Super-Patriotism’s Intercourse
With The Secret Sect Of PowerBy Gaither Stewart
19 November, 2007
Online Journal(Rome) The most insidious characteristic of the super-patriot is the support he lends to the sect of Power. He melds in with Power, and is its vanguard. He joins the societies circulating invisibly in the community, influencing people who don’t suspect that the sect of Power is observing them and evaluating them to determine if they measure up.
Your “patriotic” neighbor hangs out bigger Stars and Stripes. Your four-year old son practices the Pledge of Allegiance for his kindergarten debut. Every second car sports a “good ole USA” bumper sticker. Just a few eccentrics, you think. Then you meet the ugly faces surrounding the peace marchers and their shouts of “traitors” and “terrorists.”
Then, overnight, the new laws to back up the charges are in place. Soon arrive the denunciations, house searches, controlled e-mails and cellphones, No Fly lists, arrests for abusing the flag and the 750,000 suspect persons list.
And then arrive the reports of legalized torture and the desaparecidos of America.
And the tension spirals upwards.
The USA Patriot Act passed 45 days after 9/11 suggests the necessity of examining “patriotism.” The name “Patriot Act” did not arrive arbitrarily. In effect, the Patriot Act is anti-patriotic. New-speak again!
The Patriot Act threatens freedoms, at home and abroad. It gives the US President the power to access your private life, to secretly search your home and make arbitrary arrests. Abroad, it conducts criminal activities, the black night flights of CIA aircraft in the kidnapping, secret jailing in foreign lands and torturing of suspected “terrorists.”
Such powers are the essence of Fascism.
The word, patriotism, suggests the love for one’s native country and readiness to defend it. Most Americans consider themselves patriotic. In pre-revolutionary America however colonial power defined patriot as ‘a factious disturber of the government’ and ‘patriotism the last refuge of the scoundrel.’ America was born out of the dissent of patriots. Whether an act or an attitude is patriotic or seditious depends on the point of view.
Since the Revolutionary War the word Patriotism has been co-opted by rightwing causes. As a result of neocon fascistic-imperialistic ideology combined with “its” 9/11, the label Patriot has shifted farther to the right.The degeneration of the word patriotism reflects a major social change in America of the last seven years. In a land where the flag is used as a weapon and the hate for everything not American is common, patriotism has morphed into vicious jingoism. As yesterday in Nazi Germany, co-opted patriotism helps keep Fascists in power in America and muzzles potential opposition.
Paramilitary militia movements across the USA have also appropriated the word. They are filled with hate for everything foreign and/or intellectual—making them allies of Power. Paradoxically, in parts of the heartland it also reflects hatred for the federal government—of course for what it does not do.
Patriotism and Nationalism
Patriotism includes pride in the fatherland’s achievements. Patriotism is expressed by symbolic acts such as displaying the flag, singing the national anthem, reciting the Pledge of Allegiance and putting patriotic bumper stickers on your car. Patriotism implies identification with other members of the nation. It requires that the individual place the interests of the nation above his personal interests. Death in battle for the fatherland is the archetype extreme patriotism.
Thus patriotism is used as a synonym for nationalism. American patriotism today has many faces, ranging from Americanism, to super-patriotism and ultra-nationalism, to chauvinism and jingoism.
Patriotism does not require a program of action; it alone suffices to stimulate nationalism. Patriotism also has salient ethical connotations: the fatherland is a moral standard or a moral value in itself. The expression my country right or wrong is the extreme form of this belief.
Thus, patriotism is a borderline affair, love for the homeland on one side, belief in its supremacy on the other. Patriotism will always be not many steps behind jingoism. It is the respectable face of jingoism. Movements like Nazism and Fascism were viscerally negative toward other people's fatherlands just as the US government today is negative toward the world at large.Patriotism in wartime contributes to the military effort as in the USA. America’s permanent war is jingoism’s creator and container. Wartime demands made on patriotism are transitory but afterwards patriots are to keep a sharp eye out for expressions of non-patriotism and to label it un-American. This is where patriotism gets nasty, fascistic. Denunciations by patriots were the basis of the control system used by the Nazi Gestapo and by one of history’s most invasive secret police, the STASI of former East Germany, both of which must have served as models for Homeland Security.
Patriotism and Morality
The basic implication of patriotism is that a person has greater moral duties to fellow patriots than to foreigners. Therefore, it easily morphs into racism.
The view that moral duties apply equally to all humans is known as cosmopolitanism, despised by dictatorial regimes. As once in Nazi Germany, American super-patriots today equate cosmopolitanism with treason. They consider dissenters as traitors and peace movements anti-American.Though super-patriots regard it as a virtue, the problem is that patriotisms conflict. Iraqis, once they found an invader on their soil, rebelled. Threatened Iranians feel patriotism and love for their ancient culture. Soldiers of both sides in a war feel equally patriotic, creating an ethical paradox: If patriotism is a virtue, then the enemy is equally virtuous, so why try to kill him?
In the USA today there is increasingly less room for genuine healthy affection for the nation because of the absence of a common program that the people can share with their rulers.
The less than 30% who do share in its wars are Power’s allies. Power has at its disposal the universe of blind super-patriots, Power’s Fifth column. Yet, although Power exploits the super-patriot robots, it also despises them and does little for them. It is a paradox that the lower on the social-economic scale, among the poorest and most trampled on, the more paranoid patriotic the patriots are.Power also counts on the acquiescence of the unwitting semi-patriots in the wings. They too are allies, deceived by senseless propaganda and demagogy and repetition of slogans. Or they are cowed by fear of punishment.
How can the people intelligently share their government’s wars? Or its aspirations for global power? Impossible! That is a serious miscalculation on the part of Power. The people cannot be part of a project for world supremacy. Normal people cannot share in such secret aspirations for world supremacy.
We like to think that as a man matures he will come to find it unnecessary to appear as a pillar of society, ready to prove in every way that he is a good citizen. That reciting the Pledge of Allegiance and hanging out Old Glory does not make him patriotically superior.
As the role of patriotism becomes clear, the citizen wonders about the intents of the obscure sects gathered in their inaccessible conferences inside dark caves and dank grottoes of Power. And in a brilliant burst of understanding he comes to see the usurpers of power for the troglodytes they are.
Gaither Stewart is originally from Asheville, NC. He has lived his adult life abroad, in Germany and Italy, alternated with residences in The Netherlands, France, Mexico, Argentina and Russia. After a career in journalism as Italian correspondent for the Rotterdam newspaper, Algemeen Dagblad, and contributor to media in various European countries. His books of fiction include, "Icy Current Compulsive Course, To Be A Stranger" and "Once In Berlin", published by Wind River Press. His new novel, "Asheville," is published by www.Wastelandrunes.com He lives with his wife, Milena, in Rome, Italy. E-mail: [email protected]
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