Patriotism Defined

Samuel Johnson said, Patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels. Dr. Johnson was speaking of those in Great Britain who advocated cant: unquestioning adherence to government edicts. When I think of patriotism and scoundrels, Rush Limbaugh comes to mind as a prime example of Johnson's truism. If this be (fair & balanced) treason, make the most of it.

How I Define Patriotism
by
Peter Kirstein

The following is excerpted from a talk Mr. Kirstein gave on October 13, 2003. The talk was sponsored by the Center for Educational Practice.

I would like to honor four religious women. Sister Ardeth Platte (41 months in prison), Sister Carol Gilbert (33 months in prison), Sister Jackie Marie Hudson (30 months in prison). They were incarcerated for crossing the line at a Minuteman III nuclear-missile field and drawing crosses with their blood on an ICBM silo. Sister Moira Kenny, a Sister of Mercy, also crossed the line when she trespassed at the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia, and received a six-month sentence in federal prison. I crossed the line, through an e-mail, when I also protested against a military institution that trains its students to kill other human beings with high-tech, invulnerable flying machines.

I ask you to consider peacefully crossing the line. If enough people cross the line, I guarantee you, they will have to remove the line. Dr. King did it; four African-American students at a Greensboro, NC Woolworth's did it; Medgar Evars did it; the Seattle dockworkers did it; Gandhi did it; Henry David Thoreau did it; millions of antiwar students, throughout the world, did it last winter and spring, and I can assure you crossing the line is a mean's of achieving both personal liberation, and a reaffirmation of one's commitment to radical, societal change.

Is what I just said patriotic? Patriotism can be a highly emotional feeling and also a reflective one. In this country, the former frequently dominates the latter. To a significant extent, as Geoffrey Nunberg has noted, patriotism is intended to put people on the defensive. To Nunberg patriotism connotes "a word for devotion to one's country exists…[and] impl[ies] a contrast with those who lack that feeling." If patriotism requires an affirmation of government policy, then patriotism is a threat to democracy.

I would argue there is a moral imperative to reject actively patriotism, if it is defined as having to support a nation-state's wars, regardless of one's ethical and moral aversion to actions that are violative of peace and justice. I publicly reject being patriotic if it is construed in such a narrow manner. In January, I published a full-page response in the Weekly Standard to an article about me by President George H. W. Bush's former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense, Jed Babbin. I stated: "I assure you no one defines for me what patriotism is and whether it is even always desirable, as those of us on the pacifist, antiwar left strive for a more peaceful, integrated global environment that eschews nationalism and undiminished state sovereignty."

Take The Pledge of Allegiance. Why on earth do we need to have laws requiring public school students, from grammar school through high school, pledge allegiance to a flag? Isn't the purpose of education to develop critical thinking and insight instead of mind-numbing patriotism? Do we really want our teachers to be agents of the state to foster blind patriotism with very impressionable young people who have not had the time to reflect on the meaning of America? Let patriotism emanate in a reflective manner from what our country does and how it behaves, and not through mindless daily iteration.

As H. L. Mencken wrote in, the American Mercury in April 1924:

[The aim of public education is not] to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence....Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim…is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States…and that is its aim everywhere.

On July 4, I was on a Symposium sponsored by David Horowitz's FrontPageMag.com on "Bush's Decision to Go to War." Opposing the war were Stanley Aronowitz, Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the City University of New York and myself. Professor Aronowitz was also the New York Green Party gubernatorial candidate in 2002. Prowar panelists were Victor Davis Hanson, from the Hoover Institution and Naval Academy, and Cliff May, president, Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. Jamie Glazov, managing editor of FrontPageMag.com, was the moderator who directed this comment to Professor Aronowitz and me.

Sorry gentlemen, let me jump in here for a moment…The bottom line is that, even if WMDs were found, and the al-Qaeda connection were proven, the Left wouldn't give a damn because it doesn't give a damn. The bottom line is that, in the eyes of the Left, the Bush administration, and the capitalist America that it prevails over, is evil and must be destroyed. This isn't about missing WMDs; it is about anti-Americanism. There is nothing that Bush and America can do to get the Left's support except to engage in an act of self-destruction.

