For Memorial Day: on nationalism and patriotism
[NOTE: Both are more threatened in this country now than ever before in my lifetime, due to a frontal assault from the left which controls the media and educational system as well as the federal government. The following is a repeat of a previous post, slightly edited and updated.]
The story “The Man Without a Country” used to be standard reading matter for seventh graders. In fact, it was the first “real” book—as opposed to those tedious Dick and Jane readers—that I was assigned in school.
It was exciting compared to Dick and Jane and the rest, since it dealt with an actual story with some actual drama to it. It struck me as terribly sad—and unfair, too—that Philip Nolan was forced to wander the world, exiled, for one moment of cursing the United States. “The Man Without a Country” was the sort of paean to patriotism that I would guess is rarely or never assigned nowadays to students – au contraire.
Patriotism has gotten a very bad name during the last few decades.
I think this feeling gathered more adherents (at least in this country) during the Vietnam era, and certainly the same is true lately. But patriotism and nationalism seem to have been rejected by a large segment of Europeans even earlier, as a result of the devastation both sentiments were thought to have wrought on that continent during WWI and WWII. Of course, WWII in Europe was a result mainly of German nationalism run amok, coupled with a lot more than nationalism itself. But the experience seemed to have given nationalism as a whole a very bad name.
Here’s author Thomas Mann on the subject, writing in 1947 in the introduction to the American edition of Herman Hesse’s Demian:
If today, when national individualism lies dying, when no single problem can any longer be solved from a purely national point of view, when everything connected with the “fatherland” has become stifling provincialism and no spirit that does not represent the European tradition as a whole any longer merits consideration…
A strong statement of the post-WWII idea of nationalism as a dangerous force, mercifully dead or dying, to be replaced (hopefully) by a pan-national (or, rather, anational) Europeanism. Mann was a German exile from his own country who had learned to his bitter regret the excesses to which a particular type of amoral nationalism can lead. His was an understandable and common response at the time, one that many decades later helped lead to the formation of the EU. The waning but still relatively strong nationalism of the US (as shown by the election of Donald Trump, for example) has been seen by those who agree with Mann as a relic of those dangerous days of nationalism gone mad without any curb of morality or consideration for others.
But the US is not Nazi Germany or anything like it, however much the far left may try to make that analogy. There’s a place for nationalism, and for love of country. Not a nationalism that ignores or tramples on human rights (like that of the Nazis), but one that embraces and strives for and tries to preserve them here and abroad, keeping in mind that—human nature being what it is—no nation on earth can be perfect or anywhere near perfect. The US is far from perfect, but has been a good country nevertheless, always working to be better, with a nationalism that traditionally recognizes that sometimes liberty must be fought for, and that the struggle involves some sacrifice.
So, I’ll echo the verse that figured so prominently in “The Man Without a Country,” and say (corny, but true): …this is my own, my native land. And I’ll also echo Francis Scott Key and add: …the star-spangled banner, O long may it wave, O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave. Those lines from the anthem express a hope that has been fading. But even though things are looking dim for both liberty and courage these days, it is not over.
When I looked back at my original, longer version of this post, I saw that it was written on Memorial Day in 2005, not that long after I began blogging. Seems longer ago than that. This is another portion of what I wrote then, and although I was describing my post-9/11 thoughts, I think it’s especially appropriate now [updates in brackets]:
I’d known the words to [our national anthem] for [over sixty years], and even had to learn about Francis Scott Key and the circumstances under which he wrote them. But I never really thought much about those words. It was just a song that was difficult to sing, and not as pretty as America the Beautiful or God Bless America (the latter, in those very un-PC days of my youth, we used to sing as we marched out of assembly).
The whole first stanza of the national anthem is a protracted version of a question: does the American flag still wave over the fort? Has the US been successful in the battle? As a child, the answer seemed to me to have been a foregone conclusion–of course it waved, of course the US prevailed in the battle; how could it be otherwise? America rah-rah. America always was the winner. Even our withdrawal from Vietnam, so many years later, seemed to me to be an act of choice. Our very existence as a nation had never for a moment felt threatened.
The only threat I’d ever faced to this country was the nightmarish threat of nuclear war. But that seemed more a threat to the entire planet, to humankind itself, rather than to this country specifically. And so I never really heard or felt the vulnerability and fear expressed in Key’s question, which he asked during the War of 1812, so shortly after the birth of the country itself: does that star-spangled banner yet wave, o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?
But now I heard his doubt, and I felt it, too. I saw quite suddenly that there was no “given” in the existence of this country–its continuance, and its preciousness, began to seem to me to be as important and as precarious as they must have seemed to Key during that night in 1814.
