Swanson -- Deeming Nationalism Infantile Isn’t “Hating America”
Deeming Nationalism Infantile Isn’t “Hating America”
Wow, U.S. social media is suffering a pandemic of nationalism just in time for a celebration of a declaration of the crimes and abuses of King George, a laundry list of horrors that pale beside the accomplishments of any recent U.S. president — the quaint abuses of his royal highness of the blue piss who in reality was more progressive and less tyrannical than your average 21st century prime minister, but who was preventing the expansion of the ethnic cleansing further west and showing signs that he would do what he soon did: agree to ending the slave trade. That guy had to go. Proto-communist what he was.
Wow, I must hate America.
Not “hey, that’s false” or “that’s misleading” or “that’s incomplete.” Facts really do not come into it. Beliefs are a duty, not the outcome of learning. It comes down to what is polite. Wearing a shirt that says “Zionism is racism,” is deemed impolite completely regardless of the fact that it’s true. Not just impolite but worse than genocide. Stealing the name of two continents for one country, on the other hand, is not only acceptable but mandatory.
But here’s the thing: I don’t dislike the United States any more or less than any other nation. I find the heart-thumping, open-mouthed drooling, flag-waving, fascistic-ceremony-demanding devotion to a national government and its war machine hugely destructive and damaging. As long as that’s incomprehensible, I’m compelled to face the question: “Well which nation do you love?” But that’s like asking me which knucklehead I favor in a duel, or which jackass am I routing for in a cage fight at the U.S. royal palace, or which race or religion do I cheer for, when I have no use for any of such sides-taking. My sense of self is completely and utterly divorced from the question of who has more money, China or the United States — though why the hell a place with four times the people shouldn’t have roughly four times the money eludes me.
Now, I absolutely adore the fraction of the United States I’ve ever been in, most of the people I’ve ever met there, heaps of natural and human-built locations, all sorts of cultural creations, and so forth. I love the city I live in. But nobody demands that I swear my allegiance to my city’s flag, and to tell you the truth I’m not sure if it even has a flag. No county or state requires me to fund the wholesale slaughter of anyone outside its borders at the whim of a demented narcissist. If nationalism were like neighborhoodism, I’d be fine with it. It’s fun to cheer for a sports team, no matter what geography it goes with. It’s the mistreatment of the other nations’ teams, and the fly-overs of the murder planes that I can do without.
Because, here’s the thing: I also absolutely adore all kinds of other places I’ve been and people I’ve met outside this one country, and — even though I’ve been taught that any particular group of people has to be extensively “humanized” before I should give a damn about them — I’ve not been shown any actual reason to doubt that all humans are humans and equally worth caring about.
My more liberal friends and neighbors understand about bigotry when it comes to almost anything other than nationalism. But if ICE’s death count were equal to the U.S. military’s death count in Iran, there’s not a single one of them who would be watching soccer instead of trying to learn from Albanians or Bolivians or Koreans how people ought to behave when a government is a danger to us all.
Not only is xenophobia the last acceptable bigotry, but it is as insidious as all the others. Hundreds of U.S. professors have studied and debated whether one can overcome “human nature” and achieve a society with less militarism or incarceration or environmental destruction or gun deaths or horrible television shows than the current United States, or whether single-payer healthcare is actually possible, or how one might devise forms of transportation less dangerous, destructive, and isolating than the automobile. And it’s as if 96% of humanity just doesn’t exist.
Why should admitting that 96% of humanity not only exists but sometimes has things to teach as well as things to learn from the 4% be equated with hating that 4%? Why should a Senate candidate’s past bad behavior be more forgivable than usual because he’d even earlier done dramatically worse things to people who were not in or from the United States? Why, for that matter, should we declare various wars to have been fraudulent and catastrophic mass-murder sprees with no justification, and simultaneously praise anyone who took part in them? And why should the mere asking of that question be equated with hating anyone or anything at all?
I’ve searched for the elusive “good nationalism” or “true, positive patriotism” without much success.
But, but . . . BUT aren’t there things I love about the United States? Don’t I love the FREEDOM to be able to say such traitorous Marxist homosexual Muslim drivel as I am now engaged in saying? Well (setting aside the idiotic characterization): Yes. But I love civil liberties everywhere, including in places that have fewer of them and places that have more of them than the United States does. I’m not a fan of the violent threats people will post in response to this, or of the privatized public forum that will proclaim that they meet its “standards”. Those don’t seem to fit with the assertion of freedom. I’m not a big supporter of firing people for opposing genocide or imprisoning people for moving boxes of magazines.
I realize that I lose something by not talking about the U.S. soccer team in the first-person — and not just the imaginary thrill of being a much better soccer player than I am. But I gain a great deal by also not speaking that way about the Pentagon. And I gain even more by identifying with the good in billions of people everywhere. I get no credit for the wonderful people of Albania shutting down their country over a single Trump project. But I identify with them in the way that you may identify with anyone who marches in “No Kings” election rallies for Schumer-Jeffries types, or perhaps in the way that you identify with torch-bearing Nazis, depending on who you are. The world is a huge place with vastly more to offer than is imagined in your nationalism, my dear human. The laboratories of democracy — as well as those of tyranny — are mostly not in this little blinkered corner of the Earth.
No, I’m not a fan of the scary Democrats rumored by Republicans to favor . . . cue the nightmare music . . . OPEN BORDERS! Not a single one of them does. But I am a fan of actually open borders. They’re already open for oligarchs, culture, wildlife, and diseases. Just not most humans. You shouldn’t suffer because of your “race” or religion or gender, etc., but suffering because of where you were born: hey that’s your problem, buddy. If you want to move, just because my holy Roman government bombed your house or you’re not inclined to work harder under illegal sanctions — Boo Hoo Hoo! — well, screw you, jack! You come here and anything could happen. I could learn what happened to your home. I could learn how to protest. I could learn how to cook. I could learn some soccer songs. I could learn that you don’t want to murder or rape anyone — and then where would I be and why would I be voting for senile sociopaths and whose fault would be anything the aristocracy imposes on us?
If you’re still here — I mean if you, dear reader, have read this far — I want to tell you what I like least about nationalism. It’s an all-purpose excuse. Want better schools? Too bad, that’s not the American way! Want better healthcare? You’re trying to infect America with your socialism disease! Want to build more houses? Stop tearing down the fabric of the nation!
Did you know that some people in the UK on each Fourth of July demand Independence from the USA? It’s true, I’ve been there and seen them do it. This year, they asked me to send them a video. I did:
https://davidswanson.org/deeming-nationalism-infantile-isnt-hating-america/
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