Which is really the main point. It means, I really like this country of mine -- nothing more. It can't mean, You should like this country more than your own (different) country. That would be stupid chauvinism. One might praise the relative freedom to dissent and freedom of inquiry and individual rights, and thouse might even be be roughly measured against the situationm in other countries. Moreover that is a dimension on which we might say that the US is objectively worthy of emulation compared to many -- maybe most -- countries. But while an important dimension, it is not the only one. And the absence of such freedoms is not necessarily a reason that some foreigner might love their own country more than than he loved the US, even if he admired the US more.
Brecht has a poem somewhere, written during the Nazi years, called "Germany, Pale Mother," or maybe those are the opening words. Anyway, it goes like this:
'Let others speak of her shame I speak of my own.'
O Germany, pale mother! How soiled you are As you sit among the peoples. You flaunt yourself Among the besmirched.
The poorest of your sons Lies struck down. When his hunger was great. Your other sons Raised their hands against him. This is notorious.
With their hands thus raised, Raised against their brother, They march insolently around you And laugh in your face. This is well known.
In your house Lies are roared aloud. But the truth Must be silent. Is it so?
Why do the oppressors praise you everywhere, The oppressed accuse you? The plundered Point to you with their fingers, but The plunderer praises the system That was invented in your house!
Whereupon everyone sees you Hiding the hem of your mantle which is bloody With the blood Of your best sons.
Hearing the harangues which echo from your house,
men laugh. But whoever sees you reaches for a knife As at the approach of a robber.
O Germany, pale mother! How have your sons arrayed you That you sit among the peoples A thing of scorn and fear!
OK, here is a poem written by a Communist emigre, a refugee from the Nazi terror, addressing his country, about which its sons and daughters have nothing to be proud, in terms of shame and horror. But it is a poem written by a patriot, a man who loved his country as mucha s ahe despised what its rulers, and the majority of its people, were doing with it. He would not feel shame and disgrace without the love, otherwise he would just feel anger and hatred. It is his own shame that he limns here -- and not just instrumentally, in the Chomsky sense that one criticizes where one can make the most difference. Probablt Brecht knew that he poem, his opposition, could make little if any difference. The poem reflects a sense of violation. Germany should be better than this, it has diminished me, Brecht, to be a German even in opposition, when Germany is dominated by Nazis. Brecht was an internationalist, but a patriot too, and he shows in this poem how you can love your country while admiring almost nothing about its leadership, policy, or the current attitudes of its people. This is a more sophisticated attitude that that evinced in the Chomsky interview.
Noam
> himself is one of
> the great chroniclers of its crimes - should that
> enter into some
> accounting of good and bad? We have mass poverty,
> immature politics,
> an often idiotic public culture. Calling in the
> "best" should be
> something for know-nothings, not well-educated
> cosmopolitans.
>
> Doug
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