[Peace-discuss] Nations and nationalism--Zinn

[Morton K. Brussel]

Hi all, just returned from France, and happened, amidst a plethora of  
emails, upon this sobering article by Zinn. If you've already seen  
it, my apologies.

From: http://www.progressive.org/june05/zinn0605.php

The Scourge of Nationalism



I cannot get out of my mind the recent news photos of ordinary  
Americans sitting on chairs, guns on laps, standing unofficial guard  
on the Arizona border, to make sure no Mexicans cross over into the  
United States. There was something horrifying in the realization  
that, in this twenty-first century of what we call "civilization," we  
have carved up what we claim is one world into 200 artificially  
created entities we call "nations" and armed to apprehend or kill  
anyone who crosses a boundary.

Is not nationalism--that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary so  
fierce it engenders mass murder--one of the great evils of our time,  
along with racism, along with religious hatred? These ways of  
thinking--cultivated, nurtured, indoctrinated from childhood on--have  
been useful to those in power, and deadly for those out of power.

National spirit can be benign in a country that is small and lacking  
both in military power and a hunger for expansion (Switzerland,  
Norway, Costa Rica, and many more). But in a nation like ours--huge,  
possessing thousands of weapons of mass destruction--what might have  
been harmless pride becomes an arrogant nationalism dangerous to  
others and to ourselves.

Our citizenry has been brought up to see our nation as different from  
others, an exception in the world, uniquely moral, expanding into  
other lands in order to bring civilization, liberty, democracy.

That self-deception started early. When the first English settlers  
moved into Indian land in Massachusetts Bay and were resisted, the  
violence escalated into war with the Pequot Indians. The killing of  
Indians was seen as approved by God, the taking of land as commanded  
by the Bible. The Puritans cited one of the Psalms, which says: "Ask  
of me, and I shall give thee, the heathen for thine inheritance, and  
the uttermost parts of the Earth for thy possession."

When the English set fire to a Pequot village and massacred men,  
women, and children, the Puritan theologian Cotton Mather said: "It  
was supposed that no less than 600 Pequot souls were brought down to  
hell that day."

It was our "Manifest Destiny to overspread the continent allotted by  
Providence," an American journalist declared on the eve of the  
Mexican War. After the invasion of Mexico began, the New York Herald  
announced: "We believe it is a part of our destiny to civilize that  
beautiful country."

It was always supposedly for benign purposes that our country went to  
war. We invaded Cuba in 1898 to liberate the Cubans, and went to war  
in the Philippines shortly after, as President McKinley put it, "to  
civilize and Christianize" the Filipino people.

As our armies were committing massacres in the Philippines (at least  
600,000 Filipinos died in a few years of conflict), Elihu Root, our  
Secretary of War, was saying: "The American soldier is different from  
all other soldiers of all other countries since the war began. He is  
the advance guard of liberty and justice, of law and order, and of  
peace and happiness."

Nationalism is given a special virulence when it is blessed by  
Providence. Today we have a President, invading two countries in four  
years, who believes he gets messages from God. Our culture is  
permeated by a Christian fundamentalism as poisonous as that of  
Cotton Mather. It permits the mass murder of "the other" with the  
same confidence as it accepts the death penalty for individuals  
convicted of crimes. A Supreme Court justice, Antonin Scalia, told an  
audience at the University of Chicago Divinity School, speaking of  
capital punishment: "For the believing Christian, death is no big deal."

How many times have we heard Bush and Rumsfeld talk to the troops in  
Iraq, victims themselves, but also perpetrators of the deaths of  
thousands of Iraqis, telling them that if they die, if they return  
without arms or legs, or blinded, it is for "liberty," for "democracy"?

Nationalist super-patriotism is not confined to Republicans. When  
Richard Hofstadter analyzed American presidents in his book The  
American Political Tradition, he found that Democratic leaders as  
well as Republicans, liberals as well as conservatives, invaded other  
countries, sought to expand U.S. power across the globe.

Liberal imperialists have been among the most fervent of  
expansionists, more effective in their claim to moral rectitude  
precisely because they are liberal on issues other than foreign  
policy. Theodore Roosevelt, a lover of war, and an enthusiastic  
supporter of the war in Spain and the conquest of the Philippines, is  
still seen as a Progressive because he supported certain domestic  
reforms and was concerned with the national environment. Indeed, he  
ran as President on the Progressive ticket in 1912.

Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, was the epitome of the liberal apologist  
for violent actions abroad. In April of 1914, he ordered the  
bombardment of the Mexican coast, and the occupation of the city of  
Vera Cruz, in retaliation for the arrest of several U.S. sailors. He  
sent Marines into Haiti in 1915, killing thousands of Haitians who  
resisted, beginning a long military occupation of that tiny country.  
He sent Marines to occupy the Dominican Republic in 1916. And, after  
running in 1916 on a platform of peace, he brought the nation into  
the slaughter that was taking place in Europe in World War I, saying  
it was a war to "make the world safe for democracy."

In our time, it was the liberal Bill Clinton who sent bombers over  
Baghdad as soon as he came into office, who first raised the specter  
of "weapons of mass destruction" as a justification for a series of  
bombing attacks on Iraq. Liberals today criticize George Bush's  
unilateralism. But it was Clinton's Secretary of State, Madeleine  
Albright, who told the United Nations Security Council that the U.S.  
would act "multilaterally when we can, unilaterally when we must."

One of the effects of nationalist thinking is a loss of a sense of  
proportion. The killing of 2,300 people at Pearl Harbor becomes the  
justification for killing 240,000 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The  
killing of 3,000 people on September 11 becomes the justification for  
killing tens of thousands of people in Afghanistan and Iraq.

What makes our nation immune from the normal standards of human decency?

Surely, we must renounce nationalism and all its symbols: its flags,  
its pledges of allegiance, its anthems, its insistence in song that  
God must single out America to be blessed.

We need to assert our allegiance to the human race, and not to any  
one nation. We need to refute the idea that our nation is different  
from, morally superior to, the other imperial powers of world history.

The poets and artists among us seem to have a clearer understanding  
of the limits of nationalism.

Langston Hughes (no wonder he was called before the Committee on Un- 
American Activities) addressed his country as follows:

You really haven't been a virgin for so long

It's ludicrous to keep up the pretext . . .

You've slept with all the big powers

In military uniforms

And you've taken the sweet life

Of all the little brown fellows . . .

Being one of the world's big vampires

Why don't you come out and say so

Like Japan, and England, and France

And all the other nymphomaniacs of power.

Henry David Thoreau, provoked by the war in Mexico and the  
nationalist fervor it produced, wrote: "Nations! What are  
nations? . . . Like insects, they swarm. The historian strives in  
vain to make them memorable." In our time, Kurt Vonnegut (Cat's  
Cradle) places nations among those unnatural abstractions he calls  
granfalloons, which he defines as "a proud and meaningless  
association of human beings."

There have always been men and women in this country who have  
insisted that universal standards of decent human conduct apply to  
our nation as to others. That insistence continues today and reaches  
out to people all over the world. It lets them know, like the  
balloons sent over the countryside by the Paris Commune in 1871, that  
"our interests are the same."



Howard Zinn's latest work (with Anthony Arnove) is "Voices of a  
People's History of the United States."

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