Saying Goodbye to Patriotism (by Robert Jensen)

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>To: professors_for_peace at yahoogroups.com
>From: Phil Gasper <pgasper at ndnu.edu>
>Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2001 21:52:39 -0800
>Subject: [P_F_P] ARTICLE: Saying Goodbye to Patriotism
>
>Published on Monday, November 12, 2001
>
>Saying Goodbye to Patriotism
>
>by Robert Jensen
>
>A talk delivered to the Peace Action National Congress, November 10, 2001  
>
>This summer I wrote a book review for an academic journal -- one of
>those terribly important pieces of writing that will be read by tens
>and tens of people, some of them actually people outside my own
>family. The book is about the history of governmental restrictions on
>U.S. news media during war, and it's a good book in many ways. But I
>faulted the author for accepting the American mythology about the
>nobility of our wars and their motivations. I challenged his
>uncritical use of the term patriotism, which I called "perhaps the
>single most morally and intellectually bankrupt concept in human
>history."
>
>By coincidence, the galley proofs for the piece came back to me for
>review a few days after September 11. I paused as I re-read my words,
>and I thought about the reaction those words might spark, given the
>reflexive outpouring of patriotism in the wake of the terrorist
>attacks. I thought about the controversy that some of my writing had
>already sparked on campus and, it turned out, beyond the campus. I
>thought about how easy it would be to take out that sentence.
>
>I thought about all that for some time before deciding to let it
>stand. My reason was simple: I think that statement was true on
>September 10, and if anything, I'm more convinced it is true after
>September 11.
>
>I also believe that nestled in the truth of that assertion is a
>crucial question for the U.S.-based peace movement, one that we
>cannot avoid after 9-11:
>
>Are we truly internationalist? Can we get beyond patriotism? Or, in
>the end, are we just Americans?
>
>That is a way, I think, of asking whether we are truly for peace and justice.
>
>I realize that framing of the question may seem harsh. It may rub the
>wrong way people who want to hold onto a positive notion of
>patriotism.
>
>I mean the statement to be harsh because I believe the question is
>crucial. If in the end we are just Americans, if we cannot move
>beyond patriotism, then we cannot claim to be internationalists. And,
>if we are not truly internationalist in our outlook -- all the way to
>the bone -- then I do not think we truly call ourselves people
>committed to peace and justice.
>
>Let me try to make the case for this by starting with definitions.
>
>My dictionary defines patriotism as "love and loyal or zealous
>support of one's own country." We'll come back to that, but let's
>also look beyond the dictionary to how the word is being used at this
>moment in history, in this country. I would suggest there are two
>different, and competing, definitions of patriotism circulating these
>days.
>
>Definition #1: Patriotism as loyalty to the war effort.
>
>It's easy to get a handle on this use of the word. Just listen to the
>president of the United States speak. Or watch the TV anchors. Or, as
>I have done, be a guest on a lot of talk radio shows. This view of
>patriotism is pretty simple: We were attacked. We must defend
>ourselves. The only real way to defend ourselves is by military
>force. If you want to be patriotic, you should -- you must -- support
>the war.
>
>I have been told often that it is fine for me to disagree with that
>policy, but now is not the time to disagree publicly. A patriotic
>person, I am told, should remain quiet and support the troops until
>the war is over, at which point we can all have a discussion about
>the finer points of policy. If I politely disagree with that, then
>the invective flows: Commie, terrorist-lover, disloyal, unpatriotic.
>Love it or leave it.
>
>It is easy to take apart this kind of patriotism. It is a patriotism
>that is incompatible with democracy or basic human decency. To see
>just how intellectually and morally bankrupt a notion it is, just ask
>this question: What would we have said to Soviet citizens who might
>have made such an argument about patriotic duty as the tanks rolled
>into Prague in 1968? To draw that analogy is not to say the two cases
>are exactly alike. Rather, it is to point out that a decision to
>abandon our responsibility to evaluate government policy and
>surrender our power to think critically is a profound failure,
>intellectually and morally.
