Patriotism

by Bruce Patterson

"Those who profess to freedom and yet denounce agitation are those who want crops without plowing. They want rain without thunder, the ocean without the awful roar of its mighty waters." —Fredrick Douglass

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Now that multinational corporations have stolen America, we citizens still have Constitutional Rights only so long as we don't exercise them. For instance, while we have a Constitutional Right to petition for redress of grievances, if you actually go out and pass a petition, collect a few thousand signatures and, even if all you want are stricter municipal leash laws, the Federales are going to come and start sniffing around you, snapping pictures of you and your friends, taking names and compiling secret dossiers. Power hates Liberty the way Liberty hates power, and to believe that the ruling clique in this country is going to stand idly by while real democracy breaks out anywhere in its shadow is profoundly naíve. They stole America fair and square and they intend to keep it for themselves and to pass it on to their kids. To them (and to far too many of their blind-mice subjects) the Bill of Rights, like the Geneva Conventions or the Charter of the United Nations, has out-lived its usefulness. Accordingly, your civil liberties, like the lives of our GIs and the Iraqis in Iraq, are expendable.

To illustrate the point, consider what passes for "conservative" federal judges nowadays. Most of these Bushite good old boys and their female and colored stooges can't even come to grips with the reality of biological evolution, much less the plain fact that America was born with the forceful overthrow of the police powers of Christianity's thoroughly corrupt churches. When it comes to appreciating the precepts underpinning the American Declaration of Independence and the American Bill of Rights, these so-called conservative judges may as well be Communist apparatchiks or Chinese Mandarins. In the eternal contest between the imperial prerogatives of the Emperor and the civil liberties of the ordinary citizen, these guys and gals side with the Emperor (that's why Bush, the oil and coal company stooge, became President in the first place). Not only do these so-called conservative judges use sophistry to judiciously subvert the very constitutional principles they swore to uphold, they also routinely sell out the poor for the rich, the many for the few, the public for the corporation.

So alien and power-hungry are the Bushites that it is not enough for them to use nonstop fear-mongering broadcast through a lackey press to grind underfoot the American Bill of Rights. Their venality knowing no limit, they also wish to abolish Habeas Corpus, the 500 year old legal standard and ancient moral principle that makes theoretically possible the existence of anyone other than slaves. Since abolishing Habeas Corpus is just one aspect of their holy crusade to seize total power for themselves as the Divinely Ordained (God "speaks" to these guys and gals), obviously they are not conservatives but radicals, not pragmatists but ideologues and not patriots but subversives.

When I was 17 years old I swore a blood oath to defend the American Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. It was the same oath Bush and every "public servant" takes, and the same oath all American school children make ritually every time they recite the Pledge of Allegiance. But unlike the pretend patriots now dominating this land, when I stepped forward I knew my American history and my American Constitution and, in the best tradition of my countrymen and women, military and civilian, and in an unbroken philosophical line descending directly from Adams and Paine, Franklin and Jefferson, I took my oath literally and unequivocally.

Jefferson spoke for our Republic's founders when he proclaimed his "undying hostility to all forms of tyranny over the minds of men," and the Bill of Rights was their answer to ten thousand years of lies and tyranny. As far as our Founding Fathers were concerned, either the people would rule unfettered or their American Promise would go unclaimed.

While living under the constant pro-war propaganda of occupying government wedded to multinational corporations, it's easy to forget that Americans make lousy professional soldiers and that professional soldiers make lousy Americans. Traditionally Americans wouldn't tolerate a large, standing, free-loading, money-sucking professional army and navy. Moreover — not long ago every American knew this — just because an American citizen put on a soldier's uniform that didn't make him cannon fodder, a mere plaything for safe and unsound politicians or a thoughtless people. Because the institution of the military is antithetical to democracy and so is to be considered in the most charitable light a necessary evil, the tradition in America called for a hybrid known as the Citizen Soldier — the GI and the Weekend Warrior — and that was somebody temporarily and very reluctantly and skeptically surrendering to the coercive powers of the State that which belonged to themselves as individuals. Having their Liberty meant that individuals were sovereign and, as Abraham Lincoln was fond of pointing out, "no man is good enough to rule over another."

So that was why an American soldier, as opposed to a Prussian or an Imperial Japanese soldier, was obligated as a point of honor to follow only lawful orders and not whatever kinds of stupid or illegal orders he or she might get from anybody above them in the Chain of Command. Their sworn loyalty was not to the military and the politicians, you see, but to each other and the Constitution they'd sworn to defend. One practical reason for that was the hope that, if ever there was a military coup, then the rank and file Citizen Soldiers would side with the people and the Republic and not with the Generalissimos and the money boys who'd be behind them.

The question of Loyalty wasn't one our Founding Fathers bothered much over. Least anyone forget, they were revolutionaries. Put bluntly, they expected Loyalty from their women, their slaves and their dogs. While much abuse has been heaped upon their memory by those who wish to accomplish one tenth of what they did, only a fool forgets that the rich white men who led the American Revolution did achieve Liberty for themselves. And as their written legacy they gave us not just their Bill of Rights but also the clear collective warning that their Constitution was just a sheet of paper, unable on its own to levy taxes or to raise armies, and that patriotic talk, like paper and ink, was cheap. If future generations of Americans wished to enjoy Liberty (and what greater joy could there be; what finer endowment for one's children?), then they too would have to seize it with their own hands, each generation "expanding the areas of Liberty" left to it by those who came before.

"Democratic struggle," it was called, and all of our civil liberties now under assault are the fruits of it and not the generous gifts of a benevolent State. Democratic struggle is what makes us Americans human beings first and foremost, creatures of moral conscience and so the masters of our own destinies. "Democratic Struggle" was — and is — no more and no less than the American Promise. Without whole-hearted allegiance to the promise, American patriotism shrivels to an empty, cosmetic shell, mere tribalism masquerading as crusader righteousness (neither of which fit with the best in the American strain). And so it is that the current regime can instigate an unnecessary and so illegal war, betray the Constitution, bring ruin to thousands of American families, heartlessly slaughter thousands of Iraqi civilians and still pay no penalty. Too many Americans have forgotten what it means to be American and so these guys get away with murder.

The way President Clinton and his stooges became more beloved among the gullible, the romantic and the timid the more bald-faced lies they earnestly and dutifully recited into TV cameras, so the current regime's legion of TV spokesmen spin their lies about their lost, stupid and anti-American war. They spin their lies with a wink and a nod to those in their mass produced audience still conceited enough to believe they are being anything other than dupes.

And that kind of unthinking imposter patriotism — an American's Loyalty to State never has been "faith-based" — is all that is holding this current regime up. When and if we Americans regain our senses and rediscover our birthrights then, like Clinton, this President will be Impeached.

That being the case, the way ahead for the new anti-war movement is clear enough. The anti-war position is squarely within the American patriotic tradition, the pro-war position is not, and that makes all of the difference. Even though there are always those who refuse the evidence of their senses, that simple truth needs to be brought home to everyone. Democratic struggle is our American Heritage, and to learn how to work our way out from under the current tyranny we need to look no further than that.

"Full opportunity for full development is the inalienable right of all. He who denies it is a tyrant; he who does not demand it is a coward; he who does not desire it is a slave. The earth for all the people — that is the demand!" —Eugene V. Debs