Put
Away The Flags
By Howard Zinn
02 July, 2007
Countercurrents.org
On
this July 4, we would do well to 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.
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."
On the eve of the Mexican
War, an American journalist declared it our "Manifest Destiny to
overspread the continent allotted by Providence." 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."
We see in Iraq that our soldiers
are not different. They have, perhaps against their better nature, killed
thousands of Iraq civilians. And some soldiers have shown themselves
capable of brutality, of torture.
Yet they are victims, too,
of our government's lies.
How many times have we heard
President Bush tell the troops that if they die, if they return without
arms or legs, or blinded, it is for "liberty," for "democracy"?
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 Sept. 11 becomes the justification
for killing tens of thousands of people in Afghanistan and Iraq.
And nationalism is given
a special virulence when it is said to be blessed by Providence. Today
we have a president, invading two countries in four years, who announced
on the campaign trail in 2004 that God speaks through him.
We need to refute the idea
that our nation is different from, morally superior to, the other imperial
powers of world history.
We need to assert our allegiance
to the human race, and not to any one nation.
Howard Zinn,
a World War II bombardier, is the author of the best- selling "A
People's History of the United States" (Perennial Classics, 2003,
latest edition). This piece was distributed by the Progressive Media
Project. Email to: Progressive Media Project using our contact form.
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