>
>Definition #2: Patriotism as critique of the war effort.
>
>Many in the peace-and-justice movement, myself included, have
>suggested that to be truly patriotic one cannot simply accept
>policies because they are handed down by leaders or endorsed by a
>majority of people, even if it is an overwhelming majority. Being a
>citizen in a real democracy, we have said over and over, means
>exercising our judgment, evaluating policies, engaging in discussion,
>and organizing to try to help see that the best policies are enacted.
>When the jingoists start throwing around terms like "anti-American"
>and "traitor," we point out that true patriotism means staying true
>to the core commitments of democracy and the obligations that
>democracy puts on people. There is nothing un-American, we contend,
>about arguing for peace.
>
>That's all clear enough. As I have said, I have used that line of
>argument many times. It is the best way -- maybe the only way -- to
>respond in public at this moment if one wants to be effective in
>building an antiwar movement. We all remind ourselves, over and over,
>that we have to start the discussion where people are, not where we
>wish people were. If people feel "love and loyal or zealous support
>of one's own country," then we have to be aware of that and respond
>to it.
>
>But increasingly, I feel uncomfortable arguing for patriotism, even
>with this second definition. And as I listen to friends and allies in
>the peace-and-justice movement, I have started to wonder whether that
>claim to patriotism-as-critical-engagement is indeed merely
>strategic. Or is it motivated by something else? Are we looking for a
>way to hold onto patriotism because we really believe in it?
>
>I think it is valuable to ask the question: Is there any way to
>define the term that doesn't carry with it arrogant and
>self-indulgent assumptions? Is there any way to salvage patriotism?
>
>I want to argue that invoking patriotism puts us on dangerous ground
>and that we must be careful about our strategic use of it.
>
>At its ugliest, patriotism means a ranking of the value of the lives
>of people based on boundaries. To quote Emma Goldman: "Patriotism
>assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one
>surrounded by an iron gate. Those who had the fortune of being born
>on some particular spot, consider themselves better, nobler, grander,
>more intelligent than the living beings inhabiting any other spot. It
>is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to
>fight, kill, and die in the attempt to impose his superiority upon
>all others."
>
>People have said this directly to me: Yes, the lives of U.S. citizens
>are more important than the lives of Afghan citizens. If innocent
>Afghans have to die, have to starve -- even in large numbers -- so
>that we can achieve our goals, well, that's the way it is, and that's
>the way it should be. I assume no argument here is needed as to why
>this type of patriotism is unacceptable. We may understand why people
>feel it, but it is barbaric.
>
>But what of the effort to hold onto a kinder and gentler style of
>patriotism by distinguishing it from this kind of crude nationalism?
>We must ask: What are the unstated assumptions of this other kind of
>patriotism we have been defending? If patriotism is about loyalty of
>some sort, to what are we declaring our loyalty?
>
>If we are pledging loyalty to a nation-state, we have already touched
>on the obvious problems: What if that nation-state pursues an immoral
>objective? Should we remain loyal to it? The same question is obvious
>if our loyalty is to a specific government or set of government
>officials. If they pursue immoral objectives or pursue moral
>objectives in an immoral fashion, what would it mean to be loyal to
>them?
>
>Some suggest we should be loyal to the ideals of America, a set of
>commitments and practices connected with the concepts of freedom and
>democracy. That's all well and good; freedom and democracy are good
>things, and I try to not only endorse those values but live them. I
>assume everyone in this room does as well.
>
>But what makes those values uniquely American? Is there something
>about the United States or the people who live here that make us more
>committed to, or able to act out, the ideals of freedom and democracy
>-- more so than, say, Canadians or Indians or Brazilians? Are not
>people all over the world -- including those who live in countries
>that do not guarantee freedom to the degree the United States does --
>capable of understanding and acting on those ideals? Are not
>different systems possible for making real those ideals in a complex
>world?
