al-Jazeera Interview with Riverbend from Baghdad Burning

I was born in England, but longer have any love for my country. Blair
has consistently lied to us in so many ways that I've lost count!!
By now most law abiding citizens would have been convicted of pergury!
Not so for Blair - who seems to be 'above the law' answering to a 'higher power'. This guy is seriously dangerous, his belief in his
infalibility amounts to a dictatorship. There is no collegiate
cabinet. The man is an autocrat. It is frightening to see the old hacks of the Labour party following him in submission. I for one will
never be able to trust a Labour politician again. Blair has set a
precedent that now seems to be irriversible.
Thank God that we are in the European Union so that I can get out of this God forsaken country at the earliest opportunity - like the
200.000 that are leaving each year.

As Riverbend points out so eloquently, loving one's country caaries an ethical quid pro quo that you don't jump ship when things start going very awry. Place of birth is irrelevant but cultural identification - is that loving? - is. Besides, most people cannot do that. This comes from someone who became an expatriate to escape Thatcherism. But whoever suggested one should follow practice rather than advice?

What do you mean by the phrase 'loving one's country'? It's a strange notion if you think about it, the nation being a fairly modern, abstract notion, and as for 'love', well what does that mean? I think you really mean loyalty to a group of people demarkated by a political boundary. The foundation of that loyalty is bound to change over time as an individual develops and the 'nation' changes.

Some people don't even consider that society exists, that we are all selfish consumers and that ethics and values have no value except where they can be used as forms of control (I would include Tony and his mentor, Margaret, by this.) If you live in a society where the government is trying its damnedness to create such a situation, and to some extent is succeeding, you have to weigh up how much loyalty it is worth expending. I talk to lots of people about the current situation and most of them don't know and don't care. You have to weigh the situation up. I am not going to live or have a family in a fascist theocracy snooped over by an Orwellian identity system and if there isn't one Hell of a Blairslap in the May elections I will be making my plans.

The phrase 'loving one's country' was a paraphrase from the preceding comment. I don't disagree with what you say Dick Cheney. Indeed, ultimately we commit ourselves to certain notions of civic polity that we deem to be desirable, rather than to a 'country' or its governing establishment. I do not really understand what patriotism means. Many of us have been rebels so many times against prevailing actions and policies of our governments. I spent my entire childhood growing up in a household that checked goods'labels on supermarket shelves to discern their countries of origin - it wasn't an earth shattering revolutionary act, nevertheless, a small act of rebellion against South African apartheid. I do not agree with either the UK or the Australian governments' policies of blindly following the US regardless of either national strategic interestsof or popular sentiments - and I am a citizen and an expatriate from both countries.