What does it mean to be a patriot?


What it means to be a patriot means to feel patriotism, to experience love in your homeland and to put its interests above your own, this is the desire to do everything possible to preserve it, its people and its culture, the desire to protect its interests and borders. Patriotism was not always inherent in the human community, in primitive communities there were no states, but the beginnings of patriotism appeared in the form of attachment to one’s tribe, feelings of kinship and unity with its members, awareness of oneself as one of them.

Patriotism performs various functions, it helps to preserve the unity of a particular state or nation, helps to protect it from external unfavorable factors. Particularly striking manifestations of patriotism we see during military operations, where one person is only a small part of his people and his country, and he himself is able to do much to protect it, often sacrificing himself for the common good. Patriotism is often evaluated

as a positive quality, it is appreciated and rewarded by the state and authority, it is written about in the literature and devoted to headlines in the media, but not all consider it useful and good.

What it means to be a patriot in the opinion of Leo Tolstoy means to experience a gross, harmful and immoral feeling of patriotism, which becomes the cause of wars. And this viewpoint has reasons: after all, if the unity of the people is very strong, then the feeling “we” is formed, which expresses the thought “we are all alike and we need to stick together and protect each other,” and simultaneously the feeling “we “they”, which tells a person that all who do not belong to his people are different, they are not clear, they are not as good as his compatriots and therefore they must be defended and their views can not be accepted. Such patriotism turns into a radical one and becomes nationalism, but it becomes the cause of wars and interethnic conflicts.

At the same time, patriotism here is only an initial, initially positive feeling. Patriotism was also negative in the Soviet Union, since there was no other choice left for the person, he was born in the USSR and had to be a patriot loyal to his state; if he expressed any ideas that contradicted this, it was punished by the authorities.


1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

What does it mean to be a patriot?