Fwd: Put Away The Flags...Howard Zinn

[Guest guest]

Put Away The Flags...Howard Zinn

 

 

 

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