Today’s United States America is not a nation that I can say I am proud to be a citizen of.
Of course, you will never hear a politician utter those words, because that would set them up to be labeled “unpatriotic”. But that’s only because of a grave misunderstanding of the meaning of patriotism and its confusion with nationalism. Here is one of the best
expressed distinctions between the two that I have seen:
The difference between patriotism and nationalism is that the patriot is proud of his country for what it does, and the nationalist is proud of his country no matter what it does; the first attitude creates a feeling of responsibility, but the second a feeling of blind arrogance that leads to war.
That is a very important distinction – and I would only add that, implied in this distinction is that, whereas the patriot is “proud of his country for what it does”, by the same token he is
not proud of it when it does the wrong thing.
I doubt that today’s Republican Party would agree with any of this. To the contrary, they routinely consider criticism of their country – or their country’s (s)elected leaders – to be unpatriotic. Thus they felt free to aggressively castigate Richard Durbin for publicly
criticizing the Bush administration’s torture of its prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. And thus they claim that any criticism of the Bush/Cheney Iraq War is unpatriotic. The reasoning is that if our country is doing it, it
must be the right thing (though most of them see things a little differently when a Democrat is President). That kind of reasoning also allows them to say that criticism of the war is tantamount to “not supporting our troops”, because one can’t support our troops if one doesn’t support
their mission. And what makes it
their mission? Simply the fact that God …. I mean George Bush said that it is
their mission.
Thus my contention is that patriotism is and must be conditional. It must be conditional, that is, upon my country doing the right thing – otherwise it would not be something worth aspiring to. When my country (upon the orders of its government) invades other countries for no justifiable reason; when it holds prisoners in abysmal conditions indefinitely and with no legal recourse; when it routinely tortures its prisoners; when it holds itself above international law that was created so that the nations of the world could live in peace with each other; or when it neglects to help those of its own citizens who need help – then I am definitely not proud of my country, and I am not proud to claim to be a citizen of my country.
Of course, all that begs the question: Exactly what is a country, and more specifically, what is the United States of America?
How should one define a country?Aside from legal definitions, some countries are defined to a large extent by genetics. Does that mean that patriotism means in that case that one is proud of his/her genetic heritage? I have a big problem with that means of defining patriotism. If one says that he is proud of his genetic heritage, that implies to me that one believes himself to be superior to people with other genetic make-ups. And that sounds racist to me. For example, one could hear in the 19th Century American South (and elsewhere of course), and especially within organizations like the Ku Klux Klan, a lot of use of terms such as “White pride”.
I realize that there are those who will say that it is not necessarily racist to be “proud” of one’s race. I know that for a fact because that’s what my parents told me when I was a child. Let me add that my parents were not racist by any normal usage of the term. Yet they told me that I should be “proud” to be a Jew. I could never understand what they meant by that. They certainly didn’t mean it in a religious sense, since they never practiced the religion, and in fact were atheists. So they must have meant it in a genetic sense. Why on earth should I be “proud” of my genetics when I had absolutely nothing to do with it? We argued about it a lot. In one sense my parents had a good point, since they felt “proud” of their “Jewishness”, and yet they certainly didn’t seem to be racist. But it never did make any sense to me, and it still doesn’t.
Anyhow, that particular issue does not apply in any meaningful way to the United States of America because this country is not defined by its race. Rather what this country is defined by is its
principles. And what are those principles? Well, needless to say, in a nation of almost three hundred million people, our principles are necessarily all over the board. But presumably our principles are defined by our founding documents, which include our Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution that provides a foundation for the laws of our nation and was meant to make a reality of the principles expressed in our Declaration.
Have Americans had reason to be proud of their country?I have a great deal of respect for our Founding Fathers. For one thing, they founded our country upon our
Declaration of Independence, which is one of the greatest documents ever written. Especially the part that says that all people have the inalienable right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. What a great guiding philosophy of how we should live with our fellow human beings. If all Americans lived by that principle, and if our government routinely operated according to that principle, this country would be … well, it would be better than it is or ever has been.
Of course, our country has not always lived according to those principles. The existence of legalized slavery for the first 90 years of our country’s existence was a gross and terrible aberration from its founding principles; so were the wars and violence that we perpetrated upon the native inhabitants of this continent; and so were many of our interventions in the affairs of other nations, such as our
war against Mexico (1846-8), our imperial
conquest of the Philippines (1899-1913), and our overthrowing of the governments of
Iran (1953),
Guatemala (1954), and
Chile (1973), among many other transgressions.
But our Founding Fathers did give us some great guiding principles. Some criticize those principles as hypocritical, since for example slavery was not eliminated at the founding of our nation. But slavery was not within the power of our Founding Fathers to eliminate – though I believe that most of them would have done so if they could have. What they did do was give us some great ideals to strive for. To the extent that we as a nation have tried to live up to those ideals, and to the extent that we have made great strides in doing so over the 230 years of our existence, we have a lot to be proud of as a nation. And today we have many improvements to our Constitution, which were absent at the beginning, and which make it a much more humane document.
Do Americans have reason to be proud of their country today? I said in the first sentence of this post that I am NOT proud of my country today. And I think it should be easy to understand why that is. Most or all of my pride in my country comes from its founding principles and the extent to which Americans try to live up to those principles. The government that leads our country today has no interest in those principles whatsoever, and it makes no attempt to follow them.
The government that leads our country today is guided by new founding principles and documents specific to their purposes – documents that are the diametric opposite of our Declaration of Independence. The organization that developed the new principles and documents is called “
Project for a New American Century” (PNAC), and the main document that guides them is called “
Rebuilding America’s Defenses”. Whereas our Declaration was written by a group of men who were oppressed by an empire and wished to free themselves from that empire, PNAC was founded by a group of men who aspire to be an empire and to oppress others. And whereas our Declaration talks of the unalienable rights of all people to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, PNAC talks of the right of the United States to take what it wants from other nations and to shape them to meet our interests. In other words, other peoples have NO rights – only the right to live as long as they do our bidding.
Does PNAC really say all those terrible things?Some might argue that PNAC doesn’t actually say those things that I attributed to them in the above paragraph. Ok, it’s true that they don’t actually say those things. And neither did Hitler walk around with sign on his chest saying “I’m evil”. But they may as well have actually said those things.
The primary theme of “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” is that our military must be much stronger than the militaries of any nation or combination of nations that might oppose our ambitions. Why is that so important? Because we need to “shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests”; we need to “boldly and purposefully promotes American principles abroad”; without such a military we might lack the capability to maintain an “order that is uniquely friendly to American principles and prosperity”; and more specifically, we now have new “missions” which require “defending American interests in the Persian Gulf and Middle East” (This was written before the Bush administration publicly expressed any interest in invading Iraq and even before the 9-11 attacks on our country).
And how are we to protect and defend all those interests? Well, the document notes that “there are, however, potentially powerful states dissatisfied with the current situation and eager to change it….” (Those ungrateful evil doers!). Therefore, we must “deter the rise of a new great-power competitor”. And we must do this by “deterring or, when needed, by compelling regional foes to act in ways that protect American interests and principles…” Therefore, “The Pentagon needs to begin to calculate the force necessary to protect, independently, US interests in Europe, East Asia and the Gulf at all times.” And we better make some changes because the current extent of our military bases in the region do not allow for us to do that.
So it’s all about using our vastly superior weapons of mass destruction to protect American interests abroad. Their countries, our interests. They have them, we want them and we must get them. There is not the slightest indication anywhere in the document that suggests that people living in other countries have any rights when it comes to
our interests.
Oh, but the document also speaks of our “principles”. That must add some moral weight to their plans, right? Nope. They say nothing about what those principles are. And since there is no separation anywhere in their document between our principles and our interests, it is obvious that they consider our principles to be the equivalent of taking whatever we want – using our superior military force to do so.
A decent respect for the opinions of mankindThere is one other major difference between the U.S. Declaration of Independence and PNAC’s documents and philosophy, which underlies all the other differences. The authors of the Declaration, recognizing that the writing and signing of their document is about to commit themselves to a major war, state that “a decent respect for the opinions of mankind” requires them to justify the moral reasons for declaring themselves an independent nation. Why do they feel that is necessary?
That statement constitutes recognition of their bond to the rest of humanity. It’s a recognition that because the war that their Declaration commits them to will result in the deaths of many innocent people, before they can morally commit themselves to such an act they must be able to morally justify it. And their humility prevents them from making a claim that they need only justify their actions to themselves alone. Rather, their bond with the rest of humanity requires that they morally justify their actions to the world.
Again, this is completely the opposite of PNAC. PNAC feels no obligation to morally justify their actions to anyone. It is enough that they state that the United States of America must use its military force to achieve its interests, principles and prosperity. Their arrogance causes them to merely assume that if something is in their interests then it is morally justified. Period. The hell with the opinions of other people. The hell with the United Nations. The hell with international law. They need not justify the preemptive use of military force to anyone.
That is not an attitude that I can condone, especially when it is evident that the military actions of the United States will result in untold thousand, or hundreds of thousands, or millions of deaths and permanent injuries of innocent people.
These people who now run our country are not American in the sense of being guided by the principles upon which our country was founded. They are simply arrogant thugs – seen by the rest of the world as war criminals.
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