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 unbridled and 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 during the last year in particular. 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?
It is certainly noteworthy that patriotism and nationalism have been discredited by the “intelligentsia”, i.e. those who have benefited the most, financially and professionally, from the system in our moribund republic (from oligarchs in SV to hedge-fund billionaires on Wall Street and including most teachers, most professors, most employees of the federal government in DC, and most members of the managerial class) and, their success notwithstanding, who tend to have the greatest contempt for the country, while those who engage in the least glamorous but most necessary jobs in “flyover country” are the most likely to feel pride in the flag and to volunteer for the military, while considering the U.S., for all its flaws, to be a nation worthy of affection and respect.
I have thought and written for more than a decade about the source of the threat that I see to America as I understand it. Today a writer that I have read since 2001 has a piece up that runs to the same lines that I have thought and written. Nice to feel that maybe I’m not just a crazy old crank.
https://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2021/05/24/every-revolutionary-is-a-prophet-of-sorts-n1448868
A close college friend of mine married a German and lived in his country for the rest of her life. Reconnecting much later, in an email I described some American political figure (don’t remember who it was) as a patriot, among other qualities, and never heard from her again. I sent more emails, with no reply. A few years later it dawned on me: my appreciation of someone as a patriot revealed something despicable about me, as far as she was concerned. These days, it’s not quite the same in America, but it’s close.
Patriotism is now equated to racism. It is now settled fact (per the 1619 Project textbooks that are now historical gospel) that America was founded on racism, prospered on racism, and grew by racism. Hence, showing any reverence to the country is tacit approval of racism.
The experience with having Trump as president, i.e., of living in a country where everyday was not an officially scheduled government sponsored exercise in self-flagellation, and programmaticly required anxiety, was an interesting experience, to say the least.
Although I had always been able to describe the insufferable feeling and outrage of having the dysfunctions of the albatross/victim class chained around our necks, I somehow could not remember what it was like previously not to have them screaming into our ears in a way we might at least partially ignore.
What a liberation that was. And what a revelation. And although the so-called insurrection was nothing like an insurrection, what a hollow shell of a polity it revealed this so-called nation to be too; and what a mass of demented human garbage it revealed the so-called progressive portion of our country to be; soulless, vampiric, conscienceless, indifferent to and unbelieving in objective truth, sexually perverted and morally alien opportunists.
I suppose that if any institution lasts long enough, the vermin find a way to not only nest in it, but to make it all their own. And as they recognize no limits to their whims, wants, and desires, there is nothing they will stop at, in order to do so. Homosexual men have successfully done this with the institutional Catholic Church in America and much of the world.
But, imagine waking up one day, and the 56% of mentally disorderd progressive females, or the twerking boys, or the treasonous Biden grifters, the Lois Lerners, the Hillary Clintons et al, were just simply unable to intrude into your life.
What would you pay for that freedom?
Would you let our cities burn, and the instigators and cooperators with it? Would you ignore the wails of the purple haired transsexual fatties, as they shriveled and died?
Would you even go so far as to talk bluntly with relatives?
What then is your “Patria”? Is it a humanity which has quite deliberately stepped outside of itself and seems to be actively, if not consciously seeking death?
What in the final analysis, is there to save, that cannot be saved in some other way than becoming a slave of a slave?
Do I love my country? Better to ask, “Do I love my fellow Americans in general, and am I comitted to John Rawls’ ” shared fate” even though they are alien and morally toxic?”
And the answer to that is ….
Thomas Mann, Thomas Mann…that would be the same individual who strongly supported the German cause in WWI and asserted that German represented ‘Culture’, whereas France represented ‘Civilization’…an interesting distinction:
“Culture represents unity, style, form, bearing, taste. […] Civilization, on the other hand, involves reason, enlightenment, moderation, moral education, skepticism.” With culture Mann associated art, religion, sex — and war. And thus, all talk of “German militarism” — a favorite phrase in the French and English press at the time — was in fact a synecdoche for the more essential German property of culture. “[T]he slogan ‘civilization against militarism’ actually contains a deeper truth,” wrote Mann. “It expresses the distinctiveness and strangeness of the German soul compared with that of other nations.” As a result, the justifications for war proclaimed by Germany’s enemies — that they were fighting militarism — showed this war to be a war against the essence of Germany, a war of forced homogenization.”
https://www.lareviewofbooks.org/article/what-they-wrote-about-the-war
Too often, nationalism and patriotism are conflated with racism and religious bigotry. An example of the distinction can be found in the case of Anne Frank’s father, Otto. In the First World War, he served in the Germany army and received a field promotion to officer status. Under the Third Reich, he and his family were thrown in a concentration camp.
Nationalism and patriotism MAY lead to terrible things, as the horrible casualty counts of WWI demonstrate, but they don not have the INHERENT destructiveness of racism. It is natural, and not inherently evil, for people who occupy the same geographical area to feel that, in some sense, ‘We are all in this together.’
geoffb: If I could, I would write Thomas Jefferson’s quote in the sky:
“I have sworn upon the altar of god, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”
I have been feeling something over the past year I hear no one mentioning, see no one writing about: grief. Grief over loss of country. Over law and order withering away, the nation’s ideals trashed, the powerful—politicians, Big Tech, media, mobs—manipulating the populace, even the courts. There’s excellent independent writing and reporting of news and insights, but I haven’t seen a word about grief. True, the death of America isn’t an accomplished fact—yet. But I’ve certainly been grieving. I can’t be the only one.
