The Scourge of Nationalism

[mothandrust]

The Scourge of Nationalism

By Howard Zinn


I cannot get out of my mind the recent news photos of ordinary Americans sitting on chairs, guns on laps, standing unofficial guard on the Arizona border, to make sure no Mexicans cross over into the United States. There was something horrifying in the realization that, in this twenty-first century of what we call "civilization," we have carved up what we claim is one world into 200 artificially created entities we call "nations" and armed to apprehend or kill anyone who crosses a boundary.

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? These ways of thinking--cultivated, nurtured, indoctrinated from childhood on--have been useful to those in power, and deadly for those out of power.

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 becomes an arrogant nationalism dangerous to others and to ourselves.

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, democracy.

That self-deception started early. When the first English settlers moved into Indian land in Massachusetts Bay and were resisted, the violence escalated into war with the Pequot Indians. 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."

When the English set fire to a Pequot village and massacred men, women, and children, the Puritan theologian Cotton Mather said: "It was supposed that no less than 600 Pequot souls were brought down to hell that day."

It was our "Manifest Destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence," an American journalist declared on the eve of the Mexican War. 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."

It was always supposedly for benign purposes that our country went to war. We invaded Cuba in 1898 to liberate the Cubans, and went to war in the Philippines shortly after, as President McKinley put it, "to civilize and Christianize" the Filipino people.

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."

Nationalism is given a special virulence when it is blessed by Providence. Today we have a President, invading two countries in four years, who believes he gets messages from God. Our culture is permeated by a Christian fundamentalism as poisonous as that of Cotton Mather. It permits the mass murder of "the other" with the same confidence as it accepts the death penalty for individuals convicted of crimes. A Supreme Court justice, Antonin Scalia, told an audience at the University of Chicago Divinity School, speaking of capital punishment: "For the believing Christian, death is no big deal."

How many times have we heard Bush and Rumsfeld talk to the troops in Iraq, victims themselves, but also perpetrators of the deaths of thousands of Iraqis, telling them that if they die, if they return without arms or legs, or blinded, it is for "liberty," for "democracy"?

Nationalist super-patriotism is not confined to Republicans. When Richard Hofstadter analyzed American presidents in his book The American Political Tradition, he found that Democratic leaders as well as Republicans, liberals as well as conservatives, invaded other countries, sought to expand U.S. power across the globe.

Liberal imperialists have been among the most fervent of expansionists, more effective in their claim to moral rectitude precisely because they are liberal on issues other than foreign policy. Theodore Roosevelt, a lover of war, and an enthusiastic supporter of the war in Spain and the conquest of the Philippines, is still seen as a Progressive because he supported certain domestic reforms and was concerned with the national environment. Indeed, he ran as President on the Progressive ticket in 1912.

Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, was the epitome of the liberal apologist for violent actions abroad. In April of 1914, he ordered the bombardment of the Mexican coast, and the occupation of the city of Vera Cruz, in retaliation for the arrest of several U.S. sailors. He sent Marines into Haiti in 1915, killing thousands of Haitians who resisted, beginning a long military occupation of that tiny country. He sent Marines to occupy the Dominican Republic in 1916. And, after running in 1916 on a platform of peace, he brought the nation into the slaughter that was taking place in Europe in World War I, saying it was a war to "make the world safe for democracy."

In our time, it was the liberal Bill Clinton who sent bombers over Baghdad as soon as he came into office, who first raised the specter of "weapons of mass destruction" as a justification for a series of bombing attacks on Iraq. Liberals today criticize George Bush's unilateralism. But it was Clinton's Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, who told the United Nations Security Council that the U.S. would act "multilaterally when we can, unilaterally when we must."

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 September 11 becomes the justification for killing tens of thousands of people in Afghanistan and Iraq.

What makes our nation immune from the normal standards of human decency?

Surely, we must 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.

We need to assert our allegiance to the human race, and not to any one nation. We need to refute the idea that our nation is different from, morally superior to, the other imperial powers of world history.

The poets and artists among us seem to have a clearer understanding of the limits of nationalism.

Langston Hughes (no wonder he was called before the Committee on Un-American Activities) addressed his country as follows:

You really haven't been a virgin for so long

It's ludicrous to keep up the pretext . . .

