US Citizenship Test
 

No wonder many outside the US have often repeated the mantra that US is imperialist. I'm not reaffirming this, just saying - look at question 26 on the citizenship test!

The correct answer is 'give up loyalty to other countries'. Just saying that it could, in any manner, be taken the wrong way. xD

This is probably one of the originators from countries, even completely english language ones, that are neither muslim nor really all that effected by occupation or, as they put it, 'US imperialism'.

Not intending to be incendiary towards americans. I don't hate you guys. Just some of that government stuff is slightly away from more modern philosophy (and ironically, it asks you to identify the progenitor of women's rights, even though there couldn't have been any one single person - I'd have to read the phrasing of that question again, though).

That's really not that unusual, and that's not what imperialism is anyways.

You should re-read the question about Susan B Anthony.

What's wrong with being away from all the latest thinking? Time was when Marx was the 'modern' political philosophy.

It's not entirely surprising that they ask that. It's a country largely populated by immigrants from all over the world or their descendants, and the last thing they wanted was people bringing their fights with them. It's a way of reinforcing the perception in a new citizen's mind that whatever they were before, this is what they are now.
It fails, of course, in almost every case. But it does work a couple of generations down the road.

'A couple generations down the road', descendants of immigrants to countries that do NOT demand first-generation immigrants to abandon loyalty to their former home tend to have have more-or-less fully assimilated, at least where 'loyalty' is concerned.

Some of the questions about Presidents and history crack me up. How many natural Americans know what year the Declaration of Independence was signed or who the nth President was out of over 44 total terms since the presidency was started without looking those up?

Not everyone takes History as their {insert Yank equivalent of General Certificate of Secondary Education here} humanities choice. I took Religious Studies.

@ Tedronai: That's still not a reason to remove an oath of loyalty to the Constitution and the country. If someone doesn't want to renounce their loyalty to their home country, they can stay there - or, hell, simply not pursue United States citizenship. Clearly, it must be preferable.

@ Carnas: Me.
I took the test and, without looking it up, got a total of one question wrong. The Constitution has twenty-seven amendments, not twenty-three. If I can do it, it must not be that hard.

I did not argue that an oath of loyalty to the US and its constitution should not be required. I simply pointed out that (Muggie's) stated reason for the presence of a renunciation of other loyalties was invalid.
Moreover, the existence of one oath of loyalty does not inherently require the renunciation of any other loyalty. At most, there could be an argument for the new oath including a supremacy clause (ie. loyalty to the US and its constitution above and before prior loyalties).

Excepting other countries don't make as big a deal about being bound together by an ideal, not by blood or shared history.

How can you be loyal to two countries?

No other country in the world attracts immigrants in relatively large numbers on the basis of the ideals that country is seen as representing? No other country in the world promotes itself on the basis of the ideals it purports to represent?

The concept is called 'dual citizenship'. So long as those two countries are not openly hostile towards one another, most individuals would experience no serious conflict of loyalty. I hear tell that some individuals even manage to attain citizenship in three or more countries.

Where'd I say that?

Citizenship =/= loyalty, as you yourself allude to in the second sentence of this quote.