Patriotic Characters in Your Fiction.

 

The Christian writer C. S. Lewis said something about patriotism once. Something along the line of it being better than individual selfishness but not as good as loving the whole world.

Of course, he didn’t know about the modern globalist beatniks who love the people of, say, Kenya, while knowing nothing about them, and sheds tears about how they are all starving and living in grass huts. But their next door neighbor who has kids, goes to church, and won’t take an experimental shot that has proved not to work, they just wants to die quick.

I looked up the word ‘patriot’ in a thesaurus recently. It was an old thesaurus from 1961, but the words for ‘patriot’ tended to be words like ‘jingoist,’ never anything positive. 

Every nation has patriots. A nation couldn’t function if it didn’t have some loyal citizens. In any country, Nepal, Taiwan, Germany, Belgium or the USA, people who dislike their country enough to hope that some cooler country will just march in and take over are not the best of citizens. 

Different nations have different issues at the heart of their nation. Right now in the US, patriotic citizens want the borders closed so the immigrants will be legal, and at least checked to see if they are wanted criminals in their own country. This would also make human trafficking and drug smuggling harder to do. 

In many small nations, just speaking their national language is a patriotic issue. In Ireland, for example, the Irish language has died out in most areas. It is being taught in schools, but for now it doesn’t seem like they are going to revive Irish the way the Zionist movement revived Hebrew as a language in daily use.

Small nations have it tough. In Europe, many small nations with their own language teach two foreign languages to all school children. Interestingly, it is in just those small nations that the Esperanto movement is the strongest. They would rather learn one easy language that isn’t theirs to communicate with foreign people than the system we have now.

Other patriotic things are literature— translations of books from English often outsell original books in native languages, perhaps because the authors get globally well known. Songs in English are on the radio. In Germany, when I was there, there were German bands that did translated versions of popular songs, but they weren’t as cool as the original. But there were some people who preferred original German songs.

National dress is another thing. Most people globally wear Western dress. Traditional dress as everyday wear just doesn’t happen any more, now that most clothing is sewn by Third World labor. But in many parts of the world, people who can afford it get Sunday-best versions of national dress for special occasions. 

Patriotic people do different things to show they care about their country. In the USA, we fly American flags a lot. I was surprised when I went to Germany and saw the German flag so rarely. Why, back home I had cut a German flag out of a magazine to paste on the paper cover of my German text book. I am sure many foreign countries have patriotic issues most of us wouldn’t know about.

My current WIP, The Language of Space, features three Hungarian characters, a brother and two sisters, that are patriotic Hungarians. Their problem is that in the near-future world they live in, the Chinese nation dominates the globe, because the dominate space. Educated people in countries like Hungary have to start learning the Chinese language at an early age. The Hungarian university where the brother teaches gives most lectures in Chinese, since Hungarian students often don’t have the vocabulary to understand university level subjects in their native Hungarian. The brother seems to be lecturing in Hungarian only because he is such a patriot, but the reality is that because of a mental block he finds himself unable to learn Chinese. And so his career is threatened because only people who can speak Chinese can go into space to visit the asteroids he lectures about. 

Do you have any patriotic characters in your fiction? Do you depict them in a positive light? How do you see patriotism in fiction?

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