“ My country is the world” (1965)

From the April 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

"I vow to thee, my country —all earthly things above 

Entire and whole and perfect the service of my love.

(Sir Cecil Spring-Rice, 1859-1918)

Nobody who has been to school can have escaped the regular doses of patriotism which are administered there. The sentiments of Spring-Rice's hymn—which is sung at many a school assembly—are widely accepted, in some form or other.

For example, all capitalist political parties agree that there are some things on which the shadow boxing has to stop; one of these is patriotism. Whatever slant each of them may put on it, they are all agreed that everyone should be proud of his nationality and should work for what they call the interests of his country. In the last general election the Conservatives said in their manifesto that they aimed to ”. . . gain the vitality to keep our country great." The Liberals lamented the fact that “Britain has lagged behind since the war . . ." The Labour Party promised to “. . . rekindle an authentic patriotic faith in our future . . .”

This general agreement also means that anybody who questions the values and the reason of patriotism is often regarded as a little odd, mentally undernourished, somebody who has got the world out of perspective. Yet all facts and reasonable argument show up patriotism for an empty sham, a propaganda weapon which is used to persuade people to do things against their own interests and to obscure where their interests actually lie.

Patriotism is adaptable. It can be stretched to include a number of countries which have united—or which have been united by another power—and which previously had their own, separate patriotism. Thus when Germany became united in the 19th. century there had to be created a German patriotism, to include and dominate those of the states which had been unified. In the same way the leaders of the new states in Africa are trying to create patriotism out of a mixture —and often a clash—of tribal loyalties. They are trying to instil into the people of their countries a pride in being a “ Kenyan”, or a “ Ghanian ”, or a “ Zambian ” worker; a respect for the country's flag, its National Anthem and a love of country to work, fight and die for.

The speeches of these leaders throb with patriotism. Last January, President Kaunda of Zambia promised military measures to “. . . protect our country and preserve our national identity.” When Kenya became what was called a one-party democracy last November, Mr. Ngala, leader of the swallowed up Kenya African Democratic Union, said that he had disbanded his party because ”. . . we consider the cause of Kenya to be greater than any of our personal pride, gains or losses.”

There is a certain bitter irony in this. For it is in the new countries that people should have learnt of the dangers of patriotism. The native peoples of Africa should have learnt this, in the days when they were invaded, carved up and suppressed by the super-patriotic Empire Builders of North West Europe. The same lesson should have been absorbed by the people of India, Pakistan and the new Far Eastern States— and by the people of Israel, many of whom have had their own personal experience of the logical end of patriotism, in the concentration camps of pre-war Germany.

Just as patriotism can be extended to embrace a number of united nations, so it can be contracted when a country is divided. The East German government, for example, works to keep Germany permanently split and to foster an East German patriotism. The guards on the Berlin Wall are encouraged to forget what they were once told about German nationality, and to shoot any of their fellow Germans who try to slip over to the West. In the same way, the North Koreans are now encouraged to treat the people in the South as their enemies; the same thing applies in the war which is going on in Vietnam.

Patriotism needs to be adaptable, yet in essence it should be inflexible and dogmatic. It was Stephen Decatur, in a speech in Virginia in 1816, who gave the famous toast—”. . . our country, right or wrong,” which does not allow for any modification. The unquestioning acceptance of patriotism has made men endure exceptional horrors, it has persuaded them to accept the most degrading of indignities, and to impose the harshest of brutalities upon others. The men in the trenches in 1914/18 suffered the mud and shellfire and the slaughter in the cause of country. The Nazis cut their swath of death and fear across Europe under the inspiration of their patriotism. The men who set fire to Dresden, and who killed Hiroshima, were acting under the same impulses—and the same delusion.

Here again we have an example of the way in which the proponents of patriotism cynically vary their attitude as it suits their purpose. The Allied bomber crews who wiped out the refugees in Dresden were doing what is called their patriotic duty—they were obeying an order, without doubt or question. Yet this is exactly what most of the men who have stood trial in the war crimes courts did. These men have not, of course, been charged with offences against their country; they have been prosecuted for what have been called crimes against humanity. Thus, although the victor countries of the last war insist that their own soldiers should obey orders because it was patriotic to do so, they also insist that German soldiers should have refused to obey their orders in the interests of humanity. They ignore the fact that, to be consistent, patriotism should swamp humanity.

What sort of arguments are used to support patriotism? One that is popularly accepted, especially in wartime, is that it is something to do with a country's scenery. The official propaganda of 1939/45 encouraged us to join up, eat less, save more, by showing us pictures of placid villages, rolling downland, welcoming white cliffs. Anyone who lived through that war can remember the Ink Spots vocal group adding to this propaganda (and presumably to their bank balance) by crooning about an old cottage in a peaceful valley of corn, ending up with the song’s message, and its title—This Is Worth Fighting For.

There are three things to say about this. The first is that all countries have their beauty spots and that if it was right for an Englishman to go to war because of the Sussex Downs then it was equally right for a German to fight because of the Black Forest, or an Italian because of the architecture of Ancient Rome.

The second thing is that a lot of the scenic beauty of this country has been destroyed since 1945; not by conquering Germans but by the enemy which is always there, in peace and war. It is the profit motive of capitalism which tore up enormous areas of countryside for opencast coal mining. It is the same motive which has been responsible for, among other things, the outrages of the big airports, for the housing sprawl into places which not so long ago were green and pleasant, for the high voltage power grid which is now threatening to violate the South Downs. The National Trust estimates that at least five miles of outstandingly beautiful coastline is each year being spoilt by property developers, who see the chance to make big profits as untouched bays and headlands are opened up by new roads, and motorways.

The third thing is that, even though there is a lot of beautiful scenery in this country, the vast majority of people have little chance to enjoy it. Most of us have to work for our living, which means that we spend all day, almost every day, in the heat and noise of a factory or the monotony of an office. Or perhaps we are salesmen, frantically chasing orders, However we get our living, it absorbs the bulk of our time and leaves only the fag end of it for any other activities. And when work is done we go back to the cheap poky place we call home. Millions of us go back to slums, which after all are as typical of a country as its rural scenery. (One First World War writer thought that the trenches were better places to live in than the slums that thousands of soldiers had left to go to war.) But no patriotic posters ever showed the Gorbals or Salford, and somehow these places got left out of the Ink Spots' records.

This, in a way at least, is consistent. The basis of patriotism is pride. No matter what their economic conditions may be—even if they live in a slum or are chronically out of work—patriots are proud of their nationality. British patriots are proud of being British, and do not bother themselves with wondering whether the impoverished peasant in Vietnam is proud of being Vietnamese. In the last war, the same sort of person thought that any decent German should have been ashamed of his nationality. Patriotism is always supposed to work in only one direction.

But anyone who is proud of being British should ask himself whether he takes pride in everything for which this country has been responsible. Is he proud of the fortunes which were built up in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and which erected many of the stately homes which we are supposed to include in our national heritage, from the proceeds of slave running and piracy? Does he take pride in the pitiless hardships of the enclosures and the evictions in Ireland, in the savage exploitations of the Industrial Revolution?

The list is a long one. The conquering of India. The penal settlements in Australia. The blatant attempts to crush the young Boer Republic, Suez. And the end has not been reached. The depredations committed by the British ruling class, and by those of other countries, crowd the pages of history and continue to make the story of capitalist conflict. There is nothing in any of them for anyone to be proud of.

In fact, pride is completely out of place in relation to nationality. We are entitled to feel proud about something which we have achieved, but things which are beyond our control should not be matters for pride. We are not proud about the weather, nor about the fact that we were born at a particular time. In the same way, nobody should be proud because he happens to have been born in such a way that he can call himself British, or German, or any other nationality.

The short, simple fact is that patriotism and logic do not mix. Perhaps that is why patriotic fervour is so often so belligerently expressed, and why it can so easily lead to the extremes of racial intolerance, to the theories about a “ Master Race ” and to the “ Final Solution" which is not final, which has nothing to do with any problem, but which is modern barbarity run wild.

This is the grimmer side of patriotism. A more popular one is that of a Blimpish nostalgia for the halycon days of Omdurman and the North West Frontier. It is common, now, for so-called progressive thinkers to poke fun at this, forgetting that under the skin the modern satirist is as patriotic as any choleric Victorian colonel.

No satirist ever hit on the basic tragedy of the thing, which is that patriotism debases a perfectly laudable motive. There is nothing wrong with the notion that the interests of a group are greater than those of any individual in it. Patriotism prostitutes this by restricting the size of the group into small parts of the human race and by bolstering itself with false ideas of superiority which in the end work against the interests of the whole.

Social progress depends upon the denial of patriotism. The majority of people in the modern world are members of the working class whose problems and interests are not confined within national barriers. These people have no country, no national interests; patriotism is poison to them. What they do have is a brotherhood with workers in other countries, which unites them in the need to establish a world of freedom. Thomas Paine once wrote, “ My country is the world,” and that is not a bad way of putting it.

Ivan