{"id":5308,"date":"2011-07-05T02:13:21","date_gmt":"2011-07-05T09:13:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/?p=5308"},"modified":"2011-07-05T02:13:21","modified_gmt":"2011-07-05T09:13:21","slug":"republican-pseudo-patriotism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2011\/07\/05\/republican-pseudo-patriotism\/","title":{"rendered":"Republican Pseudo-Patriotism"},"content":{"rendered":"

How many times have you questioned a US policy and had a Republican accuse you of anti-Americanism?  If you are like me, it is far too many times to count.  Such criticism stems from the sad truth that the accusers have absolutely no idea what patriotism is.  According to Henry David Thoreau<\/a>, the truest patriots are those who serve the state with their conscience<\/em>.  That means demanding that our nation actually practice the ideals we claim to hold and opposing it when it fails to do so.  Opposed to this we have Republican pseudo-patriotism, the \u201cmy country right or wrong\u201d crowd.  The true patriots are the people who love these United States enough to demand our best, not the people who wrap themselves in the flag and settle for tyranny, or attempt to impose tyranny as Republican leaders do.<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\"5pseudoPatriotism\"Samuel Johnson famously wrote in 1775 that \u201cPatriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel<\/strong>.\u201d In The Devil\u2019s Dictionary<\/a>, Ambrose Bierce made the appropriate correction: \u201cWith all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit that it is the first.\u201d<\/p>\n

To be fair, Bierce had a 135-year advantage over Johnson. He could look back at the history of a particular brand of patriotism\u2014the American kind\u2014which, like everything else American, our modern flag-wavers will explain to us benighted folks, is exceptional, unlike European patriotism, which to them is a lesser and ignoble kind.<\/p>\n

This they claim as if, besides giving us impressive and justifiably revered notions of liberty and justice, our Founders and their successors did not expand the nation from sea to shining sea (and beyond) with a century of mass murder and grand larceny against indigenous peoples, a ginned-up war to grab more than half of Mexico, another to snag Puerto Rico and the Philippines, and a few lesser skirmishes by which places such as Maui became territory where the Stars and Stripes now flies.<\/p>\n

The pretend patriots are mortal enemies of us citizens who deeply love our country<\/strong>, but recognize that, historically and now, it is a composite of the good, the bad, and the ugly. We who refuse to reiterate the latest version of my-country-right-or-wrong should be cast out. They deplore us who acknowledge with condemnation that a jingoistic, exclusionary, authoritarian patriotism was in large part what helped make the United States \u201cgreat\u201d in the worst sense of the word. We who object to the idolatrous intermingling of militaristic nationalism with patriotism might as well be terrorists in their view.<\/p>\n

In the words of George Washington, those who practice the \u201cimpostures of pretend patriotism\u201d try at every opportunity to stifle dissent and fill the silence with propaganda<\/strong>\u2026 [emphasis added<\/em>]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Inserted from <Daily Kos<\/a>><\/p>\n

Note the graphic above.  It does not represent patriotism.  It represents the emergence fascism, the bane of true patriots everywhere.<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How many times have you questioned a US policy and had a Republican accuse you of anti-Americanism?  If you are like me, it is far too many times to count.  Such criticism stems from the sad truth that the accusers have absolutely no idea what patriotism is.  According to Henry David Thoreau, the truest patriots […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5308","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-5-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5308","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5308"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5308\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5308"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5308"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}