Rootsie

by Howard Zinn
reprinted from  The Progressive

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. 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.

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."

It was our "Manifest Destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence," an American journalist declared on the eve of the Mexican War. 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."

Nationalism is given a special virulence when it is blessed by Providence. Today we have a President, invading two countries in four years, who believes he gets messages from God. Our culture is permeated by a Christian fundamentalism as poisonous as that of Cotton Mather. It permits the mass murder of "the other" with the same confidence as it accepts the death penalty for individuals convicted of crimes. A Supreme Court justice, Antonin Scalia, told an audience at the University of Chicago Divinity School, speaking of capital punishment: "For the believing Christian, death is no big deal."

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"?

Nationalist super-patriotism is not confined to Republicans. 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. power across the globe.

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. 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. Indeed, he ran as President on the Progressive ticket in 1912.

Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, was the epitome of the liberal apologist for violent actions abroad. 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. sailors. He sent Marines into Haiti in 1915, killing thousands of Haitians who resisted, beginning a long military occupation of that tiny country. He sent Marines to occupy the Dominican Republic in 1916. 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."

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. Liberals today criticize George Bush's unilateralism. But it was Clinton's Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, who told the United Nations Security Council that the U.S. would act "multilaterally when we can, unilaterally when we must."

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 September 11 becomes the justification for killing tens of thousands of people in Afghanistan and Iraq.

What makes our nation immune from the normal standards of human decency?

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.

We need to assert our allegiance to the human race, and not to any one nation. We need to refute the idea that our nation is different from, morally superior to, the other imperial powers of world history.

The poets and artists among us seem to have a clearer understanding of the limits of nationalism.

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 . . .
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.

Henry David Thoreau, provoked by the war in Mexico and the nationalist fervor it produced, wrote: "Nations! What are nations? . . . Like insects, they swarm. The historian strives in vain to make them memorable." 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."

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. That insistence continues today and reaches out to people all over the world. It lets them know, like the balloons sent over the countryside by the Paris Commune in 1871, that "our interests are the same."

http://www.progressive.org/june05/zinn0605.php

An empire will demonize nationalism of their subservient states while authenticating its own nationalism. What we see today is that the ruling clique gains enough leverage through the medium of international finance and global capital flows - the nationalism becomes centralized around their fraternity and then even the nation which they have encouraged nationalism in is fair game for whatever is necessary to keep the ruling clique in power(i.e. waggin the dog).

i feel as if the FINANCIAL and ECONOMIC structure which has EMPOWERED a small group of people to HIDE BEHIND the military might of a nation(s) needs to be dealt with, or it seems as if solutions to crisis will be decided by the financial and economic power that these groups hold through their POSITION in the system.

i feel we have to be careful of all kinds of concepts(even the ones that sound nice) and not get caught up in our Eurocentric views of what is right for the rest of the world - this includes saying that nationalism is not right for peoples who have traditionally been under the grip of neo-colonialism.

one way of dealing with this for the disenfranchised MAY come in the form of nationalism(and again, this term is subject to a definition) - i think we perhaps are scared that other people's conception of nationalism is the same murderous kind that Europe has foisted up.  

i see this as an example of positive nationalism as a tool for liberation.

http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/NewsArchive/artikel.php?ID=89897 (http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/NewsArchive/artikel.php?ID=89897)

www.ghanaweb.com: Entertainment of Sunday, 11 September 2005


Use African music to propagate its values - Chief Mokwugwo
Accra, Sept. 11, GNA - Ichee (Chief) Geoffery N. Mokwugwo, Managing Director of Worldwide Electoral Limited on Saturday urged Africans not to abandon African music and culture because of the enticing presence of other cultures.

Rather, they should "study them critically, recreate, modify or expand them in the light of our experience or new ideas," he stated in an interview with the Ghana News Agency after the launching of Soul Entertainers Band of Nigerians latest album: "Stop The Rush," in Accra. Chief Mokwugwo said even though African culture may appear to one generation as a crooked tree, it must be remembered that, "it is the crooked tree that bears straight branches."

He said Africa does not only need political, economic and technological experts to move the continent forward but artistic men and women who through their musical performance model and the use of forms of traditional knowledge that have contemporary relevance and address the challenges of the time.

Chief Mokwugwo described African Musicians as cultural ambassadors who must use the power of music to fight against Western influences on its tradition.

He urged African Musicians to adopt traditional wear and use it during their performances and condemned artistes who attempt to adulterate African unique culture with foreign ones.

Africa abounds in profound musical thinkers and philosophers who could assert the African identity through the medium of their musical performance, songs and deeds, especially on stage and off stage, he emphasis.

Chief Mokwugwo also called for collaboration between musicians and media practitioners as well as entices the private sector to support their production.

He noted that the other cultures have used the medium of music, art, entertainment and drama to colonise the African mentally, adding, "the time has come for we, now to use the same medium to liberate ourselves." He also called for injection of professionalism in the production of music, entertainment, films and other cultural expositions about Africa. Mother Jolly Abani, the artiste, entertained scores of music lovers who congregated at the La Palm Royal Hotel for the launch with melodious songs intermingled with swift enticing romantic body movement and inviting gestures to the admiration of the audience.

With a unique costume portraying the African woman's vital shapes, Mother Abani moved the audience to the dance floor at every stage of the four-hour performance.


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Source: GNA

http://www.rootsie.com/articles/2004/0307.html

* Yes, the nation-states are arbitrary - results of colonialist agendas on the region. The idea of "nationalism" that I was thinking of though is not confined by these constraints, so perhaps I am using the wrong word to express my position.

I was thinking along the lines of cultural sovereignty and pride.