[Peace-discuss] Patriotism: Bill Blum's report

[Brussel Morton K.]

The inestimable Bill Blum.  --mkb


The Anti-Empire Report

                                           July 4, 2008
                                            by William Blum
                                       www.killinghope.org


Some thoughts on "patriotism" written on July 4

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: "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]

I won't bore you with what George W. has said.

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 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 writers equate patriotism with allegiance to one's  
country and government, while defining nationalism as sentiments of  
ethno-national superiority. However defined, in practice the  
psychological and behavioral manifestations of nationalism and  
patriotism -- including the impact of such sentiments on actual  
policies -- are not easily distinguishable; indeed, one can't exist  
without the other.

Howard Zinn has 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."[5] ...  
"Patriotism is used to create the illusion of a common interest that  
everybody in the country has."[6]

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."[7]

George Bush Sr., pardoning former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger  
and five others in connection with the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages  
scandal: "First, the common denominator of their motivation --  
whether their actions were right or wrong -- was patriotism."[8]

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." 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[9]

"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."[10] 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. Along with Mussolini in Italy, the  
Führer demanded that "true patriots" publicly vow and display their  
allegiance to their respective fatherlands. Postwar democratic  
governments of the two countries made a conscious effort to minimize  
such shows of national pride.

(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.")

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."[11]

"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, English writer 
[12]

"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[13]

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

…

He writes more more good stuff: See http://members.aol.com/bblum6/ 
aer59.htm
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