their loves on English trees,
How little is the prize they win,
how mean a coin for these --
How small a shrivelled laurel-leaf
lies crumpled here and curled:
They died to save their country and
they only saved the world.
by G.K. Chesterton, The English Graves
A man who loves his nation loves the world. In living or dying for his homeland, he defends the love of all homelands and the earth that they all call home. A man cannot love another nation if he does not first love his own. He cannot import patriotism without first cultivating his own.
Matthew 19:19
Honor your father and mother, and, You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
We cannot honor another's father and mother by dishonoring our own. A man who loves his parents appreciates another man who loves his. While their fatherlands may be at odds, their sons are in sync in their respective loyalties.
By dying for a land one dies for all lands. By fighting for the fatherland, one fights for the Father of all lands and His respective assignments of time and boundary unique to each person.
"For it is a wild folly to suppose that nations will love each other because they are alike. They will never really do that unless they are really alike; and then they will not be nations. Nations can love each other as men and women love each other, not because they are alike but because they are different." -- G.K. Chesterton, What I Saw In America
Nations are different by necessity as men and women are different by design. A man loves a woman precisely because she is different. We ought to expect our neighbors to value their nations the way we do our own and in so doing develop an appreciation of nations not their own. A man must be at home in his masculinity in order to receive a woman's attraction to it. If he despises his manliness, he will despise any woman who is attracted to it.
All that to say, the best way to learn to love all nations is by first loving your own and then looking not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others.
"In order to teach internationalism we must talk nationalism. We must make the nations as nations less odious or mysterious to each other. We do not make men love each other by describing a monster with a million arms and legs, but by describing the men as men, with their separate and even solitary emotions." -- G.K. Chesterton, What I Saw In America
As much as nations of men have at variance, they have in common. While they may differ in customs as nations, they are similar in composition as men. Any man who honors his father and mother can immediately appreciate another man who honors his own. Nations must be different enough to retain nationalities, but similar enough to remember their humanities.
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