Robert Scheer: Nationalism's psychotic side

Even decent people can be swept along by barbarism when a nation gets sick

When I was a kid in the Bronx during World War II, my mother got me to eat my vegetables by playing a war game in which the spinach or the broccoli were the Germans -- the evil ones to be gobbled up. The tastier items on the plate were labeled Americans, British and Russians -- the good guys. Even now, on the 60th anniversary of Germany's defeat, I experience a twinge of anxiety over my mother's mealtime allocation of ethnic virtue.

The problem was that my father was a German-born Protestant farm boy who had come to the United States as a teenager and spoke English with a pronounced accent. My Jewish mother, who was 19 when she fled the Soviet Union soon after the Bolshevik Revolution, earnestly assured me that my kindhearted father was not one of the bad Germans. Nor was his brother, who took me fishing quite often.