>
>If freedom and democracy are not unique to us, then they are simply
>human ideals, endorsed to varying degrees in different places and
>realized to different degrees by different people acting in different
>places? If that's true, then they are not distinctly American ideals.
>They were not invented here, and we do not have a monopoly on them.
>So, if one is trying to express a commitment to those ideals, why do
>it in the limiting fashion of talking of patriotism?
>
>Let me attempt an analogy to gender. After 9-11, a number of
>commentators have argued that criticisms of masculinity should be
>rethought. Yes, masculinity is often connected to, and expressed
>through, competition, domination, and violence, they said. But as
>male firefighters raced into burning buildings and risked their lives
>to save others, cannot we also see that masculinity encompasses a
>kind of strength that is rooted in caring and sacrifice?
>
>My response is, yes, of course men often exhibit such strength. But
>do not women have the capacity for that kind of strength rooted in
>caring and sacrifice? Do they not exhibit such strength on a regular
>basis? Why of course they do, most are quick to agree. Then the
>obvious question is, what makes these distinctly masculine
>characteristics? Are they not simply human characteristics?
>
>We identify masculine tendencies toward competition, domination, and
>violence because we see patterns of different behavior; we see that
>men are more prone to such behavior in our culture. We can go on to
>observe and analyze the ways in which men are socialized to behave in
>those ways. We do all that work, I would hope, to change those
>behaviors.
>
>But that is a very different exercise than saying that admirable
>human qualities present in both men and women are somehow primarily
>the domain of one of those genders. To assign them to a gender is
>misguided, and demeaning to the gender that is then assumed not to
>possess them to the same degree. Once you start saying "strength and
>courage are masculine traits," it leads to the conclusion that woman
>are not as strong or courageous. To say "strength and courage are
>masculine traits," then, is to be sexist.
>
>The same holds true for patriotism. If we abandon the crude version
>of patriotism but try to hold onto an allegedly more sophisticated
>version, we bump up against this obvious question: Why are human
>characteristics being labeled as American if there is nothing
>distinctly American about them?
>
>If people want to argue that such terminology is justified because
>those values are realized to their fullest degree in the United
>States, then there's some explaining to do. Some explaining to the
>people of Guatemala and Iran, Nicaragua and South Vietnam, East Timor
>and Laos, Iraq and Panama. We would have to explain to the victims of
>U.S. aggression -- direct and indirect -- how it is that our
>political culture, the highest expression of the ideals of freedom
>and democracy, has managed routinely to go around the world
>overthrowing democratically elected governments, supporting brutal
>dictators, funding and training proxy terrorist armies, and
>unleashing brutal attacks on civilians when we go to war. If we want
>to make the claim that we are the fulfillment of history and the
>ultimate expression of the principles of freedom and justice, our
>first stop might be Hiroshima. We might want to explain that claim
>there.
>
>If we are serious about peace and justice in the world, we need to
>subject this notion of patriotism to scrutiny. If we do that, I would
>suggest, it is clear that any use of the concept of patriotism is
>bound to be chauvinistic at some level. At its worst, patriotism can
>lead easily to support for barbarism. At its best, it is
>self-indulgent and arrogant in its assumptions about the uniqueness
>of U.S. culture.
>
>None of what I have said should be taken as a blanket denunciation of
>the United States, our political institutions, or our culture. People
>often tell me, "You start with the assumption that everything about
>the United States is bad." Of course I do not assume that. That would
>be as absurd a position as the assumption that everything about the
>United States is good. I can't imagine any reasonable person making
>either statement. That does raise the question, of course, of who is
>a reasonable person. We might ask that question about, for example,
>George Bush, the father. In 1988, after the U.S. Navy warship
>Vincennes shot down an Iranian commercial airliner in a commercial
>corridor, killing 290 civilians, Bush said, "I will never apologize
>for the United States of America. I don't care what the facts are."
>
>I want to put forward the radical proposition that we should care
>what the facts are. We should start with the assumption that
>everything about the United States, like everything about any
>country, needs to be examined and assessed. That is what it means to
>be a moral person.
>
>There is much about this country a citizen can be proud of, and I am
>in fact proud of those things. The personal freedoms guaranteed (to
>most people) in this culture, for example, are quite amazing. As
>someone who regularly tries to use those freedoms, I am as aware as
>anyone of how precious they are.
>
>There also is much to be appalled by. The obscene gaps in wealth
>between rich and poor, for example, are quite amazing as well,
>especially in a wealthy society that claims to be committed to
>justice.
>
>In that sense, we are like any other grouping of people. That doesn't
>mean one can't analyze various societies and judge some better than
>others by principles we can articulate and defend -- so long as they
>are truly principles, applied honestly and uniformly. But one should
>maintain a bit of humility in the endeavor. Perhaps instead of saying
>"The United States is the greatest nation on earth" -- a comment
>common among politicians, pundits, and the public -- we would be
>better off saying, "I live in the United States and have deep
>emotional ties to the people, land, and ideals of this place. Because
>of these feelings, I want to highlight the positive while working to
>change what is wrong." That is not moral relativism -- it is a call
>for all of us to articulate and defend our positions.
>
>We can make that statement without having to argue that we are, in
>some essential way, better than everyone else. We can make that
>statement without arrogantly suggesting that other people are
>inherently less capable of articulating or enacting high ideals. We
>can make that statement and be ready and willing to engage in debate
>and discussion about the merits of different values and systems.
>
>We can make that statement, in other words, and be true
>internationalists, people truly committed to peace and justice. If
>one wants to call that statement an expression of patriotism, I will
>not spend too much time arguing. But I will ask: If we make a
>statement like that, why do we need to call it an expression of
>patriotism? What can we learn by asking ourselves: What makes us,
>even people in the peace-and-justice community, want to hold onto the
>notion of patriotism with such tenacity?
>
>When I write or talk with the general public and raise questions like
>these, people often respond, "If you hate America so much, why don't
>you leave?"
>
>But what is this America that I allegedly hate? The land itself? The
>people who live here? The ideals in the country's founding documents?
>I do not hate any of those things.
>
>When people say to me "love it or leave it," what is the "it" to
>which they refer?
>
>No one can ever quite answer that. Still, I have an answer for them.
>
>I will not leave "it" for a simple reason: I have nowhere else to go.
>I was born here. I was given enormous privileges here. My place in
>the world is here, where I feel an obligation to use that privilege
>to be part -- a very small part of, as we all are only a small part
>-- of a struggle to make real a better world. Whatever small part I
>can play in that struggle, whatever I can achieve, I will have to
>achieve here, in the heart of the beast.
>
>I love it, which is to say that I love life -- I love the world in
>which I live and the people who live in it with me. I will not leave
>that "it."
>
>That "it" may not be specific enough for some, but it's the best I
>can do. Maybe it will help to answer in the negative, for I can say
>more clearly what the "it" is not. I can describe more clearly what
>is the America I do not love.
>
>The America I love is not this administration, or any other
>collections of politicians, or the corporations they serve.
>
>It is not the policies of this administration, or any other
>collection of politicians, or the corporations they serve.
>
>The America I love is not wrapped up in a mythology about "how good
>we are" that ignores the brutal realities of our own history of
>conquest and barbarism.
>
>Most of all, I want no part of the America that arrogantly claims
>that the lives and hopes and dreams of people who happen to live
>within the boundaries of the United States have more value than those
>in other places. Nor will I indulge America in the belief that our
>grief is different. Since September 11, the United States has
>demanded that the world take our grief more seriously. When some
>around the world have not done so, we express our outrage.