You've slept with all the big powers

In military uniforms

And you've taken the sweet life

Of all the little brown fellows . . .

Being one of the world's big vampires

Why don't you come out and say so

Like Japan, and England, and France

And all the other nymphomaniacs of power.

Henry David Thoreau, provoked by the war in Mexico and the nationalist fervor it produced, wrote: "Nations! What are nations? . . . Like insects, they swarm. The historian strives in vain to make them memorable." In our time, Kurt Vonnegut (Cat's Cradle) places nations among those unnatural abstractions he calls granfalloons, which he defines as "a proud and meaningless association of human beings."

There have always been men and women in this country who have insisted that universal standards of decent human conduct apply to our nation as to others. That insistence continues today and reaches out to people all over the world. It lets them know, like the balloons sent over the countryside by the Paris Commune in 1871, that "our interests are the same."

source - http://www.progressive.org/?q=node/199

[Young David]

So open borders is the solution? How about the North American Union & the National ID? Nah, I'm not buying it. Howard Zinn only knows half the story. Ask him what happened on 9/11, he'll probably tell you something about angry Arabs. The elite want to build a world government, we who are aware of 9/11 & related conspiracies know that. I respect the right of all nations to be soveirgn & advocate leaving them alone, total non-interventionist foreign policy. I respect their right to prosper & be in charge of their own lives & economies. Zinn is misdefining nationalism as colonialism. I'm not a nationalist out of some superiority complex that we're the best, (there is that kind of misguided nationalism that a lot of Americans do suffer from,) but rather out of the desire for the preservation & restoration of freedom. Horrible atroscities have been commited by the people who founded America but that's all said & done & I had nothing to do with it. If we let the elites erase our soveirgnty our rights will go along with it & that can't happen. They're not doing it for the Mexicans, they're doing it for their own benefit & that will become apparent with time. I kind of get what he's saying here but since the "end game" of the elite is a world government with no borders & an electronic tracking system, & that's that's exactly what the pro-amnesty people advocate I can't support it.

[harflimon]

I agree and disagree. While in a general humanistic view its terrible to see a bunch of people with guns guarding an imaginary line, there are exterior elements to this. Though a majority probably have no idea about elites and are there because of some bullshit nationalistic ideal, there is still a minority that knows what these impoverished people coming here means.

What it means is a breakdown of our own economic order. It means pressure on our own lower class while increased profit for the well-off. And these well-off people are the ones that created the abject poverty in Mexico in the first place. It would be better if they took their guns and went and sat outside the White House, but they are only misguided in their efforts not completely wrong.

Besides we all know them sitting with guns on the border is mostly symbolic. I doubt they ever shoot at people and the most they can do is alert border security which can never cover all the people. It's a tide that can't be stemmed with guns.

[hilly7]

Actually I think it's to help Mexico enter the Olympics. By keeping most Mexicans in Mexico they may have a shot at having a team. Currently anyone who can run, jump or swim have left the country.

[Henry]

No. Nationalism is the best defense the people have. Seems your in the UK - do you like giving up your nationalism and therefore having Brussels make all of your decisions? The anti-nationalism meme does not originate from the citizenry, but from the power brokers who are above our pay grade. Take pride in and protect your locale, and value your cultural identity. Don't trade it for a generic media-approved international culture. Love foreigners, but don't abandon the concept of foreigner - there's nothing wrong with it, and it's in fact healthy, despite what the schools and tv are teaching us.

[Young David]

And for every person guarding the border with a gun there is a Mexican reconquista illegal immigrant who is just as militantly anti-American and wants to not only come here for work & a better life but wants to actually take over a large part of the United States & make it Mexico (thanks to movements that are funded by elite globalists like the Rockefeller and Ford Foundation) but that is not mentioned in this article. So it actually is a national security threat, unlike the Muslim terrorist bullshit.

