Airsoft Forums UK

the IRA isn't a country.

You get what I mean lol

Not really. It's affilating patriotism to ones country with supporting a particular group. It's like saying you can be a patriotic Englishman without being in the National front or EDL lol.

The reason we as a nation aren't patriotic is because far right extremist hate groups such a Britain First and the EDL have for far too long associated themselves with "patriots" who are really racist cunts.

So a huge percentage of people see patriotism as something that goes hand in hand with racism.

I meant to say can't in my last comment. I think everyone should be patriotic.

Ed's right though. Small liberties like giving in when people say they find the Union Jack or St Georges cross offensive allow a mindset to develop that anyone flying these must be doing it because they're racist and want to cause offense.

The big problem we have here is confusing patriotism for nationalism...

tbh, the reason we don't need to be patriotic is that we created the largest empire the world has ever known. Overt patriotism comes from asserting your independence, and we never had to do that. there is a fine line between patriotism and bigotry and one reason the British empire held together so well and became the commonwealth is because we did slightly better at avoiding it than other European powers.

Perhaps write a letter to the daily mail asking why?

That's the sort of thing l mean though Teddy.

No one has ever been offended by that sort of stuff. That's just what the racial hate propagandists spout to pull all their ilk from the woodwork.

Whenever I see that Haka video, I get goosebumps.

Ed I live in Woolwich where Lee Rigby was killed, god rest his soul. If you didn't know, it's has a pretty high immigration rate, so much so that in Primary school I was the only white boy in my year, and the estate where I live is actually legally a "Ghetto" due to every family living here, bar maybe 10 at most are Somalian families. Having grown up with the children of these people and being friends with them, I can sadly inform you the whole offense to the flag thing is ind...

indeed alive and real amongst many other ridiculous things. Despite them being born here and technically being British, its sad really.

so we've gone from patriotism to immigration and lee-rigby. fuking typical, for shame!

perhaps this answers the original question, there's so little British patriotic stuff online as it always ends up devolving into such topics of prejudice

We've not descended into anything, i'm not being racist, if you'd read my conversation with Ed, we were talking about patriotism being misconstrued as racism due to people thinking the flag is offensive. People think the flag is offensive because they were allowed to think it was, by people giving in when the first instance of someone claiming it was offensive happened. I was simply explaining the context of my situation to explain to Ed that it is infact a real phenomena. Hence,...

Indeed nothing you said was predudice or racist at all, but the fact that us Brits seem to consider these topics eternally linked is sad. I blame the media lol. It's like we can't consider anything good by its own it's own merits, always has to be comparitive or competitive. We can't talk about something being good without complaining about why it isn't considered good. Again no one here has said anything offensive, it's just sad to see the topic always being approache...

By us embittered Brits in this manner.

And whereas you were perfectly reasonable, in the open internet the mention of these topics would quickly devolve and that's kinda my point.

This could have been a thread filled with people being patriotic and showing/creating examples of it, and the fact it isn't answers the ops question in my mind

Britain has a lot to be proud of (eg. creating western civilisation, outlawing slavery, the industrial revolution) as well as a lot to be ashamed of. The problem is that we are British, so would rather just apologize for the bad stuff and stay quiet rather than draw attention to ourselves.