No Country: Some thought exercises

Well here we have, aside from comments which are always available never used, my first ever interactive post!
Boring.
Anyway I was talking to a Canadian dude in my hostel in Nürnberg about my 'life sickness' that seems to crop up everytime I get too sedentry while travelling, and this lead to my unpatriotic outlook discussion, and I thought I might share some examples of why I say I am 'no-god, no-country' even though society generally accepts and lauds both piety and nationalism.
So without furtherado, ponder these motherfuckers:

You are Australian, that is an Australian. Through some sever misfortunes you end up in a POW camp somewhere in a nasty tropical region of the world, you are stuck there with a fellow Australian Prisoner, whom you hadn't met before your incarceration, and also a Czech Republican prisoner whom you also didn't know.
The Aussie calls you mate and all that, the Czech struggles with English, but is talkative nonetheless.
Over the months, you are beaten, starved, forced to construct a pyramid all of that glamorous POW stuff, you get to know the fellow prisoners and find the Australian to be largely pig ignorant, rude, lazy, annoying, stupid, inconsiderate, greedy, abbrasive and generally unpleasent to be around or even know. The Czech on the other hand is polite, friendly, supportive, amiable, worldly, helpfull, resiliant, determined, ambitious and generally quite pleasant company.
Now one day the nasty tropical warden decides sadistically, to free you and gives you the choice of saving one of the other inmates, you can't puss out and give up your own freedom to save both of them, furthermore the choice is forced upon you, so you must take responsibility for it.
Who do you choose?



Now see I compare this choice to the 'buy Australian' logo or even the decision to support the 'defence force' going to war or occupying another country. I chose Czech because it was the country other than China that I have liked the least so far, and note that if the character of the nationalities where reversed so to would be my decision, thus nationality here for me at least is irrelevant, however, buying Australian and 'the war on terror' the question of nationality as to who recieves unpleasent fates and who I grant relief and protection to apparantly is. So by the results I get I'll know where this should slot in aswell.
But on to question 2:

You are Australian, and like other Australians your parents were born in Ethiopia and migrated here as refugees. Australia day is rolling round in a couple of weeks and both Today Tonight and A Current Affair are running stories on 'What it means to be Australian' there are photos from early Australian History depicting 'battlers' cutting down forests to settle farms, and interviews with old people. Experts talk about 'mateship' and 'a fair go' and other stuff that appears as values in your religion of Islam. Lamingtons and Pavlova also feature heavily, but nothing like your African cuisine, infact nothing like your Sudanese cultural heritage.
Worried that you might get picked on at school for the way you are dressing, the food you eat and so fourth as being 'Un-Australian' and eager to prove your love for a country where the tap water is safe to drink and your parents earn good money as cleaners and taxi drivers and you can go to school for free what do you do?



This one I say don't assimilate, as for me it highlights that 'Australia' like 'God' is a term that doesn't physically exist, it was made up by mankind to serve a function and furthermore is sufficiently vague to be extremely hard to define and also has a habit of claiming common humane traits and labelling them as 'Australian' other examples of this I have come across is the 'Loving way we Italian's have of shortening eachother's names, to make it more intimate' as a fine example of something almost every culture does, but it takes nationalism to suddenly make something so common unique. In short birth is the criteria for membership, and since we can't exactly choose where we are spat out we shouldn't hold people at any more obligation.

Lastly, you are Australian, forced to work in Savageland, a small pacific Island Nation rich in resources, your work has sent you here and you have noticed the local government is nothing but a gang looking after its own self interest, it sits on a commanding natural resource of oil reserves and under the watchful eye of world public opinion Australia is reluctant to take it by force. Fortunately the leader of Savageland is a local massmurderer who isn't so concerned with the welfare of his people as he is with his own ability to retain power. As such he will sell the oil cheap to a popular Australian government in return for enough money to give himself first class living standards and his militant force an incentive to suppress their fellow countrymen.
This lack of fair negotiations you, through your company contacts, could change, because the downside for you is that having to live in Savageland will be unpleasent under a propped up dictator, thievery and violence would diminish greatly if the people got a fair price for their oil and could get industry jobs and investment in infrastructure that would otherwise go at a much cheaper price to the dictator and his goons.
The flipside is your fellow Australians will have to pay more for oil, so what do you do?



This last dimension of my aversion to nationalism was the hardest to do and I think I failed, but basically its the issue of scope, which Chomsky is probably best at pointing out, namely if you look at the behaviour of 'the free world' when it comes to foreign policy, you will notice near to no actual evidence that they actually believe in spreading freedom. That is its still about retention of power even in a democracy, so that if your voter base wins or at the very least is placated nobody else is important, therefore rationally it makes sense to encourage dictatorships that are cheaper to deal with and exploit anyone weaker than you in order to win more for your electorate and thus win votes. But that is to say that members are 'important' and non-members are 'unimportant' thankfully Australia has only sold out the East Timorese and a few other pacific nations in the past, America has more to answer for, but this brand of nationalism makes the world as a whole less pleasent and a smaller pie for all.

Anyway thats it douchebags, I hope you got a 'thrill' from the 'polls'