The thing that actually concerns me is the laws being changed in order to legalize the illegals, for example in this last amnesty bill that failed it contained provisions to force all Americans to carry the National ID card & it continue to pave way for the North American Union, so the whole thing is the blueprint for a slave grid a continuance of NAFTA. They're trying to use the illegal immigrants they're letting in here as an excuse to implement this stuff, that's what I oppose the most. It's almost like they're trying to guilt trip us by waving a lot of poor, down on their luck people in our faces & saying "look how bad their lives are, you can stand to give up a little of your rights to help them out." But the truth is that if they really wanted to help those people they could do it in real ways like revoking NAFTA & sending some of that however many billions of dollars in aid that are wasted on Israel every year to Mexico. No we should hold on to the freedom we have & fight to regain the rest that we're entitled to.

[mothandrust]

Quote:So open borders is the solution? How about the North American Union & the National ID? Nah, I'm not buying it. Howard Zinn only knows half the story. Ask him what happened on 9/11, he'll probably tell you something about angry Arabs. The elite want to build a world government, we who are aware of 9/11 & related conspiracies know that. I respect the right of all nations to be soveirgn & advocate leaving them alone, total non-interventionist foreign policy. I respect their right to prosper & be in charge of their own lives & economies. Zinn is misdefining nationalism as colonialism. I'm not a nationalist out of some superiority complex that we're the best, (there is that kind of misguided nationalism that a lot of Americans do suffer from,) but rather out of the desire for the preservation & restoration of freedom. Horrible atroscities have been commited by the people who founded America but that's all said & done & I had nothing to do with it. If we let the elites erase our soveirgnty our rights will go along with it & that can't happen. They're not doing it for the Mexicans, they're doing it for their own benefit & that will become apparent with time. I kind of get what he's saying here but since the "end game" of the elite is a world government with no borders & an electronic tracking system, & that's that's exactly what the pro-amnesty people advocate I can't support it.

hey Infinite, or should i call you Skillz, pleased to see you've sussed the name change.

with regard to the article i'm not saying i agree with it all but i love HZ and the way he writes and i think he generally has interesting perspectives.

as for 9/11 i suspect there are very few who know even a fraction of the story, let alone half - and i'm happy to count myself as part of that group - i.e. i will keep an open mind on it without definitive proof (and personally i doubt HZ would talk of angry Arabs, expect he would shy away from making any commitment, given the amount of disinfo, flack, and lack of published/hard evidence).

with regard to nationalism i suspect we are as far apart as possible and as such i'm unlikely to have much influence on your views, except to antagonise you - which is not my intention - the same is true for Henry and perhaps others (so best put my tin helmet on).

to be honest, having just read through your post again (and again) i don't really have much of a direct response - i got caught up with Mad on a similar issue some time back about the UK surrendering rights to Brussels - the trouble was, his post was from a member of UKIP, an ultra nationalist party who play on racist fears to further their agenda. yet their agenda, obviously, was nationalist - opposing more central control. so you see i'm in a quandary, the last thing i want to see is more central control from big/world government but at the same time, nationalism effectively defines one group against another, and in the process favours one group over the other. it is inevitable and there is no way round it. to my mind nationalism is an extension of tribalism - people finding security through identification and association. why should this be a problem? small scale it isn't, necessarily, however large scale (beyond psychological security and identification) it's not only meaningless but also destructive. well, that's how i see it.

i suppose the problem here, or at least the difference between our way of thinking or conceptualising, is that you are looking at the world as it exists and the structures that frame it and are trying to find the best way of moving it forward (in a practical sense). this i'm afraid is beyond me – to my mind the world is stitched up by not only by the world's greediest and most fearful people but also the attitudes that govern their motivation and validation. namely in terms of good and evil with violence as the solution. there appears to be no alternative on offer.

so, i am not thinking (or writing) about the here and now, i'm not offering any practical solutions that could be installed through governments or elites. what interests me is what could theoretically be possible if all the processes, structures and history which frame or world were swept aside. so let's remember, while you and Henry (and others) are talking about the practical i'm talking only in theoretical terms.

and theoretically there is absolutely no validation for nations. to quote from HZ's piece:

Quote:Henry David Thoreau, provoked by the war in Mexico and the nationalist fervor it produced, wrote: "Nations! What are nations? . . . Like insects, they swarm. The historian strives in vain to make them memorable." In our time, Kurt Vonnegut (Cat's Cradle) places nations among those unnatural abstractions he calls granfalloons, which he defines as "a proud and meaningless association of human beings."

