Nationalism Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words - 1

Nationalism - Essay Example In the perspective, nationalism does bring negative influence to the society and the people who live within such societies. Negative influence of nationalism is usually brought about by bad leadership. Primarily, leaders use nationalism to bring people together, but quite often they can go to the extremes while trying to meet their goals (Ireneusz and Suszycki 49). This may involve the use nationalism to persuade people to support their bad agenda and treatment towards the minority groups in the society. For instance, Hitler used nationalism to persuade the people of Germany to discriminate and eliminate all the minority groups in the nation. In particular, he used propaganda to invoke strong feeling of nationalism among the German population and then used it to advocate for his discriminative policies. This shows that when nationalism is abused, it can be very dangerous. People will want to fight for the rights and freedoms of their nation regardless of what others may go through. Nationalism can result in the development of extreme nationalistic movements with high degrees of discrimination. In fact, the rise of extreme nationalistic movements such as Nazism and Zionism was as a result of nationalism (Ireneusz and Suszycki 50). These movements had a strong belief in ethnicity in the sense that people that belong to their ethnic background were supreme and therefore there ethnic group was the master race. As a result, both of these ethnic groups embarked on the process of ethnic cleansing to eliminate those groups of people that belong to different ethnic affiliations. For instance, member of the Nazism eliminated the Jews by killing them or sending them to special concentration camps where they would undergo suffering and extreme conditions. On the other hand, the members of Zionism eliminated the Palestinians by driving them out of Israel. This is shows the extent to which nationalism