In Europe you’re not, since WWII, supposed to be a nationalist. Period.
The reason is that it has pretty awful connotations, historically speaking (more specifically, 20th-C. speaking)….such that the “nuanced” belief system that has evolved is: anyone with sentiments that might be considered nationalist or patriotic or feeling love of country is tantamount to being, essentially, a National Socialist. (Sport is the escape valve, certainly; and football/soccer hooliganism a seemingly tolerable, if undesirable, replacement. And now, it seems, that being rabidly “anti-colonialist”—as it is currently defined—is giving football/soccer a run for its money….) It goes without saying that religion, insofar as it also aims to impart chauvinistic feeling, has also gone by the wayside (except for the relatively new kid on the European block—AKA Islam—which has, essentially blindsided the entire continent).
As one may imagine, the Europeans had a field day with Trump; but even before Trump, American patriotism and general love of country left a sour if not bitter taste in many a rarified European mouth. (That it was the “uncouth”, “uncultured”, “superficial” US that anchored the defense of Europe against the paradise of Communism further rankled.)
So don’t take it personally. There are some notable exceptions but, generally, they really can’t help themselves. (And it’s why they’re having, with some exceptions, a lot of trouble formulating a response to the Islamic invasion of their countries.)
It’s also why the book “The Virtue of Nationalism” was published several years ago, its author fervently—desperately—trying to get the message across that nationalism is not—does not necessarily have to be—evil; that, in fact, it can be a force for good; that it may actually be a necessary force for social and national cohesion and shared historical memory—that is, a force for good—as long as “things” do not get out of control. All of this would seem to be obvious, except that….well, see above….
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Virtue_of_Nationalism
JanMN:
Actually, a number of people have commented here about feeling grief about the country. Also, I wrote this post discussing it, and I go into it more fully in this post.
david foster:
My guess is that by 1947, when Mann wrote the passage I quoted, he felt some guilt about his own earlier point of view about WWI.
JannMN…Grief over loss of country.
Here is the British general Edward Spears, describing his feelings in the aftermath of Munich:
“Like most people, I have had my private sorrows, but there is no loss that can compare with the agony of losing one’s country, and that is what some of us felt when England accepted Munich. All we believed in seemed to have lost substance.
The life of each of us has roots without which it must wither; these derive sustenance from the soil of our native land, its thoughts, its way of life, its magnificent history; the lineage of the British race is our inspiration. The past tells us what the future should be. When we threw the Czechs to the Nazi wolves, it seemed to me as if the beacon lit centuries ago, and ever since lighting our way, had suddenly gone out, and I could not see ahead.”
I try to comfort myself by remembering that it was only two years after Munich that Britain demonstrated its magnificent resistance to Nazi conquest. Perhaps the United States of America will similarly rediscover its spirit?
“…the source of the threat…”
…is magical thinking enshrined—and propagandized—as forward-looking, beneficial, lasting public policy (but which, of course, uses Orwellian slogans to cover up the sheer criminality and perversity that are at its very core).
Which calls to mind The First Law (and Second, and Third) of Grifting—that no matter how elegantly, how adamantly, how sophisticatedly one wishes to deny them, there are consequences:
https://lawliberty.org/bidens-economic-trojan-horse/
File under: The Sacred Temple of the Holy Cover-Up.
david foster:
The quote from Edward Spears is also featured in one of the posts I linked in my comment to JanMN.
JannMN,
I don’t feel grief so much yet. It’s more like I’m watching, mostly helpless, as a loved one is attacked, lying bleeding in the street as I cry out for someone to come help us. My feeling are more anger, both hot and cold, it is only in the wee hours that grief comes stealing into my mind.
If there are five stages of grief, I’m at “anger”. I’m pissed off that some of my friends neighbors, and countrymen have voted for (or abetted in other ways) the trashing of this great nation. I hope to never reach stage 3 (bargaining) or 5 (acceptance).
Pushback / hope:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/devout-catholic-biden-bails-notre-dame-commencement-after-thousands-sign-petition
Just to ruminate rather than predict …
When Rome fell, it was not just because it had been hollowed out of its middle class, and became incapable of defending itself with a vigorous native population; but, in measure, because it simply did not appear to be worth saving the corrupt shell of it anymore. Official Rome became an ornament that bestowed lustrous titles on malign opportunists, rather than a cause worth defending in itself.
Of course the best men of the times continued to try; and predictably to have their successes undercut by the venial members of their “swamp”; its members murdering those very men whom the dissipated swamp dwellers relied upon to survive: Stilicho, Aetius, Majorian.
That is actually pretty typical for destroyed polities. The invaders are invited in by disgruntled types who want what they want. The Huns were encouraged to invade the Roman Empire by a princess; the Saxons were betrayed by a weak and effete king raised in Normandy; the Irish Pale of settlement was the result of an Irish prince looking for outside help.
And now we have the Clinton’s, the Bidens, the Obama’s and even the Bush family.
Perhaps a federal republic such as ours will do somewhat better than Soissons did, as it too dissolves into several rump states.
