Patriotism

“Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel”

- DR JOHNSON

“Patriotism …is nothing else but a means of obtaining for the rulers their ambitions and covetous desires, and for the ruled the abdication of human dignity, reason, conscience, and a slavish enthralment to those in power”

- LEO TOLSTOY

Reading 1loneranger’s fascinating account of his childhood on a US Army base leads me to reflect, yet again, on the nature of patriotism. The Oxford Concise defines a patriot as “one who defends or is zealous for his country’s freedom or rights”. While it surely cannot be bad to defend one’s own country’s freedom, as in the two World Wars, over-zealousness in patriotic fervour all too easily leads to the violation of the rights of others. The history of the West is studded with examples of this.

The United States of America, in particular, has a fervent patriotic tradition which originated in the circumstances leading up to the Revolution against the British, in which the activities of self-styled “patriots” played a significant part. Whatever historical hindsight may tell us, the issues in that conflict were by no means clear cut, as the American historian Theodore Draper sets out in fascinating detail in A Struggle for Power. But history is written by the victors, and the American Myth that is the precursor of the American Dream assures us that it was all about blameless downtrodden pioneer colonists being tyrannised by a wicked monarch and a greedy grasping motherland. This myth lingered into the twentieth century, and is hardly fertile soil for the even-handed “Special Relationship” which so many British politicians have naïvely flattered themselves exists between the erstwhile motherland and her wayward overgrown daughter.

Even Kipling, that enthusiastic chronicler of Empire, mocked “jelly-bellied flag-waggers” in his schoolboy novel, Stalky & Co. In the earlier part of the twentieth century it was distastefully fashionable for loud-mouthed sedentary elderly gentlemen who never went nearer a front line than their West End clubs to exhort the valorous young to fight and die gloriously for their country in the Flanders mud. This type of hypocrisy, compounded by the election of a post-war parliament which, according a future prime minister, Stanley Baldwin [Kipling’s cousin, incidentally] largely consisted of “a lot of hard-faced men who look as if they had done very well out of the war”, led to a revulsion in the 1920s and ‘30s against the senseless patriotism of the killing fields, and was largely responsible for the appeasement mentality which at the time was not nearly so dishonourable as it may seem in retrospect.

Sadly, we are immersed in an equally senseless wave of misguided patriotism by the purblind responses to the Twin Towers atrocity of September 2001. Americans, never folk to swallow such a brazen insult, have embarked upon a “war on terror” which is as ill-directed as it is unwise. The spectacle of the world’s only [for the time being] super-power stumbling around the world like an infuriated elephant which has been attacked by a swarm of hornets and blundered into a quagmire is dismaying to all would-be friends not only of the USA but of freedom and democratic values. The ancient saying that the Gods first make mad those whom they wish to destroy is never far from one’s mind.

As Nurse Edith Cavell said before her execution by the Germans in World War I, “Patriotism is not enough”. And she added: “I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone”. True patriotism requires not only the strength of lions, but the wisdom of serpents and the peaceful heart of doves.