And then other memorized writings came to me as well–the Gettysburg Address, whose words those crabby old teachers of mine had made us memorize in their entirety: and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. Here it was again, the sense of the nation as an experiment in democracy and freedom, and inherently special but vulnerable to destruction, an idea I had never until that moment grasped. But now I did, on a visceral level.
We certainly feel the threat now, don’t we?
I’ve often wondered, in recent years, when I hear the anthem, whether we are still free and brave.
Just a few minutes ago, I turned on the TV, and there was Joe Biden, giving a Memorial Day speech. He said that we are the only nation founded upon an idea, the idea of equality for all. But he doesn’t believe that, as his administration’s actions make clear. Radical Democrats and their cohort in the government are the greatest threat to American liberty today, perhaps the greatest threat we’ve ever faced.
Kate:
After so long in Washington, Joe Biden has learned many of catchphrases so often repeated by various politicians, and he repeats them himself. I would say he repeats them without thinking about what they mean — for himself or for the citizens of this country — but that might be unfair as I really don’t know him as a person so can’t judge fairly.
But my image of the man is as someone who set himself a goal about 60 years ago, and since then he has repeated it so often that he has forgotten who he is and who we are. It is just a monomaniacal obsession, with all the ramifications of obsessions.
The big problem is, we and our nation suffer from what this obsession has done to us and to our nation. And to him. A hollow shell of a human, he no longer has the morality to lead us. That’s a cruel judgement, but I can’t reach any other.
Thought long time Europeans ditched nationalism hoping with no borders there would be no European wars.
The Marxists bailed first with their hope of universal Marxism and they are the ones keeping nationalism in the Fascism group often claiming a person with nationalism is a Fascist ie Nazi.
I don’t recall reading The Man Without a Country in school, but we did watch this adaptation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UebdtjFolcA
She is clearly correct. What will
Patriots do about it?
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/benbartee/2023/05/28/trump-national-security-adviser-deep-state-will-for-sure-rig-2024-election-n1698732
We read ‘The Man Without A Country’ and I remember class discussion about what a terrible thing it would be to denounce you country and then not be able to live in it. I was born in 1945 at the end of WWII, my dad and most all of the dads of my friends had been in the military, there never was a time when I did not plan to spend time in the military just as my older brother did his time in the 1950’s. The later part of the 1960’s was a time of choices, for me it was to spend 1966 to 1970 in the Army, most all of my friends did the same and we call came home, none of us in a box so that was good.
Other people joined the Jane Fonda side and that was wrong, so very wrong and now they are part of our government which is wrong, so very wrong. We live in a fantastic nation during a fantastic time, we have access to good medical care, plentiful food, clean water and all sorts of creature comfort and we are not happy people, this is a sorry sad evil condition and I don’t have the answers because I am not sure I even know the right questions about how we got here and how we can move forward. At this time I am an old man living a comfortable life and a nice part of Texas so there’s that for me to be thankful for.
One last thing is that here in our part of Texas around San Antonio we have a whole lot of veterans who still enjoy hanging their American flags out.
I am old enough to remember WWII. I had lots of relatives who went away and, fortunately, all survived. My cousin, who I idolized, was a B17 bombardier who flew 50 missions out of north Africa. When the war ended and all those guys came home, my parents had parties for them. I was 7, my sister was 4. On VJ Day we had a party that lasted 3 days. My sister and I had a bunk bed and during those 3 days several drunken friends of my family climbed the steps and fell into bed with us. In this blog post I have a photo from one of those parties.
They are all gone now and we shall not see their like again.
Thanks, Mike K., for the great job on your biography.
It’s informative and includes interesting pictures from those days. Well done.
Like you, I have memories of WWII and those who carried the war effort, both at home and abroad. You said, “They are all gone now, and we shall not see their like again.”
Amen to that.
The Nazi’s gave nationalism a permanent black eye.
I do think it’s a shame we can’t even express patriotism for our country. I do prefer national sovereignty to nationalism, as they aren’t the same thing, in my mind.
Every country should protect it’s right to decided how it’s citizens should form its allegiances.
well except the designers of the modern eu, like monnet and co, were explicitly marxist, like the italian spinelli, it was sold initially as an economic bloc, but also as a promise not to have continent rendering wars, (the jury is still out on that score)
so they must deny the individual cultures, therein in europe, so a country like hungary, that retains theirs are an outlier,
a similar dynamic has happened in this country, the left was willing to be pro soviet even pro german, in the molotov interregnum, against marxist regimes, they were initially less resistant but by the time of vietnam, it was very open in that position, thats when papa raskins ips came into being, central America was the next front in the 80s,
}}} But the US is not Nazi Germany or anything like it, however much the far left may try to make that analogy.
The Left is only a short few strokes from having us on the unquestioned road TO Fascism. They aren’t trying to prevent it.
They just want to make sure THEY get to be the Nazis.
I remember when I took the first tiny step from childlike recitation of anthems and pledges, to actually realizing that America was not a holy certainty.
It must have been in the mid-50s because I was watching an early episode of “Victory at Sea” on TV, and not as a repeat. It must have been the first episode, about the attack on Pearl Harbor, and there sure wasn’t any American victory being shown!
Puzzled, I asked my father “Daddy, when do we start winning?!” It was inconceivable to me until that point in my life that Americans ever lost. I will flatter myself that this was the inflection point where I began to embark on the development of a clearer-eyed view of the world than my childhood mates.
Fortunately it never morphed into an America-distaste the way it did for so many others.
Ps. Perhaps many of you will have seen the classic WW2 airbrushed photo of the Battleship USS Washington (BB-56) anchored to a buoy in a secluded fir-lined cove in the Pacific northwest. One day I stumbled upon that real-world view, sans battleship, but so obviously the very view, that I damn near drove off the road!
USS Washington is not today a museum, just scrap, even though fresh out of the blocks so to speak, she took on the Japanese battleship Kirishima, and blew her to bits. The only US battleship to engage another battleship, “mano a mano”, and sink her.
Got any ideas Stan, because I sure as hell don’t know.
Those who denounce American style nationalism and patriotism are woefully ignorant of history. Much like those who believe, or pretend to believe, that slavery was an American invention.
Nationalism run amok was a feature of the Imperial period that preceded, and led to WWI. The conditions that nurtured the great Imperialist competition, i.e., absolute monarchies, have not existed for quite some time. The vestiges are as much a function of tribalism as nationalism.
I don’t think it is a stretch to say that the last great nationalist spasm, led by the Nazis, was made possible by the chaos and bitterness lingering from WWI and the Russian-Marxist revolution. The Nazis played on German resentments lingering from their defeat and post-war trauma, then rode their triumph over the Communists in Germany like a surfer on a powerful wave.
In contrast, someone once said that the only foreign soil that the United States retained after a conflict was enough in which to bury our dead; who mostly died defending other’s freedom. From Belleau Wood, to Normandy and Iwo Jima, to Chosin; and, yes, to Saigon and on to the present, American patriots and nationalists have fought to defend others. Then the nation turned to restoring those who it had defended; and sometimes those it had defeated.
Our education system has failed our young, and thus the nation. So, many now look to multinational arrangements, such as manifest in the bureaucratic despotism of the EU or, Heaven help, the UN as their chosen model. They know not what they covet.
On a personal note, I think Memorial Day is a good time to reflect on my Dad’s service in WWII. An over-age Sailor he did return from the Pacific to Mother and his three children. As did an older cousin, my hero, who took me for my first airplane ride post war. He was a tail gunner in B-17s before he went to pilot training.
On a sadder note, although I was young, I will never forget the hysterics of our next door neighbor when she learned that her beloved son died in his fighter plane in the Pacific; allegedly while performing a victory roll. Then she saw her younger son go to war; and return. The family across the street, who were of German descent, were more stoic when their older son died–ironically in the air over Germany.
Today is also an appropriate time to pause to remember friends and comrades of my generation who were gone so young; and also honor those of succeeding generations.
All could be called patriotic and nationalistic as though those were epithets; yet all served unselfishly because they trusted the goodness of a nation that was unique in human history.
Thinking about how the left diverged from patriotism…
My father and uncle didn’t turn 18 until towards the end of World War II, but they sure enlisted when they could. My Republican grandfather even tried to dissuade my uncle and could have gotten him an exemption because of the family steel ball factory.
They had both volunteered for paratroop training and met on an Army bus. My father was reading the “Tao Te Ching” and my uncle recognized the Taoist scripture and struck up a conversation. They became best friends.
Fortunately, the US dropped two atomic bombs and Japan surrendered. So my father and uncle did not have to invade the Home Islands. They returned to civilian life as patriots. Later my uncle introduced my father to his sister, who became my mother, so I am here to tell the tale.
They had issues with America, but I never heard either run patriotism down. They both became beatniks in the 50s. My uncle graduated to became a hippie in the Haigh-Ashbury in 1967.
The last time I saw my father was in 1968. He had tears in his eyes that day upon learning Martin Luther King had been assassinated.
The hard left — those who became outright socialists and communists — didn’t have allegiance to nation or patriotism beyond what was politically useful. But I think many of the leftish variety were more complicated.