Better, that is, if these still standing refuge states can keep the pleading purple haired perverts and families of crooks who cry “rescue me” from leveraging the sympathy of the church ladies within – who love nothing more than clasping a viper to their breast – and opening up the gates.
DNW,
““Do I love my fellow Americans in general, and am I comitted to John Rawls’ ” shared fate” even though they are alien and morally toxic?”
And the answer to that is ….”
No. Those who love America are Americans. Those who feel no love of country are simply American in name only. That is not a judgement. Rather it’s an observation, as you cannot be something… that you reject.
JanMN,
I will grieve for my country when it is dead. 75+ Million voting for Trump demonstrates that life still beats within Uncle Sam’s heart.
Barry Meislin,
“In Europe you’re not, since WWII, supposed to be a nationalist. Period.
The reason is that it has pretty awful connotations…”
Compare the number of nations who initiated European wars to the number of nations that never did so. It’s not nationalism that leads to wars, evidenced by the fact that democracies do not start wars. Democracies react to wars thrust upon them. As while it takes two to make peace, it only takes one to make war. As China learned when the Japanese brought the Rape of Nanking upon them.
No, the issue is culture, in every case that is the determinate factor.
One might think that religion is another determinate. Islam being the foremost example but Islam imposed itself upon the Christian Middle East. Tribal Saudi Arabia was susceptible to Islam because tribes raiding each other was a cultural imperative, due to exceedingly scarce resources.
Asked my thirteen year old grand daughter this weekend if they sang “God Bless America” or “America the Beautiful” in school. Hadn’t heard of either.
Hell, we knew at least the first verse of the Marine’s Hymn, and something about the Caissons go rolling along. By maybe the fourth grade.
Before Christmas, classes roamed the high school halls singing Christmas carols except for my Latin class which did Gaudeamus Igitur. Nobody knew what it meant and if you do it up tempo, it fits.
Imagine today….
Jan NM,
I’ve found that I can’t even think about it!
Btw Neo — today’s not Memorial Day, it’s the Eve of the Martyrdom of St. George. See the instructions for observing it from our State Department:
https://humanevents.com/2021/05/24/breaking-news-leaked-state-department-memo-indicates-official-support-for-blm-agenda/)
Last year I lived, as I’d lived for almost 30 years, in Washington, DC. Our local shopping districts were looted, and there was some destruction of property in our residential neighborhood as well. It’s not that I was afraid per se, but the mayor’s words and actions conveyed the message that the government would not protect me (as a Trump supporter) — I was no longer a citizen. We immediately put our house on the market and moved (to FL). Leaving town, we actually took a detour not to drive past the memorials — I can’t even describe the bitterness of thinking how they would eventually (unless the avalanche’s course was miraculously diverted) be torn down and repurposed.
Covid’s suspension of normal life has greatly contributed to the sense of an ending. Lots of stuff that was already being warped or threatened by political correctness —- classical music, museums, Shakespeare, opera, historical sites, surely most of that can’t reopen in the present climate. Colonial Williamsburg? George Washington’s birthplace? Surely these will no longer receive funding, and sooner rather than later close permanently.
I remain subscribed to the “listserv” of my DC neighborhood. The librarian posts notices of events (all virtual) at the library. Are there any talks on history that aren’t about slavery? Any book groups that aren’t BIPOC or LBGTQ focused? Anything at all that isn’t BLM agitprop? And does no one mind? (No one has commented).
And when I think about traveling, I almost feel that I’d be touring a graveyard.
Perhaps the return to somewhat more normal conditions will give us at least a better gauge of what is left.
“Demian” is the longest work I have read in the German language. Hesse’s, “Siddhartha” had a significant impact on me, and “Demian” kept me intrigued, but I found it heard to empathize with the protagonist and his struggle. However, it was interesting to me how common so much of a young man’s early 20s could be a little over 100 years ago to what my early 20s were like. I assumed that men in 1900 would have had more purpose and less idle time to question their purpose.
I have recommended “Siddhartha” to quite a few people, but not “Demian.”
I pretty much always sing, “The Star Spangled Banner” when it is played in public, except when there is a soloist singing who obviously does not want competition. Most the time, even talented soloists, intend for the public to join in, but occasionally it’s more of a prima donna performance. Also, when school choirs sing at national sporting events I’ll often demure from joining in to make sure all the focus stays on the kids, unless it’s obvious the choir wants the crowd to join in.
Nancy B.,
Thanks for sharing that. I’m sorry, it sounds awful, but it is interesting to read your real life account of living in D.C. and feeling compelled to leave due to the destruction of the spirit of our nation’s capital.
I hope you are enjoying Florida! Let’s hope Ron DeSantis’ influence continues to thrive in the Sunshine State!
Richard Aubrey,
Despite having 4 semesters of Latin in College I don’t recall ever hearing of “Gaudemus Igitur.” I just looked it up. That’s hilarious! Thank you for putting me onto it. I now plan to learn it on piano so I can sing it at social events. It’s nearly perfectly ironic. Your humorous statement on it sums it up rather nicely, “Nobody knew what it meant and if you do it up tempo, it fits.”
Geoffrey+Britain on May 24, 2021 at 7:40 pm said:
I’m not sure what “America” is anymore. In fact, as a clear space for the maintenance of freedom, it has been dying beneath the ministrations of collective minded beings for well over a hundred years, as any student of Constitutional history well knows.
