Let's be Patriotic.... or maybe not.
(cut and pasted from www.LewRockwell.com)
Patriotism
by Brad Edmonds
The term "patriot" gets bandied about a lot in the US at this time of year,
and it rankles me more every time I hear it used. Today's understanding of the
term amounts to moral and historical blasphemy. An examination of the word and
its history should shed some light on how our government has grown completely
out of control.
The American Heritage dictionary is for me the best source
available. For "patriot," we are given, "one who loves, supports, and defends
one's country." That's where the problem begins – people don't have a good
enough understanding of the term, "country."
"Country" for American Heritage is, "a nation or state," or alternately the people or territory of a nation or state. A "state," then, is "the supreme public power within a sovereign political entity," or "a body politic." A "nation" is "a relatively large group
of people organized under a single, usually independent government."
"Government" is where the dictionaries finally fail. The standard definition is, and here I'm combining a few given definitions, "the agency or apparatus that controls and administrates public policy in a political unit."
What standard definitions leave out is what separates government, as
we understand it, from other institutions. In short: A government is any entity
that claims a rightful monopoly to the use of violence in a given geographic
area. Only this separates government from any other agency – the claim to the
morally legitimate monopoly over violence over a given area.
Take away "morally legitimate" or "rightful"; take away "monopoly"; or take away "given area," and you have some other entity for which we already have terminology. We have private security agencies; private military contractors; private insurance, and the like. Discussing functions of government is beside the point.
Anything that even minarchists claim as the rightful functions of government –
defense, infrastructure, enforcement of property rights and contracts – is more
efficiently, more effectively, and more justly handled by private firms who have
to compete with each other to gain and satisfy customers and stay in
business.
What we have, then, for the true meaning of the word "patriot" as
used today, is "one who loves, supports, and defends one's government."
Clarifying a bit, we have "one who loves, supports, and defends the right of
one's own government to use violence against those who disagree with, resist, or
oppose it." This is what I consider moral and historical blasphemy.
Why "historical blasphemy"? Because the people who give us the term, "patriot," the Patriots (capital P) of the American Revolution, were not loyal to their
government. They violently overthrew their government. This is the definition of
"treason," and in fact Patriots were rightly (technically) considered traitors
by their American-born opponents, the Loyalists.
"Patriot" is a truncation of the term, "compatriot," which is used most often today to mean "colleague." Our founding Patriots were loyal to their colleagues, and even more so to their principles, but not to their government. Through overuse of the term, "patriot," we began to take it to mean one loyal to the US government, then one loyal to his own government, whatever government that might be.
Why "moral blasphemy"? Because, first, it's a very different thing to be loyal to principles and neighbors than to be loyal to one's government; and second, there are and have been governments that deserve no loyalty at all – only active resistance.
The Nazi Party, Mao's cultural revolutionaries, and Lenin's socialist purgers would
be examples of such governments. Of course, it is dramatizing to mention
governments who killed tens of millions of their own citizens in the context of
discussion of the US government – there's no comparison.
Remember, though, that under the US government, slavery was once encouraged for the benefit of the economy. More recently, this government forcibly relocated and interned over 100,000 Japanese Americans, most of whom were US citizens, merely on the grounds that they were Japanese. Then, we vaporized hundreds of thousands of Japanese men, women, and children in their homes, and irradiated their land, after their government surrendered, before finally accepting their surrender in the face of their resolve.
Still more recently, we entered wars in Vietnam and Iraq, each
with a rationale based on faulty intelligence. Worse, in the face of the moral
principles of the founders, principles with which I agree, entry into those wars
would be illegitimate even if the intelligence were correct.
Today, the term "patriot" is reserved by the mainstream for those who support our government unquestioningly in the face of major government actions that are substantively morally debatable. Today, patriots are allowed to disagree with certain government expenditures – social engineering, foreign aid – but not to disagree when the government decides to kill foreigners by the thousands.
To the contrary, the term, "patriot" should be reserved for those who love, support,
and defend their colleagues, neighbors, families, and principles. This was the
understanding our founders had, and one we would benefit from reviving.
1 comment:
Amen. Thanks for sharing.
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