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OPINION
WWW.KANSAN.COM
JULY 6-JULY 12,2005
GUEST COMMENTARY
Call to abandon nationalism
HOWARD ZINN Author of the best-selling "A People's History of the United States." He wrote this for Progressive Media Project.
PAGE 21
On July 4, we would do well to renounce nationalism and all its symbols: its flags, its pledges of allegiance, its anthems, its insistence in song that God must single out America to be blessed.
Is not nationalism — that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary so fierce it engenders mass murder — one of the great evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred?
National spirit can be benign in a country that is small and lacking both in military power and a hunger for expansion (Switzerland, Norway, Costa Rica and many more). But in a nation like ours — huge, possessing thousands of weapons of mass destruction — what might have been harmless pride became an arrogant nationalism dangerous to others and to ourselves.
These ways of thinking cultivated, nurtured, indoctrinated from childhood on have been useful to those in power, and deadly for those out of power.
Our citizenry has been brought up to see our nation as different from others, an exception in the world, uniquely moral, expanding into other lands in order to bring civilization, liberty and democracy.
As our armies were committing massacres in the Philippines (at least 600,000 Filipinos died in a few years of conflict)), Elihu Root, our secretary of war, was saying: "The American soldier is different from all other soldiers of all other countries since the war began. He is the advance guard of liberty and justice, of law and order, and of peace and happiness."
On the eve of the Mexican War, an American journalist declared it our "Manifest Destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence." After the invasion of Mexico began, The New York Herald announced: "We believe it is a part of our destiny to civilize that beautiful country."
We see in Iraq that our soldiers are not different. They have, perhaps against their better nature, killed thousands of Iraqi civilians. And some soldiers have shown themselves capable
That self-deception started early.
The killing of Indians was seen as approved by God, the taking of land as commanded by the Bible. The Puritans cited one of the Psalms, which says: "Ask of me, and I shall give thee, the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the Earth for thy possession." (Psalm 2:8)
of brutality, of torture.
Yet they are victims, too, of our government's lies.
How many times have we heard President Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld tell the troops that if they die, if they return without arms or legs, or blinded, it is for "liberty," for "democracy"?
One of the effects of nationalist thinking is a loss of a sense of proportion. The killing of 2,300 people at Pearl Harbor becomes the justification for killing 240,000 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The killing of 3,000 people on Sept. 11 becomes the justification for killing tens of thousands of people in Afghanistan and Iraq.
We need to refute the idea that our nation is different from, morally superior to, the other imperial powers of world history.
And nationalism is given a special virulence when it is said to be blessed by Providence. Today we have a president, invading two countries in four years, who announced on the campaign trail last year that God speaks through him.
We need to assert our allegiance to the human race, and not to any one nation.
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Good riddance to JR Giddens! Go miss your shots for some other team.
*Free for all... you remember when I called you last year drunk and said not to blow yourself up with fireworks? Well, I'm a little drunk again this year and my moral for today is ... mmm ... well I have no morals. The moral for the day is...don't blow yourself up.*
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