We here on Neo’s site have been through this business of discussing mutual identification and estrangement before. And it is my estimate that there are quite a variety of reasons which even the tradition minded have for identifying with their supposed “fellows”: one part nostalgia maybe, one part community feeling, for whatever that is worth; one part ego satisfying identification with a story of success. And … who knows what else.
But the fact is that what now inhabits the shell of the official polity is a population of ostensible peers, half of which is simply not worth lifting a finger in order to save them from the consequences of their own acts.
It is one thing to try and edify the ignorant; but for the apostate who once had the knowledge but has now decided that it derives more intense and deeper experiential satisfactions out of nihilist side, there is nothing to be done.
Many here, have, it is obvious, retained strong emotional attachments to family and acquaintances who are quite literally enemies of liberty, and true friends only of personal license and insider privilege.
What are you going to do to save people who insist on running straight into a brick wall: keep interposing your hand between their heads and the brick? Can you save them and yourself? Can you even get them to agree that you need not function as their cushion?
Why persist? To what end?
Anthems. Performances thereof.
Compare and contrast this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0K-5RkFEagc
with this profanation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WkCMGwxMEA
A People losing its self-respect and any sense of propriety is far sadder than the loss of patriotism.
To use a metaphor of metaphors here…disguising the issue…it’s time for a triage regarding a certain entity. Time for the DNR pile.
It’s one thing to have one’s attempts to help ignored. It’s one thing to have advice ignored with a flair and a sneer.
It’s another when one’s help is absorbed to no end but abuse.
Such help comes from a finite supply of effort and resources.
Should say that the hand salute is authorized veterans during The Anthem. I am kind of embarrassed to say part of my motivation is to see who has a problem with that. I excuse myself by recalling I was on active duty 69-71. So far, no issues.
zaphod,
It’s a long story, but I’m bound by an oath I swore over three decades ago to watch the Superbowl with some friends, so I have to watch it. This year I spent most of the opening, 15 minutes or so, nearly doubled up in laughter I found it to be such a farce, including the rendition of the Anthem you linked to. I hope we have sunk as low as possible and next year’s starts getting better.
The anthem was awful, but the low point had to be the Jeep(?) commercial with an elderly Bruce Springsteen attempting to appear hip at a small, rural church in Kansas.
@Rufus:
It is a Truth Generally Acknowledged that the Superbowl, its half-time-show, and the TV commercials have become a gigantic middle finger / FU to actual Heritage Americans. Irritating, to put it mildly.
Speaking of Irritations, I woke up to find the annual Apple WWDC Invite blurb in my inbox.
https://www.cnet.com/news/apples-wwdc-2021-starts-june-7-how-to-watch-ios-15-macos-12-m1-and-everything-else/
See above for the illustration Apple chose to go with it. Is that remotely representative of the vast majority of actual, you know, Developers? This is the world’s most successful company deliberately insulting the demographic which largely built it and its applications ecosystem.
Wherever one looks, it’s a constant stream of insults and provocations and one ends up with having to choose whether to be an Angry White Man or just bow down to it and plod onwards as a despised beast of burden. Neither are particularly appetising choices and that just increases the anger or demoralisation. How long that can continue to spiral for without things coming apart is anyone’s guess.
I am very patriotic regarding the system of government our nation is founded on up to and including the 15th Amendment, and I have tremendous reverence and respect for those who fought so I could be raised in safety and live primarily free from want.
However, it’s not just the number of my fellow citizens who may not respect the Constitution that is the tipping point. It’s the system of government itself. There are so many things allowed and supported by law and case law that I do not have respect for this country, as it stands. Civil forfeiture, income tax, minimum wage laws, holding citizens without bail or speedy trials, legalized murder of human fetuses, forbidding terminally ill Americans from seeking any medication or treatment they choose, administering puberty blockers to minors, forbidding the enforcement of our immigration laws…
I could go on and on. America can be fixed. And I pray it is. And I truly love the principle of individual sovereignty America stood for, for so long. But this is not America now. Regardless of what % of the public wants what, there is tyranny now enshrined in our Constitution, in our case law, in Federal law and in every jurisdiction in America. There are many, many wonderful people currently living in America, but we are a nation of laws and far too many of our current laws prohibit freedom and liberty. I do not feel reverence for the system as it is currently codified in law.
Zaphod on May 24, 2021 at 8:43 pm said:
Well, at the risk of sounding even more like an Ozark Philistine than usual, I would be perfectly content if commercial sporting events were not cynically glorified by, nor turned into expressions of pseudo-patriotism.
They did not start off that way. A game was a game, and not some sort of sacred act of community.
It’s a bit like dignifying a whore by draping her in a flag and then calling her “darling”.
For those who’ve got, or have had a Roman Catholic parent, and who have taken such a venerable relative to a Roman Catholic Mass sometime since the 60’s, they will already have become too well acquainted with the transmutation of sacred rituals into narcissistic performances delivered for the delectation of the appreciative moral voids which thrive on that kind of thing. It all being about offering up a reflection of themselves.
Essentially, the act of praying before a smoked glass mirror.
zaphod,
A friend just showed me the phone app he is required to use every morning to answer COVID questions before he is permitted access to his office and desk. The welcome screen with the company’s logo is a woman in a burqa. He laughed and said in his 30+ years of working there he has never seen anyone with a skin shade darker than Ron Howard at his office, let alone someone wearing a hijab. I guess it’s good to know there is parity in the world of models seeking gigs for corporate photo shoots.
DNW,
As I mentioned, I like the Anthem, a lot, and always treat it with reverence, however, like you, if I had a vote I’d vote that it not be played at professional sporting events. The anthem should be reserved for more worthwhile occasions.
The League of Erudite Troglodyte Gentlemen over at the Orthosphere have this to say today:
“In places like Bosnia, ruled by the Ottoman Empire, anyone hoping to get ahead in life had to convert to Islam. One would have thought that this purely transactional, expedient move would mean a life of hypocrisy; going through the motions while not truly believing that Mohammad was a prophet. However, the descendants of these converts are still Muslim hundreds of years later. Aristotle advised that acting bravely, for instance, can become habitual until a person’s emotions also cooperate. It seems reasonably common for actors and actresses being paid to pretend to be in love on screen to start to actually start having the feelings they were simulating. This suggests that pretending to be woke for long enough might actually lead to being woke. And yet, we have the counter-example of the Russians kowtowing while their true feelings remained opposed.
Russia used fear and propaganda and succeeded in coercing its citizens to do what the elites wanted, but seemed to have a fairly high degree of simmering resentment. Education departments in colleges are fully woke and it is not possible to get a teaching degree while pointedly rejecting identitarian politics, which is true of many other departments. So, indoctrination of anti-white, anti-American, hatred starts in elementary school and continues from there. It is true that none of it makes any sense and is self-contradictory; but that did not prevent moral and cultural relativism from becoming the firm conviction of most Americans, while their actions belied this belief, since they continued to take moral decency seriously.”
https://orthosphere.wordpress.com/2021/05/24/the-nebulous-consequences-of-acting-like-you-believe/
DNW,
In my part of the world the Latin mass is making a valiant comeback; especially among the young. I know of at least three parishes were one can attend a Latin mass every Sunday (some have two services each Sunday, and one does a high mass). They are well attended and many (a majority) are parents between the ages of 20 – 35 and it’s rare to see parents with fewer than 3 children in tow.
Deo gratias!
I don’t think there’s a problem with national anthems being played at sporting events provided that the performance and public reception of same are a Civic Rite — and the whole thing about Rites is that you don’t profane them. To the extent that you have a society inclined to profane Rites, you have a problem. A big one.
@DNW: I think you might enjoy the acerbic commentary of this gentleman:
https://liturgicalnotes.blogspot.com/
As someone who was an expat for most of my adult life, I can actually envision a world without nationalism. In that future world, governments are more like local governments are now, competing with each other for the best companies and taxpayers.
But that can only happen when most of the population of the world is mobile (and more culturally homogenous) and can migrate easily. The world isn’t ready for it yet, and any effort to impose it would be disastrous.
Personally, though, if the U.S. does crater, I won’t be here when it happens. With politics and culture, you don’t argue with the weather.
@Roy Nathanson:
“As someone who was an expat for most of my adult life, I can actually envision a world without nationalism. In that future world, governments are more like local governments are now, competing with each other for the best companies and taxpayers”
Thank you, Exhibit A.
I’ve done my fair share of Rootless Cosmopolitanism in my time, and am not unfamiliar with the attractions and advantages — especially when young… but one grows weary. It’s unnatural and not something to be desired or worked towards.
“The world isn’t ready for it yet” — I think we have a winner for Understatement of the Century.
Sir, the Species isn’t ready for it yet. Let’s talk again in about a million years.
The late Constitutional Republic the United States of America (July 4th, 1776 – November 3rd, 2020) used to be the sanest, healthiest, most rational, freest, safest, best, brightest, most glorious among all countries, a shining beacon of freedom and goodness for all men to see and learn and imitate and befriend if they knew how to appreciate its virtues.
Today we can only remember it. And maybe re-found it. But that will have to be done. And it would be a monumental task.
And it order to, maybe, face that task we need to learn about how we got to where we are today.
And in order to do that lets begin by not ever attributing any level of insanity or mistakes to what can be explained simply by leftoxenomorph evil.
Don’t call them “clowns”
They are not clowns. They are jihadi warriors for leftoxenomorphism.
Pure unmitigated leftoxenomorph evil let lose upon a world gone apathetic, passive, indolent, pusillanimous and possessed by the normalcy bias by its own choice.
We didn’t get this way because somebody forced us.
We chose to get this way.
We didn’t lose a pitched battle against a superior enemy and had to get this way under threat.
We chose to get into this apathy, this passivity, this indolence, this pusillanimousness and this normalcy bias.
We let them, the leftoxenomorphs, take over everything because we didn’t want to get involved.
We let them, the leftoxenomorphs, take over education and brainwash our children.
We are letting them, the leftoxenomorphs, take over our armed forces and corrupt them out of all decency and destroy them to change them into their private leftoxenomorph forces for evil.
We let the whole of it happen.
We are watching it all happen right now.
And now we face the consequences in the foretold fashion:
“If you will not fight for right when you can easily win without blood shed; if you will not fight when your victory is sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.” – Winston Churchill
A good many of our countrymen, me thinks, are at odds with the notion of “it is better to perish than to live as slaves”
Leftoxenomorph brainwashing has gotten to them. And changed them.
Changed them for apathy, passivity, indolence, pusillanimousness and normalcy bias.
“What’s the worse that can happen?”
As if the late Constitutional Republic the United States of America (July 4th, 1776 – November 3rd, 2020) had been a magical or a metaphysically given phenomenon that can not really be destroyed.
What do you think happen in November of 2020?
Well . . . they have every right to be that stupid.
But nobody has the right to avoid the consequences of ignoring reality.
There were a considerable number of Jews in 1930’s germany that thought “well . . . this is a civilized country . . . I mean . . . what’s the worst that can happen, right? . . .”
Riiiiiiight . . .
Normalcy bias.
Along the ages it has killed quite a lot of people.
I bet Carthaginians thought “what’s the worst that can happen” until that last day when the Romans ringed their bell for the last time.
We are mishandling things whose relevance and scope are not easily grasped.
Morally and politically it is like playing with the nature and the structure of what separates the rocks we live on from the magma in the interior of the planet.
There are things in there that you don’t want to get in contact with.
Like lava.
Leftoxenomorphism is moral and political lava for humans.
And we are letting them take over and become the new feudal lords in a new medieval Dark Ages.
We are not gonna like the results.
And they are just around the corner.
People go “oooohh . . . they are teaching the children to hate their own country!”
No.
They are teaching the children to hate the country they just murdered and preparing them for the dystopia to come.
They are preparing the masses for what Klaus Schwab is saying in an unequivocal way that about ten to thirty years from now “you will own nothing and you’ll be happy”
That’s the definition of an ant not a human.
Americans are not born to be ants.
But today we are Venezuericans, aren’t we?
Perhaps Venezuericans are a different kind.
Perhaps we can actually “own nothing and be happy”
On this subject, better get a load of this:
“Biden Brings in Islamic Activists to Investigate U.S. Military for ‘Extremism’ Frontpagemag.htm”
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/biden-brings-islamic-activists-investigate-us-daniel-greenfield/
Look at the accompanying picture.
Those sub-human maggots now sit in judgment of the (Venezuerican) Armed Forces.
Are we going to continue to look in apathy?
How many understand the humongous insult to our heritage and our humanity in what is happening?
George Banner:
About the Jews in 1930s Germany – I often see stated that the Jews of Germany didn’t think things would get too bad there, and therefore stayed. Actually, that was not the case. I’d like you to read this post I wrote on the subject. I understand that the issue is parenthetical to the main points you’re raising, but I’d still like you to take a look.
DNW on May 24, 2021 at 4:19 pm
Perhaps this essay is a place to start: https://americanmind.org/features/preserving-the-american-way-of-life/
Of the 8 responses they also published addressing this essay, I found this one to be the most useful, perhaps because it was gently critical: https://americanmind.org/features/preserving-the-american-way-of-life/americas-dangerous-new-era-demands-a-new-kind-of-greatness/
neo on May 24, 2021 at 11:25 pm said:
The strangest thing about Nazi Germany from one perspective at least, is how so comparatively few, became so blamed for so much.
What, 530 +- thousand Jews in Germany, out of a population of 66 million?
Obviously there was something else at work there.
One can play the game: “What if Hitler got what he wanted in 19XX and stopped just before …”
A rational racist bigot, would have stopped when he had it all going his way, yet had not yet descended into mass murder: tried to cook up some way to send Jewish people off with their belongings and money to Palestine, or another of the places the Nazis once proposed. Stopped, when he had the Rhineland, Austria, and the Sudetenland, and while Germany was as big or bigger than when the Kaiser ruled.
Yeah, well if he was not thinking too clearly, he was nonetheless “thinking big” as they say. Worldwide, struggle of life, evolutionary progress, big.
There is obviously some attraction there that makes mere success inadequate to sate the appetite. No, it involves some trajectory they have in mind; “the arc of history” our own progressives call it as they strive to explain why they cannot leave you alone.
Apropos of nothing in particular, I’ll mention that not too long ago I came across a film by Leni Riefenstahl that I found fascinating. No, not the one you are thinking of. And not Olympia either. But rather Das Blaue Licht from 1932. When I first saw it, it was some Italian TV print version that looked like you were watching it through a shower stall door.
There is now a visually restored version of it. Unfortunately, in side by side comparison screens. Nonetheless apart from being visually striking, it made me more curious about who she was.
It turns out that she had been a dancer. There is a video somewhere of her dancing in that art deco modernistic fashion reminiscent of the robot woman in “Metropolis”. [Which has also been restored]
What really struck me, was just how un-self-aware, or incapable of self-distancing she had to have been. The talent is there, but any sign of a reflective – as opposed to calculative or even artistic – mind, is not.
I wonder how much of humanity – despite their apparent gifts – really isn’t all there.
Thanks, neo, for linking your posts on grief that I missed, and david foster for your Edward Spears quote.
Neo’s March 16 post including Art Garfunkel singing American Tune reminded me that most of Simon and Garfunkel’s songs seemed to me to be a celebration of American ideals, however faulty our ability to live up to them. I’m sure S&G were solidly from the left, but not like today’s hard left that is hostile to American founding principles. Even today there are many liberals who are as hostile to the woke and CRT as most of us here, many of whom are speaking out. Not enough, though.
Be sure to watch Ben Shapiro’s Sunday Special (May 23rd) with David Horowitz, former communist, who is promoting his new book, The Enemy Within. Horowitz doesn’t mince words about the peril facing the country. He doesn’t hold out much hope for Republican leaders fighting against it, but he encourages pushback where we can, such as what we’re beginning to see in the schools.
Woohoo… Shapiro and Horowitz covering all angles and shining a light into every dark corner of the causes of the current social and political ills plaguing the USA. That really ought to do it.
In other news, Andrew Anglin will be on at 10 doing an expose on the Neo Nazi infiltration of the FBI.
Also, Ponies! Oops… apparently it’s UFOs now. Unidentified Flying Unicorns next, maybe. And it would be rude to ask them directly how they identify.
Roy Nathanson on May 24, 2021 at 9:45 pm “In that future world, governments are more like local governments are now, competing with each other for the best companies and taxpayers.”
But part of the value of the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia establishing the idea of sovereign nation states was that this set up a form of competition among governmental and economic systems, plus their associated cultures. This competition in turn allowed the better aspects/ elements of these various cultures to be adopted or refined when judged to be of value for the adopting culture. And of course the USA is famous for being a good adopter in most cases, given the breadth of our immigrate populations (at least since 1820).
And we also recognize this competition plays out in our federal system of states vs. central or national government, as well. If we were to become overly homogenized we might well lose the benefits of this competition to find and grow the better solutions over the weaker and failing ones. It could be argued that we are already too homogeneous among the states, but the various good vs. poor reactions to the pandemic at the “policing” level have shown some benefits of our federalism are still in play.
Fighting the Good Fight.
https://humanevents.com/2021/05/24/17-attorneys-general-back-south-dakota-lawsuit-over-mount-rushmore-fireworks-cancellation/
“neo on May 24, 2021 at 11:25 pm said: George Banner: About the Jews in 1930s Germany – …”
Neo: thank you. I am better informed now. Very interesting post.
Learned a number of things I didn’t know.
My own families took a look around Europe before the Holocaust, said “nope!”, sold everything at a lose after I don’t know how may centuries or even maybe millennia of being European Ashkenazi Jews and came to the New World.
Pogroms did that to many. Not to enough, sadly.
Good choice. I may not exist otherwise. And neither many others.
Does anyone watch Ruggles of Red Gap any longer?
Woohoo… Shapiro and Horowitz covering all angles and shining a light into every dark corner of the causes of the current social and political ills plaguing the USA. That really ought to do it. In other news, Andrew Anglin will be on at 10 doing an expose on the Neo Nazi infiltration of the FBI.
Sicko
No one is serious about history unless they do honest comparative history. And in that regard the West is best. The Anglospere, best of all, with the US leading the lot.
Geopolitical strategist Peter Zeihan has posted many lectures on YT, based on his three books on the subject. And he finds the record of decade by decade improvement of the US for 160 years unmatched.
He argues that the US is blessed with more productive and strategic advantages than any other nation, and thus is destined to dominate the world this century — unless we screw it up.
Well, we are. And the CommieCrats policy is that we ought to!
Just don’t let them. That’ President Trump’s lesson to us.
@William Graves:
Had never heard of it. Interesting!
Turn about:
Has anyone read Mr. American by George McDonald Fraser (of Flashman fame)?
caddre: “ that America was founded on racism, prospered on racism, and grew by racism. Hence, showing any reverence to the country is tacit approval of racism.”
Of course /sarc
I still insists to friends and strangers that racism is the concept of inherent superiority — not by God (Monarchy), not by birth (Aristocracy), but by (White) race .
This concept did not exist nor was it understood until the old South in the 1820s, with the rise of King Cotton.
The legal historical research of Duke University’s Michael Munger (economist and political scientist). To assert otherwise is ahistorical propagandising and ersatz virtue signaling.
Pace Yoram Hazony and the Virtue of Nationslism (Barry Meislin, above), see Hbdchick’s long synthesis of data on the distinctive patterns defining Western European Exceptionalism, here
https://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2014/03/10/big-summary-post-on-the-hajnal-line/
In summary:
INSIDE (or to the west of) the hajnal line we find:
– late marriage and 10-20% of adults never marrying
– small families, either nuclear or stem
– higher average iqs than outside the line
– the highest concentrations of human accomplishment in europe
– more democracy
– greater civic-mindedness or orientation towards the commonweal
– generally low perceived corruption
– high individualism
– and low homicide rates in the 19th century
But why?
SEE MAP, HERE
https://hbdchick.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/pinker-fig-3-8-hajnal-line02.jpg
For one thing the Church could deny inheritance to elites violating incest prohibition through Manorialism.
This legalism was later passed down to the non elite, raising national IQs higher than in Slavic Europe
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/11/how-early-christian-church-gave-birth-today-s-weird-europeans
Europe wound up achieving something amazing and admirable and unprecedented after the Judeo-Christian, classical synthesis (ie, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance), simply by the Ruling Class competing and struggling to sustain themselves, resulting in the nation-state system that’s the norm today.
That’s one way to answer Hbdchick’s question. And it’s something neither understood by neoMarxists and PoMo’s nor taught to our corrupt and ignorant young.
“Europe wound up achieving something amazing and admirable and unprecedented after the Judeo-Christian, classical synthesis”
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Judeo-Christian&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2CJudeo%20-%20Christian%3B%2Cc0
You don’t say.
