Superpatriotism by Michael Parenti

Author:Michael Parenti
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Chauvinism and jingoism -- United States, Messianism, Political -- United States, United States -- Foreign relations -- 2001-, United States -- Politics and government -- 2001-
Publisher: City Lights Books
Published: 2004-03-06T16:00:00+00:00

Patriotic Fear

SUPERPATRIOTS CAN BE FOUND IN HIGH and not so high places, in the White House and the local American Legion post. We have been taught to think of blue-collar macho caricatures such as Joe Six-Pack, Tony Hardhat, and Clyde Redneck as the hypernationalist prototypes. In fact, working Americans are less the promoters of superpatriotism and more its consumers and victims. They pay the heavy taxes that support a US global military empire. They suffer the cuts in human services when so much of the nation's treasure is dissipated on war. And be they modest-income whites, African Americans, Latinos, Asians, or whomever—they provide the foot soldiers who sacrifice life and limb in the empire's military ventures. It is the politico-economic rulers of this polity who are the major progenitors of superpatriotic ideology. They play a crucial role in what Cecilia O'Leary calls "managing rituals of mass allegiance."1 They promote flag reverence, loyalty oaths, and nationalistic anniversaries. They urge the teaching of a sanitized version of US history in public schools, and establish national shrines and monuments. And they inaugurate the intensive propaganda campaigns that depict one or another foreign leader, nation, or movement as a threat to our national security. Patriotic pride is not enough. They know that a surer way to rally support for their ventures abroad is by inciting alarm at home. Behind all the patriotic cheer there lurks a heavy dose of patriotic fear.

Consider the witch hunts that were conducted against the "Red Menace" for the better part of the twentieth century. Of their own accord the American people supposedly were seized by a national hysteria, a collective phobia that caused them to see demon Communists lurking everywhere. In fact, the public's fear of Communism was tirelessly propagated over the years by federal and state authorities, corporate heads, media moguls, educational administrators, and other public and private elites.

If anyone was immediately fear stricken by the emergence of Communism, it was the moneyed classes of the world. The plutocrats of various capitalist nations greeted the Russian Revolution of 1917 as a nightmare come true. The workers and peasants had overthrown not only the autocratic czar but the rich propertied class that owned the factories, mineral resources, and most of the lands of the czarist empire. As US secretary of state Robert Lansing noted at the time, the Russian Revolution served as a dangerous share-the-wealth example to the common people of other nations, including Americans, encouraging them to acquire through political means that which can only be achieved through hard work and diligence. 2

In 1918, the United States—along with England, France, Canada, and ten other capitalist countries—invaded Soviet Russia as part of a devastating but unsuccessful attempt to destroy the revolutionary Bolshevik (Communist) government, a chapter of history unknown to most Americans. The common people of these Western nations expressed no great demand for military intercession into Soviet Russia. Quite the contrary; after a sanguinary world war that had just taken millions of lives, most people in the West wanted nothing more of bloodletting.

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