"the true nature of patriotism"

[pynchonoid]

Awhile back, several prominent P-list participants
called into question the patriotism of some of their
P-list colleagues who dared to criticize the Bush
Administration for its response to 9-11; we were
accused of helping the terrorists, etc. Arthur M.
Schlesinger Jr. addressed this issue in a commencement
speech this week. His talk addresses some of the
issues that Pynchon raises in his Foreword to _1984_,
and the Robert Jackson he mentions is Pynchon's
father-in-law.  

"[...] This raises a couple of questions-questions
that history might help us to answer. The first
question is whether a democratic people have a moral
obligation to cease debate and dissent when the nation
is at war. And the second question is whether, as a
factual matter, our ancestors abstained from debate
and dissent when their government took them into war.
These two questions presuppose a third: what is the
true nature of patriotism anyway?

    The answer to the first question is that going to
war does not abrogate freedom of conscience, thought
and speech. War does not abolish the Bill of Rights.
Even when the republic faces mortal dangers, the First
Amendment is still there.

    In the midst of the greatest war in American
history, the Supreme Court in the case of West
Virginia State Board of Education v Barnette held that
a law compelling kids in public schools to salute the
flag and to recite the pledge of allegiance violated
the First Amendment and was therefore
unconstitutional. As Justice Robert H. Jackson said
for the Court, "If there is any fixed star in our
constitutional constellation, it is that no official,
high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in
politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of
opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act
their faith therein."

    The decision was handed down on Flag Day 1943.
Though young Americans were fighting and dying for the
American flag on many fronts around the planet, the
Court's decision outlawing compulsory flag salutes and
compulsory pledges of allegiance was generally
applauded. Most Americans in 1943 thought the decision
a pretty good statement of what we were fighting for.

[...] As Theodore Roosevelt said in 1918 during the
First World War, "To announce that there must be no
criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by
the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic
and servile, but is morally treasonable to the
American public."

    During the Second World War, within a fortnight
after Pearl Harbor brought us into the war, Senator
Robert A. Taft of Ohio took the same line as Theodore
Roosevelt. Bob Taft, as your parents and grandparents
will tell you, was Mr. Conservative and a much revered
Republican leader. "I believe," Taft said, "there can
be no doubt that criticism in time of war is essential
to the maintenance of any kind of democratic
government. . . . Too many people desire to suppress
criticism simply because they think it will give some
comfort to the enemy. . . . If that comfort makes the
enemy feel better for a few moments, they are welcome
to it as far as I am concerned, because the
maintenance of the right of criticism in the long run
will do the country maintaining it a great deal more
good than it will do the enemy, and it will prevent
mistakes which might otherwise occur."

[...] The Mexican War was almost as unpopular. There
was fierce opposition to the declaration of war.
"People of the United States!", Horace Greeley wrote
in the New York Tribune. "Your rulers are
precipitating you into a fathomless abyss of crime and
calamity! . . . Awake and arrest the work of butchery
ere it shall be too late to preserve your souls from
the guilt of wholesale slaughter!" The Massachusetts
legislature passed a resolution declaring that the
war, "so hateful in its objects, so wanton, unjust and
unconstitutional in its origin and character, must be
regarded as a war against freedom, against humanity,
against justice, against the Union." Thoreau wrote his
famous plea for "The Duty of Civil Disobedience," and
James Russell Lowell condemned the war in his satiric
long poem Biglow Papers. In the midterm election, held
in wartime, the administration of James K. Polk lost
35 seats and control of the House of Representatives.

[...]  The Spanish-American War and especially the
follow-up campaign against the Filipino insurrection
provoked vigorous criticism of William McKinley, the
Republican president. [...] William James, the great
philosopher, explained why he decided to support the
Democratic candidate William Jennings Bryan against
McKinley in 1900. "There are worse things than
financial troubles in a Nation's career," James said.
"To puke up its ancient soul, and the only things that
gave it eminence among other nations, in five minutes
and without a wink of squeamishness, is worse; and
that is what the Republicans would commit us to in the
Philippines. Our conduct there has been one protracted
infamy towards the Islanders, and one protracted lie
towards ourselves." Mark Twain proposed a revision of
the American flag with "the white stripes painted
black and the stars replaced by the skull and
cross-bones."

[...]  History shows that there is nothing sacrosanct
about presidents in wartime. Indeed no president has
any right to send young Americans to kill and die in
foreign lands without the most frank and uninhibited
discussion and debate. This is all the more the case
when a fundamental transformation in the strategy of
national security promises a vista of presidential
wars stretching far into the future.

    This transformation has taken place without the
notice it deserves. For more than forty years after
the Second World War, our national strategy was based
on containment and deterrence. [...]  Now our
president has proclaimed a new doctrine of
'anticipatory self-defense,' a fancy term for
preventive war-the doctrine that has replaced
containment and deterrence as the basis of our foreign
policy. [...] The policy of anticipatory self-defense
is the policy that imperial Japan employed in its
attack on Pearl Harbor on a date that, as an earlier
American president said, would live in infamy.
Franklin D. Roosevelt was right when he said this, and
today it is we Americans who live in infamy. The
global wave of sympathy that engulfed the United
States after 9/11 has given way to a global wave of
fear and hatred of American arrogance.

    The new doctrine converts us into the world's
judge, jury and executioner-a self-appointed status
that, however benign our motives, is bound to corrupt
our leadership. John Quincy Adams foresaw all this in
a speech he gave on July 4, 1821. "Wherever the
standard of freedom and independence has been or shall
be unfurled," Adams said, "there will [America's]
heart, her benedictions and her benedictions and her
prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of
monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the
freedom and independence of all. She is the champion
and vindicator only of her own."

 [...]  America as the world's initiator of preventive
war? as the world's self-appointed judge, jury and
executioner? Is this a good idea? The decision is your
generation's to make. But I would ask you to reflect
on wise words uttered by a president whom I had the
honor and the good luck to serve in the White House.

    "We must face the fact," President John F. Kennedy
said 42 years ago in this state and the University of
Washington's 100th anniversary, "that the United
States is neither omnipotent nor omniscient-that we
are only 6% of the world's population-that we cannot
impose our will upon the other 94% of mankind-that we
cannot right every wrong or reverse each adversity-and
that therefore there cannot be an American solution to
every world problem."

    I suggested early on that our first two
questions-whether a free people is obliged in wartime
to shut up and not question their government? and
whether Americans had in fact done that in the
past?-presupposed a third question: what is the nature
of patriotism anyway?

    True patriotism, I would propose, consists of
living up to the nation's highest ideals. Carl Schurz,
who emigrated from Germany to become an influential
figure in 19th century America, defined the true
meaning of patriotism when he said: "Our country,
right or wrong. When right, to be kept right; when
wrong, to be put right."

    Let this be the watchword for the class of 2003!


read it all:
<http://www.whitman.edu/commencement/schlesinger03.html>



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