>
>But we should ask: What makes the grief of a parent who lost a child
>in the World Trade Center any deeper than the grief of a parent who
>lost a child in Baghdad when U.S. warplanes rained death on the
>civilian areas of Iraq in the Gulf War? Or the parents of a child in
>Nicaragua when the U.S. terrorist proxy army ravaged that country?
>Soon after 9-11, I heard a television reporter describe lower
>Manhattan as "Beirut on the Hudson." We might ask, how did Beirut
>come to look like Beirut, and what is our responsibility in that? And
>what of the grief of those who saw their loved ones die during the
>shelling of that city?
>
>We should ask: Where was the empathy of America for the grief of those people?
>
>Certainly we grieve differently, more intensely, when people close to
>us die. We don't feel the loss of a family member the same way as a
>death of a casual friend. We feel something different over the death
>of someone we knew compared with the death of a stranger. But we must
>understand that the grief we feel when our friends and neighbors
>became victims of political violence is no different than what people
>around the world feel. We must understand that each of those lives
>lost abroad has exactly the same value as the life of any one of our
>family, friends and neighbors.
>
>September 11 was a dark day. I still remember what it felt like to
>watch those towers come down, the darkness that settled over me that
>day, the hopelessness, how tangible death felt -- for me, not only
>the deaths of those in the towers but also the deaths of those who
>would face the bombs in the war that might follow, the war that did
>follow, the war that goes on.
>
>But humans are resilient; in the darkness we tend to look for light,
>for a way out of the darkness.
>
>I believe there is a light shining out of September 11, out of all
>that darkness. It is a light that I believe we Americans can follow
>to our own salvation. That light is contained in a simple truth that
>is obvious, but which Americans have never really taken to heart: We
>are part of the world. We cannot any longer hide from that world. We
>cannot allow our politicians, and generals, and corporate executives
>to do their dirty business around the world while we hide from the
>truths about just how dirty that business really is. We can no longer
>hide from the coups they plan, the wars they start, the sweatshops
>they run.
>
>For me, all this means saying goodbye to patriotism.
>
>That is the paradox: September 11 has sparked a wave of patriotism, a
>patriotism that has in many cases been overtly hateful, racist and
>xenophobic. A patriotism that can lead people to say, as one person
>wrote to me, "We should bomb [Afghanistan] until there's no more
>earth to bomb."
>
>But the real lesson of September 11, which I believe we will
>eventually learn, is that if we are to survive as a free people, as
>decent people who want honestly to claim the ideals we say we live
>by, we must say goodbye to patriotism. That patriotism will not
>relieve our grief, but only deepen it. It will not solve our problems
>but only extend them. I believe there is no hope for ourselves or for
>the world if we continue to embrace patriotism, no matter what the
>definition.
>
>We must give up our "love and loyal or zealous support of one's own
>country" and transfer that love, loyalty and zealousness to the
>world, and especially the people of the world who have suffered most
>so that we Americans can live in affluence.
>
>We must be able to say, as the great labor leader of the early 20th
>century Eugene Debs said, "I have no country to fight for; my country
>is the earth, and I am a citizen of the world."
>
>I am with Debs. I believe it is time to declare: I am not patriotic.
>I am through with trying to redefine the term patriotic to make
>sense. There is no sense to it.
>
>That kind of statement will anger many, but at some point we must
>begin to take that risk, for this is not merely an academic argument
>over semantics.
>
>This is both a struggle to save ourselves and a struggle to save the
>lives of vulnerable people around the world.
>
>We must say goodbye to patriotism because the kind of America the
>peace-and-justice movement wants to build cannot be built on, or
>through, the patriotism of Americans.
>
>We must say goodbye to patriotism because the world cannot survive
>indefinitely the patriotism of Americans.
>
>Robert Jensen is a professor of journalism at the University of Texas
>at Austin, a member of the Nowar Collective
>(www.nowarcollective.com), and author of the book Writing
>Dissent:Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream
>(www.peterlangusa.com). He can be reached at
>rjensen at uts.cc.utexas.edu.