Do you love your country?

One definition says that patriotism is love of one's country, to support, serve and defend, to be inspired by, to change for the better and to care deeply for its citizens. Julius Caesar destroyed the liberties of his country to enjoy the inferior pleasures of life. He never knew that there were superior pleasures in the faithful discharge of one's duty to the commonwealth.

A patriot is someone, whose pleasure arises from the faithful discharge of his duty to his country. He bends all the forces of his understanding, and directs all his thoughts and actions to the good of his country. He becomes obsessed with his passion for the motherland, the highest virtue of his earthly life culminating in the supreme sacrifice when he dies to defend its honour. To a patriot, there is no virtue higher than the love of his country.

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Is it true for you, also? Have you done anything lately to uphold that virtue? Have you done anything to return the favour of your country, to repay your debt, to show your gratitude to it? You have grown up in this country and so did your ancestors. The air, rain, sunshine, music of birds, fragrance of flowers, rivers, sky, horizon, day and night, everything that succoured the cells in your body, everything that nourished your soul, you owe it to the enclosure of land which has nestled you like the mother's lap.

Do you love that enclosure of land? And what have you done to show that love? Sensitive question I know, but let me ask. What have you done besides living in it, to prove that you are its worthy son? If it becomes your duty to take care of your mother when she is old, then why should it not be your duty to serve your country when you are old enough to do so? Why not?

There are people who give lip service to their country, those who shamelessly plunder its wealth and honour, yet claim to be patriots. Are you amongst them, the opportunistic hordes of people who pit fellow men against fellow men to fatten their wallets?

For them patriotism is a ritual, a means rather than an end, an excuse more than ethos. They treat patriotism as a ladder, greed making its every rung, their debauch and perfidious instincts lifted by the pretension of the righteous.

"Patriotism, sir, is the last resort of scoundrels," said Dr. Johnson. Some scholars have decried patriotism as a virtue, because it has caused distortions, which has harmed humanity as a whole. Leo Tolstoy was amongst the greatest anti-patriots of our times, who defined patriotism as the principle that will justify the training of wholesale murderers. Gustave Herve, another great anti-patriot, called patriotism a superstition, one far more injurious, brutal, and inhumane than religion.

He then went ahead to distinguish between two of mankind's most primal passions. The superstition of religion originated in man's inability to explain natural phenomena. Patriotism, on the other hand, is a superstition artificially created and maintained through a network of lies and falsehoods; a superstition that robs man of his self-respect and dignity, and increases his arrogance and conceit. Hence, he concluded, that conceit, arrogance and egotism were the essentials of patriotism.

One Western thinker has asked in good humour that love is a wonderful thing but why confine it to the borders? Patriotism is criticised for its unifying impulse to divide, which breaks the world into little spots and then makes it the duty for everyone living on that spot to fight, kill and die for it. Thus patriotism is a parochial passion taken to its profoundest conclusion, holding a man or a woman in a mental state of insurmountable frenzy.

Yet people have died in that frenzy. They have died in every revolution in the world, in every political upheaval against colonialism and occupation. They have died in Europe, Asia, America and Africa. They are still dying in Palestine, Iraq and Bosnia. People have died and are still dying in demand for a free homeland, in demand for freedom and dignity.

Is patriotism linked with the dignity of man? Is there pride in one's love of one's country? Or is it just organised touchiness, a non-issue mirrored and magnified as a great moral discourse signifying nothing? Frederick the Great, the bosom friend of Voltaire, once said: "Religion is a fraud, but it must be maintained for the masses." Is patriotism a fraud, which must be maintained for the masses, even though the above average and the super smarts understand that it means nothing?

Three million people have died in this country, some fighting, some defending, others simply being on the wrong side of time. Their flesh and bones, blood and tissues melted and evaporated. Some were heroes, some were victims, but they all perished in the fight for freedom. Yet there are those who lived, some heroes, some cowards, some clever and some sheer lucky.

If you compare and contrast the two kinds of people, those who died and those who lived, patriotism rings hollow in the ultimate analysis. The dead got the monuments, while the living multiplied their wealth. The dead were wretched, while the living got rich. The dead are remembered on particular days, but forgotten for the rest of the year, while the living decide who amongst the dead are worthy of their memories. The dead have been reduced into some kind of a moral mouth freshener to hide the bad breath of scuzzy intentions harboured by the scum of earth.

What do you think of it? Do you use or do you abuse the memories of those who died for the love of this country? How do you see their death, their lives cut short by enemy bullets because they had come in the line of a call of duty? Do you see them as victims of war or martyrs of a cause?

A man I recently met described how he was operated on the same eye for three times, twice without anesthesia. I asked him how he could take the pain. He said he thought of his days as a freedom fighter and tried to console himself that it could have been worse if he were captured by the Pakistani army in 1971. This is called empathy, the feeling of another man's pain as if it was your own. Another way to do it is sympathy, feeling for the man but not the pain.

Do you empathize with the martyrs of this country, or do you sympathize with them? Before you give answer to my first question, think hard about my last question. Think you have a country, because they died. Think you have freedom, because they chose to fight. Think you have dignity because they suffered. Think you have a gift because they sacrificed. Think you are enjoying the fruits of pain, which they suffered in the hands of their enemies.

Now you tell me if you love your country, and what have you done for it. If you have plundered and squandered its wealth, then you are an enemy. If you are willing to serve your country and die for it, you are a patriot. Know your place in the new conflict, because a confrontation has become inevitable.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.