people are people – that's it. your average American is no better or worse or more intelligent than your average European, Asian or African – fact. and if you were to converse with them you would also realise they want pretty much the same things from life that you do, namely food and security, and to be left alone (most particularly by authority, i.e. government) (we are all trying to work our way through life in the best way possible).

so, whilst i cannot deny the existence of borders or trade agreements or of people who will willingly label themselves Mexican or American, nor indeed the enormous arsenals these artificial constructs amass from the taxes they impose, that does not give them any validity – except through violence.

and IS, whilst you of course cannot do anything about the raping of the Americas by Europeans (most particularly the English and the Spanish) you do still live off the back of it, while Native Americans effectively live in concentration camps. from this aspect, nationalism and colonialism are the same – remember, the notion of nations is a European concept, cast in stone in 1648 (at Westphalia) and exported to the world. before we arrived, most indigenous cultures did not even have a concept of land ownership – it was the other way round they belonged to, or at the very least worked in harmony with, the land. (which is of course a far more logical position – after all, who ever heard of anyone owning their host?)


just to add one last note of antagonism - freedom. what a complete load of old bollocks. what is freedom? do any of you know - past some silly word that governments hold out as a carrot, or fantasy? there is no such thing as freedom (beyond mastery of one's self).

[MC David]

Somehow I lost the original Skillz part of my name, not sure how that happened :eyebrow:. Anyway, 9/11's fairly simple, just an elaborate false flag operation I think the only thing that's debatable is if there were Muslim patsies involved or not & to what extent but the building's were detonated & all the surrounding evidence shows that American & allied intelligence agencies espescially Israeli were intimately involved. I wrote that about Howard Zinn because I'm not sure if he's ever exposed it as a false flag or if he supports the idea that it was "blowback" from U.S. & U.S. sponsored imperialism. Blowback created the conditions for which the frame-up was believable & perhaps is what got the Muslim patsies to begin with if there were any but it was a false flag operation & that's the first place I look personally to judge if a journalist is accurate enough to be worth reading.

As for nationalism, I may write more about this later but what I am particularly against is the North American Union/New World Order agenda. This is the attempt to herd all of us into a slave grid. I understand that nationalism can be detremental in the ways that you're describing, but I think if we are gonna evolve beyond nation states we have to do it on our own terms, not theirs. So I'm not gonna be standing at the border with a gun but I did oppose the last amnesty bill b/c it included legislation, it's emotional manipulation in my opinion to wave the impoverished illegals immigrants in our faces & say aw "look how bad their lives are, can't you just give up a little of your rights to make them better?" When it's their doing that put those Mexicans in that position & continuing to let them pursue the 'globalization' agenda is gonna continue to impoverish & punish people, you just can't let them advance it they wanna fool us. But I do disagree w/some of the hate that people have for the unregistered Mexican immigrants, it's not them to be mad at it's the elite that both sides should be concerned with. For example the U.S. government sends 2+ billion needless dollars in foreign aid to Israel every year, if that was sent to Mexico instead we wouldn't have all these people wanting to come into the United States but no one (in government) talks about that. The illegal immigration is just like the terrorism, they engineer the problem then offer the solutions for it that benefit their agenda that are deterimental to the people.

I recommend checking out this documentary by Gaylon Ross: "The Global Union"

[MC David]

I meant to write: I opposed the amnesty bill because it included legislation to advance the goals of the mandatory biometric id card for all U.S. citizens & merging the country into the North American Union. Once the U.S. is emerged into the NAU & probably the AU later the constitution of the U.S. will be voided in place of an NAU constitution. This will result is significant loss of liberty so I opposed it. Just like you don't get security out of the sacrifice of liberty I don't think it's a good trade either to say that supposedly you're going to be helping others by sacrficing your liberty. I actually find that kind of hard to believe & think we all are going to be in a bad position when the NWO fully comes in & we're gonna wish we fought to retain the country's soveirgnty.

