2008 Woodie Awards
Good vs. bad patriotism
DYLAN DUKE GINTZ
ARBITER JOURNALIST
Issue date: 10/13/08 Section: Opinion
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As David Walker, a military and diplomatic historian at Boise State said, “Nationalism is used as a negative term. People describe nationalism as hyper-patriotism … Hyper-patriots begin to see everyone else as the other.”
Furthermore, he said nationalism is often associated with racism and starting wars in Europe. In other words, nationalism is comprised of the twin notions of “my country, right or wrong” or “my country is always right,” and it places the country or the government above concerns of human rights.
While teaching in China for a year, it was easy for me to observe nationalism’s influence on a country and its people. Modern China provides a perfect example of nationalism. The Chinese government proposes the idea that patriotism is blind loyalty and unconditional support of the Communist Party of China is patriotism. They can get away with this because the CCP controls the newspapers, television and much of the Internet. The Chinese populace conflates criticism of human rights abuses by the government with hatred of China the country or Chinese people.
Every country has something bad they’ve done. Britain and America had slavery and shabby treatment of Indians, (different Indians for the British). Germany had the holocaust, and Japan has the Rape of Nanking. Germany and Japan are exceptionally horrific examples because their idea of patriotism was inseparable from a racism that denied the human dignity of anyone not Aryan or Japanese, respectively.
The decent citizens of those countries should feel embarrassed, or maybe even a little ashamed, of these past atrocities. Generally, I don’t have much respect for folks ashamed of where they came from, but the Chinese can’t (or maybe they just don’t) say anything bad about Mao or his party. It’s like an American whitewashing slavery. In a just world, the average Chinese citizen would look at Mao like a decent German would look at a concentration camp or an American looks at the remains of a plantation slaves worked at.
Instead Mao has his face on the paper money of China and on a 15-foot painting in a public school I worked at sometimes.
The constant visage of Mao shows that China has not come to terms with the brutality of its past. Mao killed 30 million to 70 million Chinese people, depending on what scholar you’re reading, that’s more than every foreign occupier combined. The fact that he is still revered in China shows the historical amnesia that has crippled the Chinese mind.
American patriotism has a natural constraint against growing into nationalism. We connect our love of country to individual liberty. When someone asks an American, “why do you love your country?” That American would probably reply, “because it allows me to be free.”
What’s more, patriotism tied to liberal democracy empowers the individual to question the state and its use of power.
As professor Walker said, “Our government is unique in that it’s based on a set of ideas that protect the universal rights of man … My country, right or wrong, doesn’t have to mean my government, right or wrong … One could argue that the government is being unpatriotic.”
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