From a different perspective, yes. your willingness or unwillingness toward supporting or advocating war to settle difference is most certainly used to determine your patriotism. It is considered by many to be the defining characteristic.
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Those who oppose war are always perceived to be anti-whatevercountrytheylivein by most, particularly if those people have a conservative perspective.
One of the most obvious examples of this in my mind was the “America, Love it or Leave it” campaign during the Vietnam war. The flags, the buttons the fucking country songs.
Our beloved leaders decided that it was in “The Country’s” best interest to send our youth 8000 miles to fight and die in order to halt the advance of communism in the Asian continent. If you opposed this action you were tarred with the anti-patriotic brush. If you refused to participate you were forced to flee to another country to avoid arrest. It took about two decades, over 58,000 American deaths and uncountable deaths of Vietnamese for the majority of this country to finally see that those “unpatriotic scum” that would not support the war in the beginning were right all along; that there was no reason for us to be over there. And yet we still punished those who were forced to flee to remain out of prison for another decade thereafter.
Vietnam fell to the communists, the rest of Asia did not fall like dominos but remained pretty much how it had been and a dozen or so years later we were treating the Vietnamese like our buddies in capitalism and using their cheap labor to undermine our own labor forces here in the US. Had we ignored what was going on and let them settle it the best they could we would have been doing the very same thing twenty five years earlier so, other than the dead and the money made by the Military-Industrial Complex what we did accomplished little if anything.
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In the first Iraq war almost the entire country cheered to see all those civilians in Baghdad blown to pieces by our “shock and awe” campaign and those few who said this was wrong were shouted down, denigrated as unpatriotic and, again, locked up in yet another round of, as the movie said “Murica! Fuck Yeah!” rhetoric that took little account of the rising death toll.
In the end, Hussein stayed in power and did our bidding for a few more years and we ended up killing a shit load more civilians through our embargo but, hey, we ddid gain major concessions for the energy companies and those providing weapons and other military services did make a killing thus helping the economy. All at the cost of only 4500 dead. Well, 4500 American dead and that is all that counts. We also gave ourselves a reason to invade a second time with similar aftermath except this time after destroying their infrastructure we paid American companies to rebuild it as huge markups that allowed people like Chaney, Bush and Tillerson to become rich, not to mention all the money made by the M-I Complex again yet again.
Afghanistan, sixteen years, 6600 dead Americans and untold Trillions of dollars spent and we will walk away eventually, again accomplishing nothing and yet try to speak out against it and against those soldiers who continue to fight and allow it to continue and see how swiftly your are condemned for your un-American views. We would not be there if it were not a just war and because we are there it is just. Kind of a circular argument but basically what you hear from our politicals. And that is not even mentioning the War without End on Terror perpetrated by those we both trained and armed all those years both preceding and during the conflict. Hey, we both made money on that (if you were invested heavily in the arms manufacturing and sales companies) and will continue to use it as a reason to increase our military budget for decades if not centuries to come. And, any talk of how immoral it is to make money of killing non-Americans is most assuredly not patriotic and possibly treasonous.
Korea. We have been stuck in that mess for 71 years now and yet we are not allowed to question why without being tarred with the epithet “Unpatriotic” Have a fucking loonie threatening to turn another country into glass? Doesn’t matter, he is your President and he and his followers will brook no disagreement.
Killing those we disagree with or who will not do what they are told is the American Way and if you disagree you are scum, worse than scum! Why, you are an un-American, unpatriotic commie loving tree hugging global warmin’ believin’ libtard!
Such is life.
and death.
