[Reader-list] Some Thoughts on "Patriotism"

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Some really Interesting Thoughts



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"Some Thoughts on "Patriotism"

By William Blum

 July 06, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- July 04, 2010 --  Most
important thought: I'm sick and tired of this thing called "patriotism".

The Japanese pilots who bombed Pearl Harbor were being patriotic. The German
people who supported Hitler and his conquests were being patriotic, fighting
for the Fatherland. All the Latin American military dictators who overthrew
democratically-elected governments and routinely tortured people were being
patriotic — saving their beloved country from "communism".

General Augusto Pinochet of Chile, mass murderer and torturer: "I would like
to be remembered as a man who served his country." 1

P.W. Botha, former president of apartheid South Africa: "I am not going to
repent. I am not going to ask for favours. What I did, I did for my
country." 2

Pol Pot, mass murderer of Cambodia: "I want you to know that everything I
did, I did for my country." 3

Tony Blair, former British prime minister, defending his role in the murder
of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis: "I did what I thought was right for our
country." 4

At the end of World War II, the United States gave moral lectures to their
German prisoners and to the German people on the inadmissibility of pleading
that their participation in the holocaust was in obedience to their
legitimate government. To prove to them how legally and morally inadmissable
this defense was, the World War II allies hanged the leading examples of
such patriotic loyalty.

I was once asked after a talk: "Do you love America?" I answered: "No".
After pausing for a few seconds to let that sink in amidst several nervous
giggles in the audience, I continued with: "I don't love any country. I'm a
citizen of the world. I love certain principles, like human rights, civil
liberties, democracy, an economy which puts people before profits."

I don't make much of a distinction between patriotism and nationalism. Some
people equate patriotism with allegiance to one's country and government or
the noble principles they supposedly stand for, while defining nationalism
as sentiments of ethno-national superiority. However defined, in practice
the psychological and behavioral manifestations of nationalism and
patriotism are not easily distinguishable, indeed feeding upon each other.

Howard Zinn called nationalism "a set of beliefs taught to each generation
in which the Motherland or the Fatherland is an object of veneration and
becomes a burning cause for which one becomes willing to kill the children
of other Motherlands or Fatherlands. ... Patriotism is used to create the
illusion of a common interest that everybody in the country has." 5

Strong feelings of patriotism lie near the surface in the great majority of
Americans. They're buried deeper in the more "liberal" and "sophisticated",
but are almost always reachable, and ignitable.

Alexis de Tocqueville, the mid-19th century French historian, commented
about his long stay in the United States: "It is impossible to conceive a
more troublesome or more garrulous patriotism; it wearies even those who are
disposed to respect it." 6

George Bush Sr., pardoning former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and
five others in connection with the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal,
said: "First, the common denominator of their motivation — whether their
actions were right or wrong — was patriotism." 7

What a primitive underbelly there is to this rational society. The US is the
most patriotic, as well as the most religious, country of the so-called
developed world. The entire American patriotism thing may be best understood
as the biggest case of mass hysteria in history, whereby the crowd adores
its own power as troopers of the world's only superpower, a substitute for
the lack of power in the rest of their lives. Patriotism, like religion,
meets people's need for something greater to which their individual lives
can be anchored.

So this July 4, my dear fellow Americans, some of you will raise your fists
and yell: "U! S! A! ... U! S! A!". And you'll parade with your flags and
your images of the Statue of Liberty. But do you know that the sculptor
copied his mother's face for the statue, a domineering and intolerant woman
who had forbidden another child to marry a Jew?

"Patriotism," Dr. Samuel Johnson famously said, "is the last refuge of a
scoundrel." American writer Ambrose Bierce begged to differ — It is, he
said, the first.

"Patriotism is the conviction that this country is superior to all other
countries because you were born in it." — George Bernard Shaw

"Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits but according
to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use
of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial,
forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its
moral colour when it is committed by 'our' side. ... The nationalist not
only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has
a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them." — George Orwell 8

"Pledges of allegiance are marks of totalitarian states, not democracies,"
says David Kertzer, a Brown University anthropologist who specializes in
political rituals. "I can't think of a single democracy except the United
States that has a pledge of allegiance." 9 Or, he might have added, that
insists that its politicians display their patriotism by wearing a flag pin.
Hitler criticized German Jews and Communists for their internationalism and
lack of national patriotism, demanding that "true patriots" publicly vow and
display their allegiance to the fatherland. In reaction to this, postwar
Germany has made a conscious and strong effort to minimize public displays
of patriotism.

Oddly enough, the American Pledge of Allegiance was written by Francis
Bellamy, a founding member, in 1889, of the Society of Christian Socialists,
a group of Protestant ministers who asserted that "the teachings of Jesus
Christ lead directly to some form or forms of socialism." Tell that to the
next Teaparty ignoramus who angrily accuses President Obama of being a
"socialist".

Following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, we could read that
there's "now a high degree of patriotism in the Soviet Union because Moscow
acted with impunity in Afghanistan and thus underscored who the real power
in that part of the world is." 10

"Throughout the nineteenth century, and particularly throughout its latter
half, there had been a great working up of this nationalism in the world.
... Nationalism was taught in schools, emphasized by newspapers, preached
and mocked and sung into men. It became a monstrous cant which darkened all
human affairs. Men were brought to feel that they were as improper without a
nationality as without their clothes in a crowded assembly. Oriental
peoples, who had never heard of nationality before, took to it as they took
to the cigarettes and bowler hats of the West." — H.G. Wells, British writer
11

"The very existence of the state demands that there be some privileged class
vitally interested in maintaining that existence. And it is precisely the
group interests of that class that are called patriotism." — Mikhail
Bakunin, Russian anarchist 12

"To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by
geography." — George Santayana, American educator and philosopher

William Blum is the author of:

    * Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War 2
    * Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower
    * West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir
    * Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire

Portions of the books can be read, and signed copies purchased, at
www.killinghope.org
Notes

   1. Sunday Telegraph (London), July 18, 1999 ↩
   2. The Independent (London), November 22, 1995 ↩
   3. Far Eastern Economic Review (Hong Kong), October 30, 1997, article by
Nate Thayer, pages 15 and 20 ↩
   4. Washington Post, May 11, 2007, p.14 ↩
   5. "Passionate Declarations" (2003), p.40; ... Z Magazine, May 2006,
interview by David Barsamian ↩
   6. "Democracy in America" (1840), chapter 16 ↩
   7. New York Times, December 25, 1992 ↩
   8. "Notes on Nationalism", p.83, 84, in "Such, Such Were the Joys" (1945)
↩
   9. Alan Colmes, "Red, White and Liberal" (2003), p.30 ↩
  10. San Francisco Examiner, January 20, 1980, quoting a "top Soviet
diplomat" ↩
  11. "The Outline of History" (1920), vol. II, chapter XXXVII, p.782 ↩
  12. "Letters on Patriotism", 1869 ↩"

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