Patriotism and Heroism

Patriotism and Heroism and One's True Nature

http://nyti.ms/1gWIRBg

The Czech writer Ivan Klima’s new book, a memoir, begins in a Nazi camp and ends with the Velvet Revolution of 1989.

A very emotionally strong, unusual, and brave person and a writer to boot. Someone to think about in connection with the true meaning of patriotism and heroism. It's much easier to make noises about freedom and democracy and all that jazz while living in a free society than to do so in a totalitarian society. For that reason, the dissidents in Vietnam should deserve our utmost respect while those loudmouths in the Viet émigré communities in the West and Australia should be viewed with tempered caution. Patriotism without our heroism does not mean much.

Reading the above link about the writer set off a cascading chain of thoughts in my mind, one of the thoughts was the preceding paragraph. Others are as follows:

1. Love without risk does not mean shit either. To love someone in a safe, cautious manner is not love at all. It is cowardice. It is selfishness. It is a form of self-love, not true love. True love is dangerous to oneself, to one's well-being because it involves giving of oneself and that's vulnerability. True love is a form of insanity. But if reciprocated, then sanity, a special kind of serene, transcendental sanity emerges. And the lovers know peace and paradise. But such love is rare. 

2. To understand a person, we take him to drinking and talking and putting him in situations that infuriate him or force him to make a choice of protecting his own skin or risking his security, even his life, to help us. Until then, we don't know that person at all. I fear and despise selfish individuals. Those individuals are not quite human. They are in some cases worse than beasts. I have known many women are like that. 

3. A man who talks so frankly, so openly about his shortcomings and foibles as I have been doing is lying or into self-debasement or seeking integration of warring contradictions. Do you actually believe I was into booze and drugs and hitting women? Or somebody who loved me so much that she bought me a car and jewelry and taking me out to nice restaurants on a regular basis, despite my hitting her so hard that she lost consciousness?  Do you think I am that depraved and yet that lucky to be loved that much? If you do, then your IQ must be of room temperature and you are much more stupid than I thought. Maybe I am just a lousy fiction writer who is much into wishful thinking. It's very hard to live on just arts alone. The other day, a former Bulgarian Olympian weight-lifter---I repeat, weight-lifter, just forget and never mind he was good enough to be chosen for the Olympics--- told me that I was an artist. I asked him, "How could you tell?" He replied, "The way you talked, the odd way you dressed." I shook his hand. He made my day. I asked him if any chance he had artistic sensibilities himself. He nodded his head and smiled. 

Wissai