So Peter and Stanley, please acknowledge this fact: that, in essence, you are not really interested in missing WMDs (as if their discovery would lead you to praise Bush's decision to go to war); you are interested - and long for - the destruction of America and capitalism. That is what this is all really about isn't it?

One of the ways to discredit the antiwar movement is to cast the debate in highly emotional terms, in which wartime dissent is characterized as an equivalent threat to those the national-security elites have defined as the "enemy." If "love of country," is measured only in terms of supporting American foreign policy, then anything short of blind patriotism is construed as disloyalty and even desiring "the destruction of America."

In my opinion as patriotism increases, the capacity to analyze critically a nation's actions decreases. If there is a presumption that acts of war, for example, are fought for state preservation and self-defense, then the likelihood of a robust debate over policy and holding accountable a state's actions, in its decision to go to war or its conduct of war, are significantly attenuated. A smothering patriotism that construes dissent as disloyalty is literally a blank check for governmental misconduct and excess-not to mention the undermining of academic freedom through the coercion and the suspension of antiwar professors who contravened mainstream public opinion, and the ethos of university administrations or governing boards.

Another concern I have with patriotic correctness during war, is the inverse relationship between the demand for patriotism and the capacity to care and think about others. During war patriotism frequently becomes oppressive, as the emotions associated with killing and the defining of enemies, are exacerbated by government propaganda and disinformation. It is ironic that war--which most assuredly precipitates the greatest demand for patriotism--is a threat to those very values that the patriot claims to be defending. The militarization of American society and its incessant military crusades pose a greater threat to our freedoms, than the putative enemies that we slaughter on the battlefield or even worse in their homes or hospitals in distant lands.

I think of the Alien and Sedition acts of 1798 as a response to growing tensions with France and the rise of war-induced nativism; I think of Lincoln and martial law; I think of Lincoln and the arrests of newspaper editors; I think of both the Espionage Act of (1917) and the oppressive clear and present danger stifling of speech during World War I as seen in the Schenck, Debs and (despite Holmes's and Brandeis's dissent), the Abrams cases of 1919; I think of American concentration camps during WW II; I think of Muhammad Ali who was stripped of his heavyweight boxing title for several years for refusing induction in a genocidal-immoral war in Southeast Asia; I think of the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention police riot; I think of Kent State protestors murdered by the Ohio National Guard in 1970. I think of the egregious Patriot Act where "sneak and peek" violations of American privacy rights are common, and non-citizens are arrested, detained and imprisoned without rights to counsel or even a legal hearing.

Also beware of patriotism and its tendency to close the American mind, to usurp sardonically Alan Bloom's, The Closing of the American Mind. Patriotism is frequently ethnocentric and contemptuous of other nations and peoples with whom we share a common destiny in a global village. It's our Manifest Destiny to create an American empire; it's defeating them; it's Henry R. Luce proclaiming the "American Century" in Life magazine in 1941; it's the canard of the United States as protector of the "Free World"; it's the narcissism of American exceptionalism.

For me, patriotism is collaboration; it's the United Nations; it's stopping American capitalism from exploiting developing nations through anti-union, anti-worker globalization; it's radical dissent and challenging America to live up to its ideals, and desist from becoming a terrorist democracy that has become the unilateralist-preemptive threat to international peace and security; it's denouncing, to revisit my e-mail that was circulated throughout the world last year, the "aggressive baby killing tactics of collateral damage"; it's refusing to admire "top guns [who] rain death and destruction upon nonwhite peoples throughout the world"; it's criticizing "cowards who bomb countries without AAA, without possibility of retaliation"; it's exposing "imperialists who are turning the whole…world against us"; it's withholding support or endorsement of my country's policies as I choose, regardless of the price or the sacrifice.

John Rawls, one of the great political theorists of the twentieth century, wrote in A Theory of Justice, "Given the often predatory aims of state power, and the tendency of men [and women] to defer to their government's decision to wage war, a general willingness to resist the state's claims is all the more necessary."

Mr. Kirstein, professor of history at Saint Xavier University, recently published Terrorism from the Sky: The Destruction of Nagasaki, New Ground (July-August 2003), a publication of the Democratic Socialists of America (Chicago).

Copyright © 2003 Peter Kirstein