Should anyone be ashamed of their nation's history? Should anyone be proud of it?

Kate

2025

In today’s polarized political climate, where public statements are often intensely scrutinized, people are increasingly cautious about using emotional terms to describe their relationship to their country and its history. One’s relationship with one's nation requires contextual analysis lest a nation’s history be oversimplified. National pride is not just an emotion, but a “symbolic investment in what a nation represents” (Abdel-nour, 2003). National shame, similarly, is “a form of affective citizenship… through which nations recognize their failures” (Abdel-nour, 2003). John Locke argued that a legitimate government must be built on the consent of the governed and exist to protect their natural rights—justice, liberty, and equality. In his view, pride should only exist when those ideals are upheld, and shame becomes appropriate only when rights are systematically denied. Building on this framework, this essay will examine how expressions of extreme national pride and shame can distort historical understanding, fracture personal identity, and ultimately hinder a country’s ability to pursue moral progress and democratic growth. 

National pride doesn’t require denying a nation's past failures. Genuine pride comes from the willingness to acknowledge injustice while still striving for progress. Individuals can recognize the harm their nation has caused without rejecting it entirely. This balance of tempering pride with accountability reflects a deeper interest in the country’s moral future. As James Baldwin 

once wrote, “I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” His point is clear: true patriotism means holding one’s country to its highest ideals, not ignoring its failures. Pride and self-criticism must coexist if a nation hopes to grow. 

When national pride becomes deeply personal, individuals often begin to see themselves as morally tied to their country’s history, both its achievements and its failures. Such intense emotional investment carries the risk of spiritual fragmentation and identity crisis, as individuals struggle to reconcile personal identity with a conflicted national narrative. 

When Pride Distorts: The Dangers of Historical Denial

National pride can drive denial when historical truth is seen as a threat to national dignity. This dynamic is evident in Japan’s ongoing struggle with its wartime past, including its involvement in the Nanjing Massacre in 1937-38, which rendered a severe split in citizens' attitudes towards historical revisionism about atrocities. Despite the documented mass deaths of over 40,000 Chinese civilians in this war, the Japanese still hold extremely complex views about this historical event. The expert used the phrase 'very sensitive' (Morgan, 2002) to describe the Japanese response to this event. On the one side are individuals like Tokyo University professor Lenaga Saburo, who has long worked to promote public acknowledgment of Japan’s WWII aggression. On the other hand, there are figures such as former Tokyo mayor Ishihara Shintarou, who claimed the Nanjing Massacre was entirely fabricated. This divide illustrates how national pride can fuel both efforts to confront the past and impulses to deny it, depending on how history is perceived to impact national dignity.

This national historical contradiction has damaged Japan’s collective memory. From 1940 to 1970, despite extensive testimony and evidence, the Nanjing massacre remained “largely ignored by the Japanese and even deleted from school textbooks.” (Violi, 2012) Fomenting a strong sense of national pride in the country's development fosters a sense of protectiveness among citizens towards their national history, as they work to preserve their dignity and perception of themselves and their nation as a whole. In doing so, they demonstrate how blindly national pride can lead to historical whitewashing–an oversimplification of history that ignores injustice to preserve the nation’s positive image as one consistently on the correct side of history. As a result, this sense of pride that provokes toxic nationalism is dangerous not only to a nation's development but also to the stability of national relations. 

In a similar vein, the Soviet Union illustrates how state-sponsored national pride can suppress a nation’s reckoning with internal crimes. Citizens were immersed in the “dominant myth” (Wertsch, 2008) of victory in WWII—a narrative heavily shaped by state propaganda, which overshadowed the atrocities of the Great Purges, Stalin’s brutal crackdown on perceived enemies. Alongside this was the Gulag system, a vast network of forced labor camps that imprisoned millions, many of them innocent. As an expert later notes, “no study has inquired deeply into the feelings of the Soviet population toward the great internal events of 1935–1939.” (Thurtson, 1986) Even after Stalin’s death, the state displayed what experts call “definite reluctance” (Barnes, 2000) to release the wrongly accused or confront the damage done. In this context, pride in wartime victory functioned more as a state-driven framework that left little room for moral reckoning. 

