Patriotism

an essay by Roger B Rueda

In Mark Twain's “Notebook,” [Patriotism] ...is a word which always commemorates a robbery. There isn't a foot of land in the world which doesn't represent the ousting and re-ousting of a longline of successive “owners” who each in turn, as “patriots” with proud swelling hearts defended it against the next gang of “robbers” who came to steal it and did —and became swelling-hearted patriots in their turn.

Today, let me dip into this lexeme. It is, of course, too familiar a word but it is so far down that we need to take a look at it many times to grab hold of it well into our dream boxes.

Patriotism, based on the Random House Dictionary, is devoted love, support, and defense of one's country; national loyalty. Well, it has radial pith to other people and it has probity I suppose.

You might wonder why I am pitching into patriotism now. What have I pigged out? Definitely, I just want to usher you to the other loins of patriotism.

A great anti-patriot Gustave Hervé justly calls patriotism a superstition--one far more injurious, brutal, and inhumane than religion. The superstition of religion originated in man's inability to explain natural phenomena. That is, when primitive man heard thunder or saw the lightning, he could not account for either, and therefore concluded that back of them must be a force greater than himself. Similarly he saw a supernatural force in the rain, and in the various other changes in nature. Patriotism, on the other hand, is a superstition artificially created and maintained through a network of lies and falsehoods; a superstition that robs man of his self-respect and dignity, and increases his arrogance and conceit.

In “More Maxims of Mark” by Johnson in 1927 patriot is defined there as the person who can holler the loudest without knowing what he is hollering about. This is quite farcical but on ice.

In “Patriotism: A Menace to Liberty ,” Emma Goldman says that thinking men and women the world over are beginning to realize that patriotism is too narrow and limited a conception to meet the necessities of our time.

Then she levels out further that the people are urged to be patriotic ... by sacrificing their own children. Patriotism requires allegiance to the flag, which means obedience and readiness to kill father, mother, brother, sister.

Goldman admonishes that conceit, arrogance, and egotism are the essentials of patriotism. [...] Patriotism assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate. Those who have 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 the others.

Culled from her paper—Goldman yaks in her luscious disquisition that Leo Tolstoy, the greatest anti-patriot of our times, defines patriotism as the principle that will justify the training of wholesale murderers; a trade that requires better equipment for the exercise of man-killing than the making of such necessities of life as shoes, clothing, and houses; a trade that guarantees better returns and greater glory than that of the average workingman.

“Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons,” Bertrand Russell thought. This is true nowadays. Many go west because of some very daft whyfor. They heft things inexorably or never at all.

Perhaps, Senaca is right when he said “Men love their country, not because it is great, but because it is their own.” Possibly!?

Lin Yutang, however, has a piquant two cents worth of patriotism: “What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as a child?” What do you think?

Subjectively as a moral sentiment, patriotism has no benefits. It can only egg on exclusivity or illegitimate druthers for one's fellow citizens over other human beings. Like all forms of love, it can blind you to faults. These problems are cold sober. After all, some forms of patriotism identify a particular nation with exclusiveness and the unfair treatment of foreign countries.

Kids are taught in every country to be patriot about their land of their birth. I think, to many people this is scalded and this is a horrific thing.

Patriotism is what leads to over puffed up egos and opinions about one's realm. And these kids with over overblown opinions about their own countries think theirs are best and will “superbly” fight for and die for their patria. But who cares if, for instance, he/she dies on the theater of war.

He/she is nondescript and he/she is forgotten and the country can live up to its mammoth priggishness for a bit longer before it needs another war to bear out it's so good.

Patriotism is what revs enmities and conflicts. It's synonymic with hubris and over-inflated ego of one's country and is grody.

Someday there will be a world without purlieus because we are starting to be ultramodern and all-embracing recreants. Hence, think about the loins you have seen with a frog chaser.