I liken nationalism to owning one’s home. Both are to be defended against intrusion, assault, robbery (which is what the millions of illegal migrants live on, our assets). Don’t we all lock our doors at night against unwelcome intruders? Americans own this country!
If I were younger and if Hungarian (Magyar) were not such a tough language to learn, I might emigrate there. Orban built fences to keep out the Muslim hordes migrating, encouraged by Merkel on her effort to make western Europe Eurabia.
…if Hungarian (Magyar) were not such a tough language to learn…
Cicero:
You got that right! Hungarian, along with Finnish, is not even an Indo-European language.
IOW, English has more in common with Sanskrit than Hungarian.
I believe, and have done a good deal of reading about it, that without the Kamikazes at Okinawa, we would not have used the atomic bomb. The allied POWs in Japan were all to be killed if we invaded.
Thanks to all for sharing your memories of WWII and those who served!
Mike K., I really enjoyed reading your blog entry. Thank you for writing and sharing it!
“Got any ideas…[?]”
“CPA Group Wants States To Secure Elections Using Accounting Techniques”—
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/cpa-group-wants-states-secure-elections-using-accounting-techniques
The Democratic Party will of course never agree to the above as it continues to try to subvert any and all effort to bolster election integrity.
Cf:
“Of Course: Gov. Hobbs Vetoes Election Integrity Reforms in Arizona”—
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2023/05/28/of-course-gov-hobbs-vetoes-election-integrity-reforms-in-arizona-n1698689
+ A brace of articles explaining the Democratic Party’s (and friends’) strategy—perhaps “methodology” is a better word—of destroying the country:
– On the supreme and unstinting efforts of a government and its media/corporate arm to forge an overall and comprehensive policy that replaces “Of the people, by the people, for the people” with “LYING TO THE PEOPLE”…
“Gaslighting: The American People Are Trapped In A Textbook Abusive Relationship”—
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/gaslighting-american-people-are-trapped-textbook-abusive-relationship
– On manipulating the value—and mantra—of “CIVIL RIGHTS”…in order to destroy civil rights and to destroy a country….
‘ “Trans Rights” Means Trans Entitlements And The End Of Civil Society’—
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/trans-rights-means-trans-entitlements-and-end-civil-society
+ Bonus (on Covid—a companion piece to the “gaslighting” by all the usual suspects in the above link)
“The Great Silence”—
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/great-silence
Related (on nationalism):
“The weaponization of antisemitism against conservatives;
“A conference on how to save the West has been smeared by those out to destroy it….”—
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/371640
+ Three views of nationalism by English political scientists/philosophers (focusing on Zionism and the larger Middle East):
“Zion as Proxy?
“Three Jewish Scholars of Nationalism on Zionism and Israel”—
https://en.davis.huji.ac.il/sites/default/files/davisinsten/files/zion_as_proxy_joffe.pdf
Watch Claire Lehmann’s short video Nationalism is the Antidote to Racism:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpmoAnvnbTw&t=120s
Her argument is that loyalty over a larger entity (Australia, in her case) overrides the divisive attachment to various ethnic tribes.
The geniuses (genii?) touting a return to TRIBALISM as the answer to all of society’s ills—as ushering in nirvana—would beg to differ…
(Although it’s entirely possible that they’re in fact aware of the utter destruction that such Neo-Tribalism will wreak—IS wreaking—and that THAT is precisely the reason the Neotribalists are pushing it so hard, so iniquitously and so ubiquitously—in every realm, in every sphere, in every aspect, facet and theater of existence…)
File under: “Beware the Neotrib, my son…”
yes it’s funny that tribalism only applies to one side of the aisle, the one with the spears and the pot, for cooking
re Nationalism, Racism, and Tribalism…it’s interesting that in the Kaiser’s Germany,
Anne Frank’s father, Otto, served in the German Army and received a field promotion to Lieutenant. Whereas in the Third Reich, he and his family were thrown into concentration camps.
Plenty of harm can be done by runaway nationalism, as the example of WWI attests, but runaways tribalism is an order of magnitude worse.
Lee Smith with some evocative interviews:
– Richard Grenell on one of Jack Smith’s previous follies… (Who’s Jack Smith, you ask?):
https://twitter.com/EpochTV/status/1663261300791681024?cxt=HHwWgIC9pefVi5UuAAAA
– Kimberly Guilfoyle on the cleavage within America:
https://twitter.com/kimguilfoyle/status/1663545807025610758?cxt=HHwWjIDR9Z-GjZYuAAAA
https://twitter.com/kimguilfoyle/status/1663526736422752256?cxt=HHwWgMC-7ZiwhJYuAAAA