When Shame Paralyzes: Germany’s Moral Crisis 

Rather than catalyzing positive change, overwhelming shame can create a cycle of self-destruction that prevents the reform it purports to encourage. The paralysis that results from total shame is as dangerous to national development as the blindness that results from uncritical pride. The first generation in Germany post-WWII had no time to feel pain and humiliation while reforming their entire nation, but the impact was hard felt for their second generation. The second generation "adds a past generation's mental representation of a shared event to its own identity" (Moses, 2007). Volkan describes it as "chosen trauma;" they inherit the trauma from their parents, but are unable to fully mourn or resolve the past. Under the intense mental stress of shame and humiliation, this second generation's self-identity denial leads to a cognitive disintegration within the nation. 

This psychological crisis manifested in two distinct but equally problematic reactions in Germany following World War II. One reaction, the non-German German reaction (Germans who deny their German identity), was fury against the previous generations for the "pollution and stigmatization of the collective self that they had bequeathed to the younger generation" (Moses, 2007). The great mass of people who identify as non-German Germans are disgusted by their national selves, recognizing that "even in rebellion, one could not wipe the filth of the Fatherland from one's boots. One would always be caught in a web called Germany" (Joschka Fischer). Thus, this complete rejection of national identity, while understandable given the weight of historical trauma, creates a spiritual vacuum that prevents engagement with the past and future generations. 

The other side, German Germans, struggled with a deep inner conflict known as "psychological dissonance," a state of mental tension that arises when a person’s moral values clash with their inherited group identity. In this case, individuals hold a strong sense of "moral and social respect," but also "[belong] to a group that was stigmatized for having committed the worst of all genocides" (Moses, 2007). To cope, they tried to separate Nazism and the Holocaust from their national identity, "displacing [their resentments and genealogical relationship to the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft] onto non-German Germans, regarding themselves as victims of persecution." (Moses, 2007). This psychological segmentation offered temporary relief but often manifested as silence, avoidance, or blame-shifting. By refusing to fully integrate the Nazi past into their collective identity, they hindered the accountability necessary for genuine healing and long-term democratic growth. The introspection caused by these past misdeeds results in a profound national shame with self-loathing in the German psyche; some individuals even internalize victims' trauma as a form of self-punishment, seeing it as a path to atonement. This burden fragments how Germans relate to their history and each other. 

Even decades after the war, many German intellectuals continued to consider the same question: how does one preserve national identity in the shadow of moral catastrophe? One of the most influential voices in this conversation is Jürgen Habermas, a German philosopher known for his theories of democracy and public discourse. He proposed that Germans must accept their "branded [eingebrannt]" identity and say "'never again' to [them]selves," rather than remaining trapped in the cycle of shame. The German experience shows how overwhelming shame can block healing and national coherence. 

Either of these extreme standards can lead to the radical disintegration of self or national identity on a mass scale. When a population becomes trapped in either delusion or despair, it creates a psychological crisis that halts both reconstruction and forward progress. In the space between these two emotional surges lies a necessary foothold: a position of both and neither. Pride in progress, shame in injustice, but refusal to be fully defined by either. 

Critical Patriotism in Practice: The U.S. Civil Rights Movement 

James Baldwin’s concept of critical patriotism provides a framework for navigating between the extremes of blind pride and paralyzing shame. Critical patriotism involves loving one's country enough to hold it accountable to its highest ideals, and celebrating genuine progress while acknowledging and working to address historical and contemporary injustices. This approach recognizes that true Patriotism requires the courage to confront uncomfortable truths about the past and present, not as an act of betrayal, but as an expression of faith in the nation's capacity for growth and improvement. 

