Nationalism Part 3

Especially obnoxious was the "hurrah patriotism" I experienced in Thatcher's Britain during the Falklands War, not to be forgotten was 'The Sun's' "Gotcha' headline on May 4th 1982 when a British nuclear submarine sank the Argentinian cruiser the 'General Belgrano'; a state of the art nuclear submarine had sunk an old second world cruiser outside the 200 mile exclusion zone as it was sailing away from the islands and 323 Argentinian sailors died. Of course, there are those who would argue that the sinking was necessary for various reasons. Whatever, England's "Pravda" had its headline and the flags were being waved up and down the country.
A few years later in Germany, I watched them sing the "Deutschland Lied" and listened to them screaming "Wir sind ein Volk"and along with the upsurge in nationalistic bravado in what was once collectively known as Eastern Europe, I thought that the lid on the Pandora's box had been lifted. The European body politic has managed, I believe, to check the forces of extreme nationalism, at least outside of Russia and in Germany a strange phenomena has appeared. At the football World Cup in 2006 I was confronted for the first time in my life with a patriotism that didn't instill me with fear; a sort of nationalism that rejects any notion of my country right or wrong, a nationalism not bred of an inferiority complex and a phenomena that might offer hope for now and for the future.
The pictures above show the Sun headline from May 4th 1982 and German football fans celebrating in Fuerstenfeldbruck near Munich after their team had beaten Argentina.