The Anti-Empire Report n°58 e 59: naziyankee e patr ioti, fottetevi

The Empire -- A Status Report
There are a number of expressions and slogans associated with the Nazi
regime in Germany which have become commonly known in English.
"Sieg Heil!" -- Victory Hail!
"Arbeit macht frei" -- Work will make you free.
"Denn heute gehört uns Deutschland und morgen die ganze Welt" --
Today Germany, tomorrow the world
But none perhaps is better known than "Deutschland über alles" --
Germany above all.

Thus I was taken aback when I happened to come across the website of
the United States Air Force -- www.airforce.com/ -- and saw on its
first page a heading "Above all". Lest you think that this refers
simply and innocently to planes high up in the air, this page links to
another -- www.airforce.com/achangingworld/ -- where "Above all" is
repeated even more prominently, with links to sites for "Air
Dominance", "Space Dominance", and "Cyber Dominance", each of
which in
turn repeats "Above all". These guys don't kid around. They're not
your father's imperialist war mongers. If they're planning on a new
"thousand-year Reich", let's hope that their fate is no better than
the original, which lasted 12 years.

continua : http://members.aol.com/bblum6/aer58.htm

Some thoughts on "patriotism" written on July 4
Most important thought: I'm sick and tired of this thing called
"patriotism".

The Japanese pilots who bombed Pearl Harbor were being patriotic. The
German people who supported Hitler and his conquests were being
patriotic, fighting for the Fatherland. All the Latin American
military dictators who overthrew democratically-elected governments
and routinely tortured people were being patriotic -- saving their
beloved country from "communism".

General Augusto Pinochet of Chile: "I would like to be remembered as a
man who served his country."[1]

P.W. Botha, former president of apartheid South Africa: "I am not
going to repent. I am not going to ask for favours. What I did, I did
for my country."[2]

Pol Pot, mass murderer of Cambodia: "I want you to know that
everything I did, I did for my country."[3]

Tony Blair, former British prime minister, defending his role in the
murder of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis: "I did what I thought was
right for our country."[4]

I won't bore you with what George W. has said.

At the end of World War II, the United States gave moral lectures to
their German prisoners and to the German people on the inadmissibility
of pleading that their participation in the holocaust was in obedience
to their legitimate government. To prove to them how legally
inadmissable this defense was, the World War II allies hanged the
leading examples of such patriotic loyalty.

I was once asked after a talk: "Do you love America?" I answered:
"No". After pausing for a few seconds to let that sink in amidst
several nervous giggles in the audience, I continued with: "I don't
love any country. I'm a citizen of the world. I love certain
principles, like human rights, civil liberties, democracy, an economy
which puts people before profits."

I don't make much of a distinction between patriotism and nationalism.
Some writers equate patriotism with allegiance to one's country and
government, while defining nationalism as sentiments of ethno-national
superiority. However defined, in practice the psychological and
behavioral manifestations of nationalism and patriotism -- and the
impact of such sentiments on actual policies -- are not easily
distinguishable.

Howard Zinn has called nationalism "a set of beliefs taught to each
generation in which the Motherland or the Fatherland is an object of
veneration and becomes a burning cause for which one becomes willing
to kill the children of other Motherlands or Fatherlands."[5] ...
"Patriotism is used to create the illusion of a common interest that
everybody in the country has."[6]

Strong feelings of patriotism lie near the surface in the great
majority of Americans. They're buried deeper in the more "liberal" and
"sophisticated", but are almost always reachable, and ignitable.

Alexis de Tocqueville, the mid-19th century French historian,
commented about his long stay in the United States: "It is impossible
to conceive a more troublesome or more garrulous patriotism; it
wearies even those who are disposed to respect it."[7]

George Bush Sr., pardoning former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger
and five others in connection with the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages
scandal: "First, the common denominator of their motivation -- whether
their actions were right or wrong -- was patriotism."[8]

What a primitive underbelly there is to this rational society. The US
is the most patriotic, as well as the most religious, country of the
so-called developed world. The entire American patriotism thing may be
best understood as the biggest case of mass hysteria in history,
whereby the crowd adores its own power as troopers of the world's only
superpower, a substitute for the lack of power in the rest of their
lives. Patriotism, like religion, meets people's need for something
greater to which their individual lives can be anchored.

So this July 4, my dear fellow Americans, some of you will raise your
fists and yell: "U! S! A! U! S! A!". And you'll parade with your flags
and your images of the Statue of Liberty. But do you know that the
sculptor copied his mother's face for the statue, a domineering and
intolerant woman who had forbidden another child to marry a Jew?

"Patriotism," Dr. Samuel Johnson famously said, "is the last refuge of
a scoundrel." Ambrose Bierce begged to differ -- It is, he said, the
first.

"Patriotism is the conviction that this country is superior to all
other countries because you were born in it." George Bernard Shaw

"Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits but
according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage --
torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations,
imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of
civilians -- which does not change its moral colour when it is
committed by 'our' side. ... The nationalist not only does not
disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a
remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them." George Orwell[9]

"Pledges of allegiance are marks of totalitarian states, not
democracies," says David Kertzer, a Brown University anthropologist
who specializes in political rituals. "I can't think of a single
democracy except the United States that has a pledge of
allegiance."[10] Or, he might have added, that insists that its
politicians display their patriotism by wearing a flag pin. Hitler
criticized German Jews and Communists for their internationalism and
lack of national patriotism. Along with Mussolini in Italy, the Führer
demanded that "true patriots" publicly vow and display their
allegiance to their respective fatherlands. Postwar democratic
governments of the two countries made a conscious effort to minimize
such shows of national pride.

(Oddly enough, the American Pledge of Allegiance was written by
Francis Bellamy, a founding member, in 1889, of the Society of
Christian Socialists, a group of Protestant ministers who asserted
that "the teachings of Jesus Christ lead directly to some form or
forms of socialism.")

Following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, we could read
that there's "now a high degree of patriotism in the Soviet Union
because Moscow acted with impunity in Afghanistan and thus underscored
who the real power in that part of the world is."[11]

"Throughout the nineteenth century, and particularly throughout its
latter half, there had been a great working up of this nationalism in
the world. ... Nationalism was taught in schools, emphasized by
newspapers, preached and mocked and sung into men. It became a
monstrous cant which darkened all human affairs. Men were brought to
feel that they were as improper without a nationality as without their
clothes in a crowded assembly. Oriental peoples, who had never heard
of nationality before, took to it as they took to the cigarettes and
bowler hats of the West."   H.G. Wells, English writer[12]

"The very existence of the state demands that there be some privileged
class vitally interested in maintaining that existence. And it is
precisely the group interests of that class that are called
patriotism." Mikhail Bakunin, Russian anarchist[13]

"To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by
geography." George Santayana, American educator and philosopher

continua su: http://members.aol.com/bblum6/aer59.htm
[ Auf dieses Posting antworten ]