The civil rights movement demonstrates how critical patriotism can serve as a powerful force for positive change. Rather than accepting the status quo or rejecting the nation entirely, civil rights activists held America accountable to its founding principles—justice, liberty, and equality for all—while working to ensure these ideals were practically applied to all citizens. This approach acknowledged both the noble values enshrined in the Constitution and the nation’s repeated failures to live up to them, using this tension not as a source of despair, but as motivation for continued struggle. 

While proud of the progress in empowering "ordinary Black Mississippians to take control of their lives and to challenge the [brutal] racial system" (Washington, 1996), civil rights leaders remained critical even after key legal victories, recognizing that true racial equality required more than just changes in the law. Their actions reflect rightful pride in Black-led activism stemming from their communities. The nonviolent philosophy rooted in southern Black culture further reinforced this critical patriotism. It fostered national pride by demonstrating that the civil rights movement embodied core American ideals—justice, liberty, and equality—through principled, courageous action by ordinary citizens. Yet that moral clarity began to fracture in the late 1960s. Internal divisions emerged, particularly within organizations like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), as leaders such as Stokely Carmichael grew disillusioned with the slow pace of progress and the limits of nonviolent resistance. As unity gave way to ideological tensions, the movement gradually lost the coherence that had once defined it. However, the deeper source of national shame lies not in the movement’s fragmentation but in the fact that a campaign grounded in justice and democratic ideals could not achieve its goals, revealing the broader failure of the American state to deliver on its promises of equality. 

This period of turbulence, however, also marked a turning point. It "changed the way Americans think about race" and "helped Blacks to identify with nonwhites of the Third World and their African backgrounds, and to take pride in that history as well as challenge stigmatization" (Washington, 1996). The rise of the Black Power movement captured this shift. It rejected blind nationalism and despair alike, instead demanding that America live up to its promises. By confronting injustice, asserting dignity, and expressing frustration with urgency, Black Power became a renewed form of critical patriotism, an act of love that insisted on reform through resistance. 

The nation's history and its development can never be understood from a single perspective. To achieve a better future, people should view history as a source of reflection, rather than one of blind pride or shame. The task is not to glorify or condemn but to acknowledge and remember. This is how we move forward. This approach demands the courage to face uncomfortable truths, the wisdom to recognize past progress, and the belief that loving a country means staying true to its ideals, not blind loyalty to its every action. In this way, citizens can honor their past while building a more just future.

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Farid Abdel-Nour, "National Responsibility," Political Theory 31, no. 5 (2003): 10-12. 

Steven A. Barnes, "All for the Front, All for Victory! The Mobilization of Forced Labor in the Soviet Union during World War Two," International Labor and Working-Class History, no. 58 (2000): 239-253. 

Raleigh Morgan, "Chinese, Japanese, and United States Views of the Nanking Massacre: The Supreme Court Trial of Shiro Azuma," American Journal of Chinese Studies 9, no. 2 (2002): 241-246. 

A. Dirk Moses, "The Non-German German and the German German: Dilemmas of Identity after the Holocaust," New German Critique, no. 101 (2007): 54-69. 

Ben Railton, "Considering History: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Legacies of Critical Patriotism," Saturday Evening Post, last modified January 20, 2020, accessed June 20, 2025. 

Robert W. Thurston, "Fear and Belief in the USSR's 'Great Terror': Response to Arrest, 1935-1939," Slavic Review 45, no. 2 (1986). 

Patrizia Violi, "Educating for Nationhood: A Semiotic Reading of the Memorial Hall for Victims of the Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders," Journal of Educational Media, Memory and Society 4, no. 2 (2012). 

Robert Washington, "Reclaiming the Civil Rights Movement," International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 9, no. 3 (1996): 460-469. 

James V. Wertsch, "The Narrative Organization of Collective Memory," Ethos 36, no. 1 (2008): 124-125.