nay nay

[Dan Scanlan <coolhanduke@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Put away the flags

By Howard Zinn

07/02/06 "The Progressive" -- -- 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 and Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld 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 last
year 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). He can be reached at
pmproj@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx