PATRIOTISM - -LAST REFUGE OF THE SCOUNDREL Talk by Rel Davis, minister, before the Unitarian Fellowship of South Florida, 1812 Roosevelt Street, Hollywood, Florida, on the Fourth of July 1993. Samuel Johnson: "Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel." John Dryden: "Never was patriot yet, but was a fool. One of the most popular speakers at patriotic rallies, I understand, is Lt. John Calley, who was commander at the Mylai incident in Vietnam, the worst massacre by U.S. forces in modern times. Though convicted of the massacre, he now commands a speaker's fee in the thousands before right-wing political meetings. Even more popular is Oliver North, another military man, who betrayed his nation's trust, broke every imaginable law, siphoned off public funds for his own use, sold arms to Iran, and contributed to the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians in South America. His fee is in the hundreds of thousands. Another great "patriot" is Richard Milhous Nixon, who also commands fees in the six-figure range to speak before patriotic groups. Nixon betrayed the highest office in the nation and was forced to resign in disgrace to avoid certain impeachment. But he isn't our nation's super-patriot. That honor goes to Ronald Reagan, who receives fees in the millions for his services at Fourth of July meetings. Reagan succeeded in eight short years in tripling the national debt, saddling taxpayers with trillion-dollar debts to pay off the S&L scandal he created through deregulation, and selling off a reported one half of the nation's wilderness areas he was sworn to protect. Patriots all. Scoundrels all. In the past two decades we Americans have been striving to prove Samuel Johnson's adage about patriots. And we've done so quite well. "Patriots" in Miami's Cuban community routinely plant bombs in opponents' cars. "Patriots" in modern Serbia rape Moslem women as a political statement. "Patriots" in Germany burn down homes to kill Turkish infants. We have Israeli patriots and Palestinian patriots killing each other for the same "fatherland." We have patriots all over the world killing each other and killing innocent by-standers, all in the name of some "fatherland." The word patriot is derived from a Latin root (patrios) which meant literally "of one's fathers." Dictionary definitions of the term "patriot" are usually patriotic ones. Take the Random House definition: "One who loves, supports, and defends his country and its interests with devotion." If you hadn't figured it out by now, you can see by this definition that the word patriot is a masculine word. "Defends his country" says it all. How the D.A.R. (Daughters of the American Revolution) can consider itself a patriotic organization is beyond me. In the United States, the words "politician" and "patriot" are considered to be synonyms. Every politician is, by definition, a patriot. And every patriot is, by action, a politician. Politician is also a masculine word, as demonstrated by the ancient definition of statesman, as a "politician after he's dead." By extension, we realize that a "patriot" is a politician after he's been caught with his hand in the till. Two expressions need to be clarified before I go any further. One is a superfluity and the other is an oxymoron. The first is "crooked politician." The expression is absolutely unnecessary, since the latter necessarily includes the former in its meaning. The expression "crooked politician" is as superfluous as the expressions: "mental telepathy," "medical physician," "dead corpse" and other such misuses of the English language. The second expression is "honest politician," an oxymoron of the first order. An oxymoron is not (as some people think) a "high-powered idiot" but an expression composed of two contradictory opposites, like "military intelligence," "baby doctor" or "legal justice." Since honesty and politics are opposites, they don't belong together in the same expression. The word "patriot" is used to cover a wide range of scoundrels. Back in the 1950s the John Birch Society issued a list of the "seven greatest patriots alive." Interestingly enough, considering the John Birch Society was supposedly an American organization, not one of the seven were Americans. Included were Portugal's Salazar, Spain's Franco, South Korea's Rhee. Taiwan's Chiang Kaj- shek, and Cuba's Batista. All of them were right-wing military dictators who restricted free speech and resorted to murder and assassination to stay in power. But true patriots all. The true definition of "patriot" is a little more complicated than the dictionary would imply. Can we assume that a true patriot is best exemplified by a military dictator who restricts human rights? Or an American President who betrays the public trust? Or a mass murderer wearing a military uniform? One working definition of patriot is "someone who values the nation or fatherland more than the people living there." Most patriots would agree with the words of Stephen Decatur, a nineteenth century naval officer, who penned those famous words: "Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations, may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong." The patriot places the nation as institution above all else. The Nuremburg trials were an international attempt to punish people who did just that. The criminals condemned at Nuremburg were true patriots. They backed their country, right or wrong. When I was younger we actually used two other words to describe what today are called "patriots." The first word was based on a French soldier named Chauvin who served under Napoleon. Chauvin was so loud in his support of France and Napoleon that boisterous support for national causes and particularly a nation's military causes came to be known as chauvinism. A chauvinist is simply a louder- than- normal patriot. Today, the word is so often combined with "male" to provide the term "male chauvinist" that few people remember the original meaning. The second word once used to describe a patriot was "jingoist," a person who supported war, any war, at any time --particularly when the jingoist didn't have to actually fight in it. The term arose in a popular song back in 1879 supporting Britain's going to war against Russia. "We don't want war," the song said, "but by jingo if we have to fight we will!" A jingoist is a patriot too old to join the army. Another working definition of patriot comes to mind. Have you ever noticed that patriotic organizations are invariably filled with middle-aged men? The U.S. Congress is a patriotic organization and will vote for war at the drop of - hat. And it's composed mainly of men too old to fight (and those young enough know they'd get cushy jobs far from the front if they did have to serve.) So perhaps we can define patriot as "someone who'd like someone else to defend his country." But there has to be more than that to our definition of patriot. What makes a patriot generally a scoundrel? Or, as Dryden put it, a fool? Are all patriots scoundrels? Certainly all scoundrels aren't patriots, but might not the reverse be true? If we look at the politics of the patriot we find an interesting pattern. Contemporary patriots usually claim to be opposed to "big government." You'd think from that claim that they were anarchists like myself, but nothing could be further from the truth. Modern patriots want the government to stay out of their business, but not anyone else's. Patriots today want the government to tell women when or whether to have an abortion. They want the government to keep everyone from using any drugs not prescribed by an AMA pusher. They want to deny citizenship rights to anyone who isn't like them - - to people like homosexuals, black immigrants, and single mothers. Take Ronald Reagan for example, a true patriot, right? His politics basically are this: efficient government controlled by corporations backed by a powerful military. Every action taken by Reagan was in support of business and military interests. Individual rights --unless they are the rights of the elite class -- were never important to Reagan. He actively and publicly pursued reducing abortion rights for women and human rights for gays. Efficient government controlled by corporations and backed by a powerful military. Does that sound familiar? It happens to be a classic definition of fascism. Mussolini turned over much of Italy's government to major corporations and to the military. And it was efficient. Remember, he made the trains run on time. Fascism is simply nationalism taken to extremes -- and that, of course, is also a classic definition of patriotism. The sins of patriotism are these: 1. Elevation of the institution over the individual. By denying the importance of the human beings who live in the country, the patriot dehumanizes people. Humans become no more than cannon fodder, valuable only so far as they are useful to the state. 2. Glorification of war as a means of resolving conflict. When nations are treated as individuals (rather than conglomerates of individuals) then war is a legitimate means of resolving conflict. When the citizens are seen to be important, a method of buying peace which involves the slaughter of 20 million citizens is not seen to be legitimate at all. 3. Betrayal of !he social contract. Governments are, according to contemporary theory, established through a social contract between the citizens and the state - - a contract which guarantees certain rights and privileges to the citizens in exchange for payment through such things as taxes and conscription. But patriotism, which elevates the state over the individual, breaks that contract and inevitably reduces the citizenry to a form of slavery. Anyone who lived through the Second World War remembers the extreme restrictions which applied throughout the duration --for national security of course. And these are only the normal or customary sins of patriotism. The greater sin is that patriotism is used as a "cover" for a multitude of other sins. Every politician caught violating public trust quickly wraps himself in an American (or other national) flag and excuses his actions under the color of patriotism. Every demagogue and potential dictator uses patriotism as an excuse for excesses and criminal activity. Hitler's Brown Shirts murdered Jews and Gypsies, beat up socialists and liberals, and conducted systematic terror campaigns against the entire nation --as patriotic acts. And every greedy merchant who needs an excuse to produce more arms to sell, cries patriotism as he calls for another petty little war. July Fourth marks the time when our nation set up a semblance of freedom in a new world. Only a semblance of freedom because that freedom originally was restricted to white male landowners, and the nation was carved from the blood of Native American Indians. It took three quarters of a century for Black males to get the vote, and a century and a half for women to get suffrage. American Indians today are still treated as second-class citizens, and the wealthy elite --the top one-tenth of a percent are the only truly free in America. But the idea was good, if you can overlook the sexist language: "In Congress, July 4, 1776, A Declaration by the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress Assembled:" "We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness." The idea was good. That all humans have certain rights that cannot be taken away by government, and that one of these rights is the right to overthrow any government that tries to take away these rights. The patriot tries to tell us that the government so instituted is more important than the people the government is instituted to protect. The patriot tries to tell us that to protect that government we the citizen must surrender our rights. The patriot tells us that some citizens are more important than other citizens. I'm an anarchist because I believe the social contract is invariably invalid whenever the government involved is larger than a body in which every person can know every other person directly. The only government I would willingly support would be one in which every adult and child had a vote - -as would every creature that walked the earth and every tree in the forest. The reason every patriot is a scoundrel is because every government is corrupt. Nationalism arose with the patriarchy and is just one other method by which hierarchic society restricts its members. The other restrictive instruments are organized religion, commerce and education. Victor Hugo, in his classic novels, Les Miserables and Notre Dame de Paris, attempted to bring out those points. In the first, he wanted to demonstrate that the state was the sworn enemy of the individual. In the second, he wanted to show the Church also as an enemy. The patriot, by supporting my enemy, is my enemy. This Fourth of July, let us remember the rights promised us by the Declaration of Independence, and not the government which keeps us from those rights. Blessed Be!