<html><head></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">From Bill Blum, on patriotism: The whole commentary is worth considering:<div><br></div><div><a href="http://killinghope.org/bblum6/aer83.html">http://killinghope.org/bblum6/aer83.html</a><div><p class="byline">July 5th, 2010<br>
by William Blum<br>
<a href="http://www.killinghope.org">www.killinghope.org</a></p>
<h2>Some thoughts on "patriotism" written on July 4</h2><p>Most important thought: I'm sick and tired of this thing called
"patriotism". </p><p>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".</p><p>General Augusto Pinochet of Chile, mass murderer and torturer: "I
would like to be remembered as a man who served his country." <sup><a href="http://killinghope.org/bblum6/aer83.html#note-1" id="link-1">1</a></sup></p><p>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." <sup><a href="http://killinghope.org/bblum6/aer83.html#note-2" id="link-2">2</a></sup></p><p>Pol Pot, mass murderer of Cambodia: "I want you to know that
everything I did, I did for my country." <sup><a href="http://killinghope.org/bblum6/aer83.html#note-3" id="link-3">3</a></sup></p><p>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." <sup><a href="http://killinghope.org/bblum6/aer83.html#note-4" id="link-4">4</a></sup></p><p>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.</p><p>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." </p><p>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.</p><p>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." <sup><a href="http://killinghope.org/bblum6/aer83.html#note-5" id="link-5">5</a></sup></p><p>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. </p><p>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." <sup><a href="http://killinghope.org/bblum6/aer83.html#note-1" id="link-6">6</a></sup></p><p>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." <sup><a href="http://killinghope.org/bblum6/aer83.html#note-7" id="link-7">7</a></sup></p><p>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. </p><p>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?</p><p>"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.</p><p>"Patriotism is the conviction that this country is superior to all
other countries because you were born in it." — George Bernard Shaw </p><p>"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 <sup><a href="http://killinghope.org/bblum6/aer83.html#note-8" id="link-8">8</a></sup></p><p>"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." <sup><a href="http://killinghope.org/bblum6/aer83.html#note-9" id="link-9">9</a></sup>
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.</p><p>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".</p><p>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." <sup><a href="http://killinghope.org/bblum6/aer83.html#note-10" id="link-10">10</a></sup></p><p>"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 <sup><a href="http://killinghope.org/bblum6/aer83.html#note-11" id="link-11">11</a></sup></p><p>"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 <sup><a href="http://killinghope.org/bblum6/aer83.html#note-12" id="link-12">12</a></sup></p><p>"To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by
geography." — George Santayana, American educator and philosopher</p>
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