The Scourge of Nationalism
Zinn, Howard
It Seems to Me Howard Zinn The Scourge of Nationalism 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...
...The historian strives in vain to make them memorable...
...The killing of Indians was seen as approved by God, the taking of land as commanded by the Bible...
...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...
...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...
...Today we have a President, invading two countriesinfour years, who believeshe gets messages from God...
...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...
...It was our "Manifest Destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence," an American journalist declared on the eve of the Mexican War...
...One of the effects of nationalist thinking is a loss of a sense of proportion...
...It was always supposedly for benign purposes that our country went to war...
...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...
...Our cultureispermeatedbya Christian fundamentalismaspoisonous as that of Cotton Mather.Itpermits the mass murderof"the other" with the same confidenceasitaccepts the death penalty for individuals convictedofcrimes...
...He sent Marines to occupy the Dominican Republic in 1916...
...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...
...would act "multilaterally when we can, unilaterally when we must...
...That insistence continues today and reaches out to people all over the world...
...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 sent Marines into Haiti in 1915, killing thousands of Haitians who resisted, beginning a long military occupation of that tiny country...
...Indeed, he ran as President on the Progressive ticket in 1912...
...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...
...What are nations...
...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...
...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...
...The poets and artists among us seem to have a clearer understanding of the limits of nationalism...
...When the first English settlers moved into Indian land in Massachusetts Bay and were resisted, the violence escalated into war with the Pequot Indians...
...Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, was the epitome of the liberal apologist for violent actions abroad...
...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...
...Nationalism is given a special virulence when it is blessed by Providence...
...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...
...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...
...We need to assert our allegiance to the human race, and not to any one nation...
...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...
...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...
...It lets them know, like the balloons sent over the countryside by the Paris Commune in 1871, that "our interests are the same...
...Liberals today criticize George Bush's unilateralism...
...A Supreme Court justice, Antonin Scalia, toldanaudienceatthe University of Chicago Divinity School, speaking of capital punishment: "For the believing Christian, deathisnobig deal...
...That self-deception started early...
...The killing of 2,300 people at Pearl Harbor becomes the justification for killing 240,000 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki...
...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...
...The killing of 3,000 people on September 11 becomes the justification for killing tens of thousands of people in Afghanistan and Iraq...
...power across the globe...
...But it was Clinton's Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, who told the United Nations Security Council that the U.S...
...Howard Zinn's latest work (with Anthony Arnove) is "Voices of a People's History of the United States...
...After the invasion of Mexico began, the New York Herald announced: "We believe it is a part of our destinytocivilize that beautiful country...
...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...
...What makes our nation immune from the normal standards of human decency...
...Like insects, they swarm...
...sailors...
...It Seems to Me Howard Zinn The Scourge of Nationalism 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...
...He is the advance guard of liberty and justice, of law and order, and of peace and happiness...
...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...
...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...
...Nationalist super-patriotism is not confined to Republicans...
...Henry David Thoreau, provoked by the war in Mexico and the nationalist fervor it produced, wrote: "Nations...
...These ways of thinking-cultivated, nurtured, indoctrinated from childhood on-have been useful to those in power, and deadly for those out of power...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...We need to refute the idea that our nation is different from, morally superior to, the other imperial powers of world history...
Vol. 69 • June 2005 • No. 6