[faust]

Quote:just to add one last note of antagonism - freedom. what a complete load of old bollocks. what is freedom? do any of you know - past some silly word that governments hold out as a carrot, or fantasy? there is no such thing as freedom (beyond mastery of one's self).

Explain

[MC David]

The definition of freedom may be debatable but tyranny's pretty clear cut & that's what's on the agenda through this North American Union & New World Order.

[faust]

Quote:I meant to write: I opposed the amnesty bill because it included legislation to advance the goals of the mandatory biometric id card for all U.S. citizens & merging the country into the North American Union. Once the U.S. is emerged into the NAU & probably the AU later the constitution of the U.S. will be voided in place of an NAU constitution. This will result is significant loss of liberty so I opposed it. Just like you don't get security out of the sacrifice of liberty I don't think it's a good trade either to say that supposedly you're going to be helping others by sacrficing your liberty. I actually find that kind of hard to believe & think we all are going to be in a bad position when the NWO fully comes in & we're gonna wish we fought to retain the country's soveirgnty.

I doubt that the american constitution will be voided there fella. Realistically it would takes years to bring another constitution into the mix. They're doing very well at subtefuging the original framework anyway.

[mothandrust]

Quote:

Quote:just to add one last note of antagonism - freedom. what a complete load of old bollocks. what is freedom? do any of you know - past some silly word that governments hold out as a carrot, or fantasy? there is no such thing as freedom (beyond mastery of one's self).

Explain

guess i shouldn't have stuck this on the end of my post, seeing as it's rather off topic, but 'freedom' is one of those words like 'peace', or 'justice' or 'democracy' or 'security'... that works because of the warm fluffy feeling it creates inside, without anyone actually knowing what it (they) mean!

i could just as easily ask you to explain.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau said people had to "be forced to be free" - this i think is essentially true. For although 'freedom' is a rallying cry, beyond removing the physical impediments of slavery what else does it mean? do you want to be free of air, of food, of life? or just free from certain things, like tax or responsibility, in which case you must define it.

is 'freedom' a verb or a noun? even as a concept it will have different meanings to everyone - and if you impose your freedom on me then i am no longer free (and, ironically, neither are you). exactly the same arguments can be made for (and against) 'peace'.

perhaps this is all rather theoretical and indefinable - airy-fairy, but if we consider it at a day-to-day level there are just as many unanswerable problems:

does your freedom give you the right to drive your SUV across virgin tundra, polluting and distorting the environment? or to have clothes made by child slaves, or tortured chicken for dinner, or... or... or... is that freedom, or irresponsibility?

or, is freedom, as the song goes, "just another word for nothing left to lose"?

[MC David]

Quote:

Quote:I meant to write: I opposed the amnesty bill because it included legislation to advance the goals of the mandatory biometric id card for all U.S. citizens & merging the country into the North American Union. Once the U.S. is emerged into the NAU & probably the AU later the constitution of the U.S. will be voided in place of an NAU constitution. This will result is significant loss of liberty so I opposed it. Just like you don't get security out of the sacrifice of liberty I don't think it's a good trade either to say that supposedly you're going to be helping others by sacrficing your liberty. I actually find that kind of hard to believe & think we all are going to be in a bad position when the NWO fully comes in & we're gonna wish we fought to retain the country's soveirgnty.

I doubt that the american constitution will be voided there fella. Realistically it would takes years to bring another constitution into the mix. They're doing very well at subtefuging the original framework anyway.

The NAU constitution will override the U.S. constitution just as the EU consitution does. Yes they are subtefuging the original framework, this is part of it. Wake up.

[faust]

Quote:The NAU constitution will override the U.S. constitution just as the EU consitution does. Yes they are subtefuging the original framework, this is part of it. Wake up.

You're talking about it like it's happened already ffs...!!

What EU constitution? EU countries still have sovereignty. There are, obviously, requirements for being a member of such an organisation such as following certain guidelines, but EU law hasn't got to the point where countries sovereign laws are "void"

Subterfuge is not a part of preparing for the NAU constitution, you're just spouting nationalist paranoia :wink: You lost a huge chunk of your liberties when the patriot act came to town, don't try and tell me the patriot act was a plot to bring in the NAU constitution in place :biggrin: