Yep. I was an internationalist Marxist and did not support the American side in the Vietnam War. I did six months in military prison because of this.
Hey! I've got an idea! You say I'm lying about this, of course. (But there is a slight contradiction here -- you can say "You are/were no patriot, because you opposed the war and went to military prison and got a Bad Conduct Discharge " or "You didn't oppose the war and go to jail and get a Bad Conduct Discharge, you're lying." But you can't say both. Well, okay, YOU can say both, consistency, truth, is not part of your makeup.)
So ... ANOTHER TEN THOUSAND FOR YOU!!!! I'll prove this as well. I indeed was in military prison. But Joe, we both know you're a coward and won't accept my offer, because you know I'm telling the truth. It's just that 'the truth' doesn't matter to someone with your particular personality.
As for patriotism: as I've said elsewhere on this site, it's not a virtue like honesty and kindness, etc. A patriot is simply one who loves his country -- it doesn't dictate any particular behavior. You can love your country, and hate the government. You can love your country and carry out genocide because your government tells you to.
Leftists today -- the wing driving the rest of the Left -- actually hate America. They burn its flag. The less militant wing honors the Soviet spy Ethel Rosenberg.
But ... even this lack of patriotism is not necessarily something wicked. If these Leftists had a 'higher patriotism' a committment, say, to humanity as a whole, a vision of a democratic world order, then that would be different. They would be subsuming the particular polity they happened to be born in, into a broader one. The would be 'patriots of the world'. But they're not.
There is nothing admirable about a committment to a particular piece of geography. Nor is there about a committment to your family, or clan, or tribe, or ethnicity. Those are in fact biologically driven -- the selfish gene trying to replicate itself.
The thing about patriotism, committment ot a whole country, is that, in a multi-national state like the US, it transcends biological family-clan-tribe-ethnicity loyalty. It's a step forward in morality, which, at the end of the day, is the extension of self-love, self-interest, to broader and broader groups.
Let's take a concrete example. I've mentioned several times the liberal New York City's honoring of Ethel Rosenberg, the executed Soviet spy. It should be self-evident that when people like these New York liberals then call men like Robert E Lee a 'traitor' -- we should just laugh.
But ... there was an element of tragedy in the Rosenbergs, and in fact in the whole Communist movement. These people, by and large, did not do what they did because they were evil, or because they wanted power to oppress others. The Rosenbergs didn't spy because someone offered them money to do so.
No. The 1930s saw mass unemployment in the capitalist world, anti-Semitism, lynching of Blacks in the US, the rise of fascism in Italy, Germany, Spain. But the Soviet Union held up a vision of a different way of doing things. There was no unemployment there. Anti-Semitism and the promulgation of racial hatred was outlawed there. Millions of previously-illiterate people were being educated. Women's equality was held up as an ideal. The Soviet Union supported the anti-colonial national liberation movement. And they seemed to be the only big nation really opposing fascism.
(When the fascists rose up in Spain to overthrow the democratic Republic, the Western democracies were neutral, and prevented arms from being shipped to both sides, the democrats and the fascists! Hitler and Mussolini supported the latter, only the Soviets supported, with arms, the former.)
So it was no wonder that decent people became Communists! They overlooked the purges, rationalized the single-party state. They were deeply misguided but ... they were not evil people. (Yes, the totalitarian nature of the Stalinist system warped them. They became adept at rationalization, at slandering political opponents. But they started with good intentions.)
They were not American patriots. They considered themselves internationalists. But -- especially after 1935 when Stalin, panicked by what his policies had let happen in Germany, turned the Communist movement toward co operation with all anti-fascist forces -- they were able to blend a kind of American patriotism with that internationalism. It wasn't all fake. They focussed on the good aspects of American history. The Communists who went to Spain to fight the fascists called their group 'The Abraham Lincoln Brigade'.
And thus it was that a Communist was able to win a Distinguished Service Cross for bravery in action against the Japanese. His story is here:
[
Robert G. Thompson - Wikipedia ]
It's worth quoting what his award says:
Was this brave man a 'patriot'? It's really an irrelevant question. He was undoubtedly NOT motivated by any sort of narrow American nationalism. If you could have asked him at the time, he would have said that he did not hate Japanese as such, and looked forward to a democratic Japan. He believed that at that moment, America bore, however imperfectly, the democratic cause, and Japan did not.
One more point about American patriotism:
it is the only effective anti-racism. Everything else is just goody-goody moralizing, which people will go along with, but which really doesn't get down to their deep emotions. Patriotism does.
I've argued with genuine racists on other forums. The best argument against them, by far, is not around technical issues of genetics, or statistical analysis of crime ... it's an emotional one, not even, probably, technically a logical argument. You just ask your white racist opponent ... Are you a better man than these men? And then post this list and ask your opponent to click on some of the names. Which one of these me is he better than? (It's sort of unfair to argue this way, but what the hell):
en.wikipedia.org
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So. Patriotism is not like 'honesty', a simple virtue. It can be mobilized in a bad cause. It's partly based on self-interest. But ... when the Left claims the mantle of 'patriotism' while they tear down historic statues, we can know that they are lying.
Not everyone on the Left is a liar, by any means. But some are, as we see here.
