What does Patriotism mean to you?

Our national holiday of celebrating patriots and patriotism is winding down.  As the fireworks explode across my small city and reverberate outside my window, let me share a piece published in The Nation in 1991.  

La patrie, the nation state, now has 191 members as listed at the United Nations.  It would appear that an examination is in order for the term "patriotism."  The vote on the EU constitution has been a source of turmoil recently and nationalism has been a root cause.  The evolution of Iraq's "newly" formed government and its "constitution in works" is another example.  Certainly, the precedents of bush's unilateralism in war (Iraq) and peace (controlling the world's internet) give a certain expediency to the examination of exactly what constitutes an ethical and moral patriot.

Adlai Stephenson... knew at the same time that "to strike freedom of the mind with the fist of patriotism" was "an old and ugly subtlety."
            -- Floyd Abrams

More after the flip...

Nietzsche wrote that words with a history cannot be defined. Their meanings are in their stories, their biographies. That is surely the case with "patriotism." Patriotism is as patriots have done. And in relatively recent times--say, since the American and French revolutions--those who have called themselves patriots or who have called others to the banner of patriotism have largely fallen into two camps.

The first company, whose signature is on so many of the bloodiest pages of the modern age, has its spiritual roots in the radical ideologies of the French Revolution. They announced the advent of a new god on earth and a new prophet/commander whose voice was the voice of that god. The new god, of course, was la patrie, the nation, and the new commander was the state.

Abbé Sieyès named the new god: "The nation exists before all. It is the origin of everything. It is the law itself." By 1792, in a petition addressed to the National Assembly, the ferociously jealous claims of the of the new god were made chillingly clear: "The image of the patrie is the sole divinity which it is permitted to worship."

Those claims have echoed in a thousand variations from that day to this. It is the worship of national power, of national greatness, nearly always expressed as power over other peoples and qualities, and as power that acknowledges no limits on its own assertion. This voice has been as clamorous and continuous in our own country as in many others. The line from Col. Alexander Hamilton to Lieut. Col. Oliver North is strong and pure.

The other company of patriots does not march to military time. It prefers the gentle strains of "America the Beautiful" to the strident cadences of "Hail to the Chief" and "The Stars and Stripes Forever." This patriotism is rooted in the love of one's own land and people, love too of the best ideals of one's own culture and tradition. This company of patriots finds no glory in puffing their country up by pulling others' down. This patriotism is profoundly municipal, even domestic. Its pleasures are quiet, its services steady and unpretentious.

This patriotism too has deep roots and long continuity in our history. Its voice is often temporarily shouted down by the battle cries of the first company, but it has never been stilled. Jefferson spoke for it, as did Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr.

We should not be surprised if this voice is often heard lamenting or rebuking the country's failures to live up to its own best ideals, which have always been the ideals of the fullest possible freedom and the most nearly equal justice for all. Its specifically political ideal found its finest expression in Lincoln's "government of, by and for the people," and the American domestic patriot is often heard calling fellow citizens and their officials to this standard. That call is distinctly a citizenly call, and never more so than when, as Father Mapple's wonderful sermon in Moby-Dick has it, the citizen stands firm "against the proud gods and commodores of this earth" and calls every violation of the covenant to account "though he pluck it out from under the robes of Senators and Judges."

                   --JOHN SCHAAR

This Fourth of July, as on some twenty that preceded it, I'll join with family and friends to celebrate America's revolutionary heritage. It's something we started doing when Richard Nixon and his pals were sporting American flag pins in their lapels. Damn it, we thought, it's not their flag, it's not their country, and we're not going to let them steal America from us.

So we get together on the afternoon of the Fourth--it has never rained on our parade--to do all-American things (drink beer, eat hot dogs) and to recall, without rhetorical excess, that this country has a great radical tradition. We nail facsimiles of the Declaration and the Bill of Rights to a tree, and I've noticed that once in a while someone actually ambles over to read them.

It's a peculiarly ambivalent institution, this Fourth of July party of ours--part observance, part parody. A couple of years ago, when flag burning was the idiotic issue of the moment, a friend brought his own flag to burn. Some thought it was a fine way to mark the Fourth; others demurred.

That ambivalence is symbolic of my own mixed feelings about the attitude or set of attitudes we call patriotism. I can invoke the usual heroes from the left's pantheon--Tom Paine and Sojourner Truth, Gene Debs and Jeannette Rankin--and for their sake proclaim myself a patriot. Or I can summon up the monstrous crimes committed in the name of flag and country and denounce patriotism as the root of much of the world's evil.

I'm one of those unreconstructed leftists who still get a lump in the throat on those increasingly rare occasions when someone plays the "Internationale." It may turn out, in the long run, that one of the major crimes committed by the Stalinists was to give internationalism a bad name. I think it's still the way for humanity to go.

"It's a great country,"  my late friend and colleague Milton Mayer used to say, and then he'd add, under his breath, "They're all great countries." That, in a few words, sums up the trouble with patriotism: It's an absolute claim in world where few absolutes make any sense. And to invoke the absolute of patriotism as a rationale for killing and dying --as it is perpetually and horribly invoked--makes the least sense of all.

               Erwin Kroll
            Editor, The Progressive

Richard Falk, Professor of international relations, Princeton University, expressed it best:
"As citizens in the nuclear age we must struggle harder to convince others that the true patriot is now, above all, dedicated to peace and justice, to diplomatic solutions and to a foreign policy respectful of international law and of the United Nations so long as it acts within its own constitutional mandate."