If love is blind, patriotism has lost all five senses

Samuel Johnson “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel”

All the dictators’ last attempt is to use ultra-Nationalism to be able to continue ruling the country…. …

“Well, there are people who think that it’s right to do any thing in the name of their religion, their race, their family, or any organization to which they may belong.”

Daw Aung San Suu Kyi

I believe that Ko Htike is wrong by just generalizaing like this

အာဏာရွင္ လက္ေအာက္မွာ ႏိုင္ငံေရး ေခါင္းစဥ္က တစ္ခုတည္းရယ္။
ဒီမိုကေရစီ ရရွိေရး .. ေပါ့။

ရန္သူကလည္း တစ္ခုတည္းရယ္။
အာဏာရွင္ စစ္အစိုးရေပါ့။

Of patriots and scoundrels

Edited and adapted to Burmanize from the, “Of patriots and scoundrels” by Hazlan Zakaria from Malaysiakini

‘Playing at war, as kids often do, I was always the one dying under the flag – defending my country to the last, the doomed protector keeping a nation safe by selfless action.’

I was, admittedly, a product of mass-produced patriotism, so common in the
movie industries’ endless parade of itinerant war movies. Growing up, I was
touched by Hollywood. Or as some would sometimes say, touched in the head.

Last refuge of a scoundrel

Image via Wikipedia

Extracted and edited from MKini, “Last refuge of a scoundrel” by Kee Thuan Chye
“Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” So said Samuel Johnson, the famous British man of letters. He is believed to have said that to condemn the false use of the term “patriotism”.

 “When you want to malign some people, you call them unpatriotic”.

More than that, it is indeed false patriotism to say that if you don’t join the army, you are not patriotic. Nothing could be more ridiculous than that. It is the same kind of thinking that goes along these lines – “if you are not with me, then you are not patriotic”. This, of course, is the ultimate hogwash.