll always try to remain neutral about the whole damn thing. As I keep on saying, patriotism just edges too closely on nationalism. And if we go into nationalism and the good ol' feeling of white supremacy, we'll have another Holocaust on our hands. This is especially important with this particular event since those provoking all the patriotism aren't white christians but rather Middle Eastern Muslims. An even greater catalyst for violent racism.

Which brings me to my next point. The muslims are not responsible for all that's been happening. The radicals, the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden are those responsible and there's no reason whatsoever that we should blame all Muslims for the World Trade Center incident. But as I've been seeing, a large amount of people haven't been feeling the same way. Mosques all over the US have been trashed by angry white crowds. What's interesting is that Saudi Arabia, a very Middle East and Muslim nation, is an ally to America. The Taliban and Osama Bin Laden don't even represent most of the Muslim population. Only a tiny minority of the Muslims can be represented by the Taliban. The Taliban is simply a radical group that took over Afghanistan by force. The majority of the people of Afghanistan even hate the Taliban government and would be just as glad as us if we rid them of it.

The same goes for a lot of the Middle Eastern nations. Not even Iraq, a long time enemy of the US, is going all out to support the Taliban. Neither is Pakistan, or any of the other Middle Eastern nations. You may have heard that in Pakistan and Afghanistan people were cheering, dancing, and handing out candy on the street when they heard of the World Trade Center attack. You probably heard this from CNN in fact. This is completely false. The video sent to CNN showing the Afghan people in the street was actually dated from 1991 but CNN was informed by the Associated Press that it came from that morning. CNN later took back their earlier statement, but I think a lot of people may have missed it. Hmmm... possible propaganda anybody?

As I've been saying, Osama Bin Laden gets very little support from the people. Pakistan has even joined in on America's side of all this. Something that, as you may have heard on CNN, caused a lot of riots on the streets killing atleast three people. as they said in the news reports, this is a very small minority of people. There are about as much of them in Pakistan as there are Neo-Nazis in America. They're just radicals and radicals like that are unavoidable wherever you go. By starting a huge pogrom against muslims, as some people have already started against mosques, we will just be no different from the radicals that bombed the World Trade Center. Just a seemingly "superior" type of radical, atleast by our perspective.

Now I'd just make this particular rant a daily rant if it was just about patriotism. However it's obviously not. As I've already been getting into, we've become racists by attacking muslims. This is not just a rant for the anti-hero and against nationalism/patriotim, but this is about bigotry. One event that I heard of that really pissed me off, I heard that the store of a Hindu Indian was burned because he was Middle Eastern, or atleast appeared that way. This is by far one of the largest acts of stupidity I have ever heard of in my life. The guy was from India, a democratic capitalism and also an ally of the United States. The US has been supporting India for years. Not only that, but the guy was Hindu. The Hindu's are ancient enemies of the Muslims and today they're still enemies of the Muslims. Since 500AD or so, India has been fighting against the Muslim for territories in the North. So basically these guys attacked a strong ally against the muslims just because he looked Muslim. This is going beyond even simple nationalism and bigotry. This is going into Nationalist Socialism.

Now this really kinda goes off topic with the rest of my rant and has more to do with political science but, do you realize how bad a move killing Osama Bin Laden would be? It would make him martyr. It would give the extremist muslims even more cause to fight and it would cause even worse terrorism and even more innocent lives lost. The best thing we can realy do is exile Bin Laden and take apart the entire Taliban administration. But we can't accomplish that with bombings and other distant attacks. We'd need to move troops into afghanistan and take them by person. But Pakistan and all the other neighboring nations definitely won't allow that. So now what do we do? I have no idea, but let's hope Bush and his cronies do. There definitely isn't any permanent solution to a problem like this, but atleast we can stop and set-back their progression and that's really all we can do.