Personally abused no. Shamed by my own country's and Britain's record before the many people whose esteem I value yes. Vastly more sympathetic to the oppressed than to the oppressors (including in DV by the way) yes. Contemptuous of those who lack a moral compass yes. And also of those who so lack an intellectual compass as not to know that 1948 was soon after the war (I know, mired in the colonialist narrative of 1920). Also affronted by ultra-racist iggos who call me or people I respect "Jew haters".

Dear Julian,

I don't think that one ought to feel ashamed of things that occurred before they were born and/or were not in their control. One can only be responsible for their own actions.

I don't think that you can find even one country today which does not oppress people in one way or another. First that come to mind are North Korea, Iran, Syria, Saudi-Arabia and China, but it's practically everyone. I used to think of Bhutan as an ideal state based on Buddhist non-violence, but then I discovered how they too mistreated and expelled their Nepalese minority.

Evil states have divided this whole planet among them (and now they even seek to assert control over space and the rest of this planetary system). This violence and desire to control is due to the animal-nature that comes with our bodies, covered with only a thin veil of civility. It saddens me that despite hating oppression, you seem to identify with one or two of those states (you wrote "my own country's and Britain's"). I don't have a "my own country": I need to have a place to live in somewhere on this planet and this happens be in Australia, but as I don't identify with it, I don't need to feel ashamed for what it did or does.

I too am sympathetic with the oppressed, but first I must ascertain that the "victim" is indeed actually oppressed. If someone is injured, then I would ask "where does it hurt?" - they could say that it hurts "in my foot" or "in my tummy", etc. and then I would also be outraged with their attacker(s), but if they say that "it hurts my national pride", then I say "Good. I'm glad that your national pride has been hurt and I hope it dies soon".

The so-called "Palestinians" lived happily and prospered under Israeli occupation from 1967 until around 1975-6. They had no road-blocks or other restrictions on travel/work in Israel. So sad for them that Arafat incited them to start calling themselves "Palestinians" and develop a national identity.

We bear responsibility for what our own country does including with whom it allies itself. This is a citizen's responsibility that comes with the benefits and protections of citizenship. To an extent we also have a responsibility to the world at large which comes with the benefits and protections of international law and the institutions that maintain it. Shirking responsibilities is rightly derided as a copout.

Dear Julian,

You unnecessarily take upon yourself the burden of other people's sins. Have you got none of your own to take care of first?

"our own country"? Check my pockets, I own none!

I didn't ask for the Australian state to be here, all I wanted was to escape from a worse place and live in this continent, which should be everyone's natural right - states are nuisance parasites and we owe them nothing. I do not approve of nationalism of any kind, be it Israeli, Palestinian, Australian, Russian, American, whatever.

I cannot stop you from suffering as it is completely by your own choice. Your preferred people, the so-called "Palestinians", while they too are suffering, they too brought it on their own heads, unnecessarily. They could have been happy and prosperous - but due to their infatuation with nationalism and terror, they chose not to.

I have great sympathy for the ordinary local Arab person in the West Bank and Gaza and their suffering as individuals at the hands of both Israel and their own leaders, but once they become beholden to nationalism, there my sympathy ends.

Dear Yuyutsu,

Grayling in "The Meaning of Things"

"Nationalism is an evil. It causes wars. Its roots lie in xenophobia and racism; it is a recent phenomenon – an invention of the last few centuries – which has been of immense service to demagogues and tyrants, but to no one else. Disguised as patriotism and love of one’s country, it trades on the unreason of mass psychology to make a variety of horrors seem acceptable, even honourable. For example: if someone said to you, ‘I am going to send your son to kill the boy next door’ you would hotly protest. But only let him seduce you with ‘Queen and Country!’ My country right or wrong!’ and you find yourself permitting him to send all our sons to kill not just the sons of other people, but other people indiscriminately – which is what bombs and bullets do.

Demagogues know what they are about when they preach nationalism. Hitler said, ‘The effectiveness of the truly national leader consists in preventing his people from dividing their attention and keeping it fixed on a common enemy.’ And he knew whom to appeal to: Goethe had long since remarked that nationalistic feelings ‘are at their strongest and most violent where there is the lowest degree of culture’.

Nationalists take certain unexceptionable desires and muddle them with unacceptable ones. We individuals wish to run our own affairs; that is unexceptionable. Most of us value the culture which gave us our sense of personal and group identity; that too is unexceptionable. But the nationalist persuades us that the existence of other groups and cultures somehow puts these things at risk, and that the only way to protect them is to see ourselves as members of a distinct collective defined by ethnicity, geography or sameness of language or religion, and to build a wall around ourselves to keep out ‘foreigners’. It is not enough that the others are other, we have to see them as a threat – at the very least to ‘our way of life’, perhaps to our jobs, even to our daughters.

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When Europe’s overseas colonies sought independence, the only rhetoric to hand was that of nationalism. It had well served the unifiers of Germany and Italy in the nineteenth century (which in turn paved the way for some of their activities in the twentieth century), and we see a number of the ex-colonial nations going the same way today.

The idea of nationalism turns on that of a ‘nation’. The word is meaningless: all ‘nations’ are mongrel, a mixture of so many immigrations and mixings of people over time that the idea of ethnicity is largely comical, except in places where the boast has to be either that the community there remained so remote and disengaged, or so conquered, for the greater part of history, that it succeeded in keeping its gene pool ‘pure’ (a cynic might say ‘inbred’).
Much nonsense is talked about nations as entities: Emerson spoke of the ‘genius’ of a nation as something separate from its numerical citizens, Giraudoux described the ‘spirit of a nation’ as ‘the look in its eyes’; other such meaningless assertions abound. Nations are artificial constructs, their boundaries drawn in the blood of past wars. And one should not confuse culture and nationality; there is no country on earth which is not home to more than one different but usually coexisting culture. Cultural heritage is not the same as national identity.

The blindness of people who fall for nationalistic demagoguery is surprising. Those who oppose closer relations in Europe, or who seek to detach themselves from the larger comities to which they belong, do well to examine the lessons of such tragedies as the Balkan conflicts, or – the same thing writ larger – Europe’s bloody history in the twentieth century. pp. 77-9;