Patriotism

Hmmmm Good question.

Happy St Davids Day Jen…hope you have a lovely day.

I’m a British Asian (official classification on forms). I actually don’t feel passionate about any Indian celebrations. Yes we celebrate but not to a passion. I probably feel more passionate about Christmas than any other day. I love Christmas. The whole family thing. Love giving and getting pressies. I know its a Christian celebration and I’m Sikh but I have been brought up celebrating Christmas all my life.
I think the lack of passion has come from confusion growing up. Trying to fit in. People don’t realise, how we are never fully accepted here even though I was born here, my kids were born here. Funny thing is when we go to India, we are also never fully accepted there, because we are british citizens. We are treated differently, get ripped off like any other tourists.
Now whilst I am 100% proud of my roots and love my culture. I personally think I am very lucky to have a mixture of both in my life. Through language, clothes, history, I am not passionate about any particular Indian celebrations. I guess it’s because I have not experienced them in India, whilst growing up. It’s usually as kids we have amazing memories of certains days and celebrations that we bring into adulthood and I have not experienced that.
So that’s me :lol:

Looking at the UK, why do the Celts always appear to be more passionately patriotic than the English?

Genetically, the Welsh are scarcely any more ‘Celtic’ than the English. Throughout Britain, among people of longstanding British ancestry, Celtic and pre-Celtic genes are predominant. What happened in England is that the Angle and Saxon invaders are thought to have imposed their rule and culture on the ‘Celts’, including the replacement of the Britonic language (old Welsh) with old Frisian, which developed into English. But like many colonialists, the Saxons, Angles, Danes and even the Romans before them, didn’t interbreed with the indigenous people all that much, so they didn’t add much to the gene pool.

Before the arrival of genetic science, it was believed that the Angles and Saxons had ethnically cleansed what became ‘Angle-land’ of its Celtic people, who had either been forced to flee to Wales and Cornwall or had been killed. So the discovery that Celtic and pre-Celtic genes are similarly distributed throughout Britain came as a bit of a surprise.

The only thing that differentiates the Welsh from the English is the language, which is spoken by a minority of the population. It is a remnant of the language that was once spoken throughout England and lowland Scotland. Cornish is a language closely related to Welsh (but uses the letters ‘k’ , ‘v’ and ‘z’, which Welsh doesn’t) and a form of Welsh was spoken in the Lake District until about 400 years ago – hence place names like Helvellyn, Blencathra, Penrith. Even the word ‘Cumbria’ itself has the same origin as Cymru (pronounced ‘Cumry’)

Anyway, my ancestry is English, Welsh and Irish. My patriotism is to the British Isles as a whole, to the land, to our islands, to all our people. My slogan is ‘British, not English’.

I haven’t missed the point, I was really talking about the misapprehension that Welsh people are Celts and English are not.

I’m not anti-Welsh – like I say I’m part Welsh myself and I can speak a bit of Welsh although I’ve forgotten more than I remember.

I think patriotism is a curse on mankind. Like the idea of race, the nation state is a three or four hundred year old con job.

One nation, one people, one tribe. Debout, les damnés de la terre.

Does that equal patriotism? Are any of those things defined by arbitrary lines on maps? I’m not so sure.

We all know there’s a line with patriotism where it turns nasty. Patriotic is how the BNP think of themselves. It’s how the Nazis thought of themselves.

It’s all about pride. Apart from that in of itself being a sin, how can we be proud of a flukey happenstance? I suppose immigrants could be proud of their new homes – after all, they chose them – but the rest of us?