C’mon, Zaph — FREE WILL! Obey God!
Even the Japanese see theWest — until quite recently — as their moral teacher.
@TJ:
“Even the Japanese see theWest — until quite recently — as their moral teacher.”
Nope. Not in this sorry node of the Quantum Multiverse they did not.
They saw the West as something they had better catch up with double quick fast in order to *not* lose their collective soul. As part of said catching up, two more outward-looking feudal domains with axes to grind rolled their Tokugawa overlords and picked a handy figurehead — the Meiji Emperor. A biographical sketch of Fukuzawa Yukichi (who graces the 10,000 Yen banknote) will supply some nuance.
Eventually they got a bit side-tracked and bit off more than they could chew militarily and now they *have* lost their collective soul. Poor crazy genius Mishima lost his head over that tragedy.
But Moral Teacher? The West? It is to laugh.
That’s not what Youtuber Felix Rex (“Black Pigeon Speaks”) says, a Canadian living in Tokyo for about a decade. Nor is it what my friend from Kumamoto, Japan.
YMMV.
@TJ: Your heart is in the right place, but please, please try to dig a bit deeper sometimes and not be a Boy Scout.
Felix Rex walked down Takeshita-dori in Harajuku recently making one of his rambling videos and couldn’t even pronounce it remotely right after however many years in Japan. He’s got a nice ad-revenue thing going. Cool.
But Puhleeeese. The guy knows a bit about rescuing birds and appreciating YP and public cleanliness and manners… I don’t think I’d be looking to him for deeper insights into Japanese history and psyche.
If your other friend comes from Kumamoto then you better ask him about Saigo Takamori.
I’m offensive, I get it. I’m also shallow and ignorant about many things. But I tend to know what I don’t know. <— this.
@TJ:
For extra points, can you see if you can posit a reasonable theory as to why the term ‘Judeo-Christian’ pretty much did not exist prior to late 1930s? I mean really Think. Agitate those neurons. It doesn’t have to be nefarious conspiracy… but imagine what you would do if you were feeling just a bit insecure in other people’s lands and had the very great gift of the literary gab: you’d work overtime to retcon yourself into everything that made the West the Best. Hellooo Straussians! By the time you’d half finished, you’d be so goddam grafted-on that only the most perverse plant pathologist would feel comfortable mentioning it in polite company.
Islamic scholarship helped transmit some lost largeish bits of classical civilization to Christendom in the Middle Ages. So did Jewish Scholarship. For both we are grateful for at least those contributions. Both these civilizations also made their own intellectual contributions and some of that was transmitted to the West to our undoubted benefit. Very good.
However, we don’t speak of Islamo-Christian Civilization. Do we now? Critical Thinking Cap, Old Chap.
Related Civilizations yes. Castor and Pollux? Think more Castor Oil and Lox: goes down very easily but systemic issues may ensue.
I see BPS Black Pidgeon Speaks as a fellow traveller. I guess that you don’t tells me about your self-limitations more than about Felix Rex.
About the rest, you really ought to catch up with new scholarship outside your conspiracist wheelhouse.
https://www.nas.org/reports/the-lost-history-of-western-civilization
There really are alternative facts to be faced if you are ever to gain traction outside there.
Yep Mecca, Medina, and Istanbul have been the three pillars of intellectual development for the last 1200 years. So much so that all the advances of worldwide civilization are in their debt; even the Chinese are awed. After all, the industrial revolution and modern economic systems are totally dependent on the knowledge that came from the Arab/Turkic nexus. Even Africa, that modern wonder, owes its magnificence to the gentle prodding and encouragement of the Islamic culture. Right, Zaphod?
“…why the term ‘Judeo-Christian’ pretty much did not exist prior to late 1930s.”
An interesting question.
And yet, the founding fathers certainly knew—and appreciated—their Old Testament. And quoted from it. And developed their views on Liberty from it. Ditto for Lincoln and no doubt for numerous others. Keeping in mind that the OT was revered by the Puritans and that (Biblical) Hebrew was one of the three Classical languages taught and studied at elite colleges/universities from their inception in the late 18th C., for most of the 19th C. and perhaps even a bit after that. (E.g., the word for “Truth”, in Hebrew, appears on the seal of Yale U., which seems like a bit of a sick joke these days, but is still historically relevant.)
Perhaps one reason why the actual term is of relatively recent vintage is because the Jewish connection to Christianity was fully understood and recognized implicitly; and/or the BELIEF that the dominant religion—i.e., Christianity (though itself beset by intramural divisions, competition and, even, hostility)—had developed from Judaism, built on it, added to Judaism and improved upon it (and that this was so obvious) such that it was NOT necessary to even mention Judaism. Perhaps…. Added to which was a not uncommon, if related, view that Judaism, qua religion, was itself degraded and incomplete, stale, legalistic and lacking a future. A relic from another age…(which, parenthetically, was a major reason why the establishment of the Jewish State in 1948 came as such a shock to those who were absolutely certain that such an occurrence was a theological anomaly, a religious impossibility…)
Which views began to evolve in the 20th C., at least in some places and among some people…which evolving views were motivated, perhaps in part, by the wholesale jettisoning of ALL religion, generally, by the radicals of the 19th and 20th centuries….