Reply #38: With all due respect

[Jcrowley]

this article is really just a minor tract in nationalistic fervor. What is being advocated here is the furtherance of the national security state and forcing folks into this service as well as pushing patriotism as something to be desired.

Sorry this whole article sounds very jingoistic.

This is the US Military Wet Dream of how to organize and condition our society, completely insane:
more border patrol; public transport security; EMTs; fire and police personnel. We need young people to work in the inner cities and the country's most rural sectors. The Vista and the Peace Corps programs also need inexpensive and talented personnel filled with a sense of patriotism and mission. A renewed draft should distribute personnel into each of these sectors for two years' service as warranted by the country's needs, not the draftee's desire.

The universal draft I imagine would begin with 10 weeks of basic training for everyone who is physically able. These people would learn a great deal about freedom (and the loss thereof), skills such as cardiopulmonary resuscitation, team work, maintenance activities for keeping a community vibrant, and so on.

Following the 10-week basic training period, draftees would receive orders for advanced individual training in one of the military services or one of the other service areas as listed above.

A sense of "Patriotism and Mission?" What is this? Sounds like Semper Fi let's get the American blood stirring. I doubt this was your intent but the language in this article is uber-americanistic-militarism. Strong borders, patriotic fervor, sense of meaning through "team work", more police, etc....

PATRIOTISM: A MENACE TO LIBERTY


WHAT is patriotism? Is it love of one's birthplace, the place of childhood's recollections and hopes, dreams and aspirations? Is it the place where, in childlike naivety, we would watch the fleeting clouds, and wonder why we, too, could not run so swiftly? The place where we would count the milliard glittering stars, terror-stricken lest each one "an eye should be," piercing the very depths of our little souls? Is it the place where we would listen to the music of the birds, and long to have wings to fly, even as they, to distant lands? Or the place where we would sit at mother's knee, enraptured by wonderful tales of great deeds and conquests? In short, is it love for the spot, every inch representing dear and precious recollections of a happy, joyous, and playful childhood?

If that were patriotism, few American men of today could be called upon to be patriotic, since the place of play has been turned into factory, mill, and mine, while deafening sounds of machinery have replaced the music of the birds. Nor can we longer hear the tales of great deeds, for the stories our mothers tell today are but those of sorrow, tears, and grief.

What, then, is patriotism? "Patriotism, sir, is the last resort of scoundrels," said Dr. Johnson. Leo Tolstoy, the greatest anti-patriot of our times, defines patriotism as the principle that will justify the training of wholesale murderers; a trade that requires better equipment for the exercise of man-killing than the making of such necessities of life as shoes, clothing, and houses; a trade that guarantees better returns and greater glory than that of the average workingman.

Gustave Hervé, another great anti-patriot, justly calls patriotism a superstition--one far more injurious, brutal, and inhumane than religion. The superstition of religion originated in man's inability to explain natural phenomena. That is, when primitive man heard thunder or saw the lightning, he could not account for either, and therefore concluded that back of them must be a force greater than himself. Similarly he saw a supernatural force in the rain, and in the various other changes in nature. Patriotism, on the other hand, is a superstition artificially created and maintained through a network of lies and falsehoods; a superstition that robs man of his self-respect and dignity, and increases his arrogance and conceit.

Indeed, conceit, arrogance, and egotism are the essentials of patriotism. Let me illustrate. Patriotism assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate. Those who have had the fortune of being born on some particular spot, consider themselves better, nobler, grander, more intelligent than the living beings inhabiting any other spot. It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight, kill, and die in the attempt to impose his superiority upon all the others.

http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Goldman/Writings/Anarchism/patriotism.html